Alexandra Park and Palace: a home of happiness, health and culture
by Kirsten Forrest
Did you know that our much loved Muswell Hill park can lay claim to at least two ground-breaking ‘firsts’? Here on the South slope below the BBC Tower in 1936, was built the first television garden. And almost 150 years ago, the People’s Designer, Christopher Dresser brought Japanese landscape design & architecture to the British public for the first time.
Waterlow Park and Lauderdale House
by Pam Cooper
Visitors new to Waterlow Park are still wowed by the overwhelming feeling of entering a private estate, thanks to a sensitive conversion of Sir Sydney Waterlow’s estate from private to public use by the London County Council. We’ll take a light-hearted ‘upstairs and downstairs’ look at life at Lauderdale House, with its gardens and grounds, in the 19th century, when it was still an exclusive private dwelling, and touch on its role since, as part of Waterlow Park, open to all and truly a ‘garden for the gardenless’.
225 years of ‘Walks’: framing an art gallery with an estate of rural beauty
by Helen Payne
Walking isn’t just something we’ve done a lot of in the last 2 years. In the 1790s the landscape architect, Humphry Repton proposed 10 ‘Walks’ for Kenwood. His intention was for you to pause and admire the view, or seek out something remarkable. And people have been doing it ever since. When Kenwood was left to the nation nearly 100 years ago, those framed views had to help join up “a fine example of the artistic home of a gentleman of the eighteenth century” with “an open space for the benefit of the public”. Let’s perambulate!