On this day … 27 October 1864

Preston Corporation accepted a gift of eleven acres of land from the town’s leading cotton magnate, Thomas Miller, head of the Horrocks textile empire, to form a park to be known as Miller Park. That park and its neighbouring Avenham Park, designed by Edward Milner, were formally opened in October 1867 by the Duke of Cambridge. A more muted formal opening was carried out the next day for Moor Park on the other side of the town, not by the duke, but merely by the mayor, Alderman Birley.

The reason for Moor Park’s relegation in the formal opening stakes was possibly that it had already been serving the town as a park for more than thirty years: a fact that is now recognised in Moor Park’s designation as the country’s first municipal park.

The claim was recognised in the park’s listing as Grade II* in 1994. The reasons for listing the park, which recognise an 1833 creation date, are set out on the Historic England website:

Moor Park, Preston, laid out 1833-5 and improved by Edward Milner in the 1860s, is designated at Grade II* for the following principal reasons:
Date: the park is an especially early example of a municipal park;
Design: although enhanced, the park’s design is essentially unchanged from its C19 layout;
Designer: Edward Milner, who in the 1860s enhanced the park and laid out two others in Preston, was a leading designer of parks in England;
Historic interest: the first municipal park laid out by an industrial town;
Structures and features: the park retains numerous features of C19 date;
Planting: Moor Park retains much of its C19 planting.

The claim has not gone unchallenged, especially since much was made of its formal opening, along with Avenham and Miller Parks, in 1867. Not that there have been that many challenges, but a substantial one came from Richard Hoyle, a former history professor at UCLan, who had a house overlooking the park.

He wrote a scholarly article for an academic journal as what he described as his ‘valediction to Preston, and to Lower Bank Road in particular’, where he lived for nearly 20 years, and from where he had a clear view over Moor Park from his office. As a valediction or farewell to the town where he had lived and worked for so long, it seems, to say the least, unkind.

He traces the claim to the 1991 publication that forms the key text on the subject of municipal parks, Hazel Conway’s People’s Parks, noting that she ‘identified Moor Park as “the first [municipal park] to be established in an industrial town”. In her chronological listing of park foundations, Moor Park is placed third after Regent’s Park in London and the Royal Victoria Park in Bath …’

Prof Hoyle, now visiting professor of economic history at Reading University, maintains that the land occupied by Moor Park could not be considered a public park before 1867, because until then it did not boast all the fine features that Preston’s parks came to enjoy, and cattle were still grazed on it.

In arguing that the ‘establishment of Moor Park as a park must be dated to 1867’, he seems to be excluding the earlier creation date because the park of that date did not emerge fully fledged with all the refinements of a late-Victorian park.

But expecting the pioneering park of the 1830s to conform exactly to the designs of an Edward Milner is rather like expecting Stephenson’s Rocket to have incorporated all the subsequent advances in steam engine design. The corporation itself clearly saw it as a park for in 1846 its ‘committee of taste’ was raising funds for ‘the improvement of the Moor park’.

And comparing Moor Park in the 1840s with Avenham Park in the 1890s, as shown on the relevant Ordnance Survey maps, they seem remarkably similar in their layouts. They both had pleasant walks, attractive lodges, an ornamental pond and a large area of open grassland in the centre with a single path across it.

Of course, Avenham Park did not have Moor Park’s grazing cattle (the northern equivalent of Richmond Park’s deer herd?). So, what did Avenham Park in the 1890s have that Moor Park in the 1840s did not that made the former a municipal park and the latter merely an enclosed common? The surveyors of the 1840s recognised it as a park, labelling it Preston Moor Park on their map.

---

Source
Review of Richard Hoyle’s article