History
As early as 1921, former Blackpool Mayor and Member of Parliament (MP) Sir Albert Lindsay Parkinson acquired a large area of land, intending to develop it into a park with the help of the town council. The council subsequently took over the land and the project, further extending the area by purchasing and demolishing some of the surrounding buildings. The task of designing the park was given to the distinguished landscape architects TH Mawson and Sons and much of the work was handled by the founder's son Edward Mawson as his father's health failed due to Parkinson's disease. The park's golf course was designed by the famous partnership of Harry Colt and Dr Alister MacKenzie, who also created the nearby Blackpool North Shore and Royal Lytham and St. Annes courses. The park was finally declared open on 2 October 1926 by the 17th Earl of Derby, Sir George Edward Villiers Stanley. It is named in honour of his father, the former Governor General of Canada, Frederick Stanley, 16th Earl of Derby KG, GCB, GCVO, PC who, from 1885 to 1886, had been the first MP for the newly created Blackpool Parliamentary Constituency having been, for 20 years before that, one of the MPs for the larger constituency of which Blackpool had then been part.
Since 1995, Stanley Park has had Grade II status (as a historically important garden) on the National Register of Historic Parks and Gardens and is currently undergoing extensive restoration with the help of National Lottery funding. Despite its age, the park was still the most recent park development in Blackpool until 2006 when George Bancroft Park was opened.
Read more about this topic: Stanley Park, Blackpool
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In front of these sinister facts, the first lesson of history is the good of evil. Good is a good doctor, but Bad is sometimes a better.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)