Pictures of Darlington parkland in new exhibition

DARLINGTON’S South Park is a pioneering park. It is the oldest public park in the North East, with its first seeds being planted in 1851.

In the north, Sheffield is generally regarded to have had the first public park which opened in 1841, although it was owned by the Duke of Norfolk until 1848.

Liverpool is generally recognised as having the second, Princes Park, which opened free to the public in 1842 but was owned by the private developers who were building Georgian mansions around it until they gave the park to the city in 1849.

Birkenhead also has a pioneering role, because in 1843, an Act of Parliament was passed allowing a local authority for the first time to create a public park for everyone to use. That park officially opened in 1847.

So when Darlington’s Board of Health – the town’s first vaguely democratic council – set up a park committee in 1851 to oversee the creation of South Park, it was blazing a trail. That park opened, without much ceremony and without any ornamentation, in November 1851 and was known as the People’s Park because it allowed the people – many of whom still lived in town centre hovels in appalling sanitary conditions – to stroll in a green space for free.

Joseph Pease donated 100 tons of slag from the bottom of his Middlesbrough blast furnaces to create the first paths, and “a few trees here and there to break up the bareness of the aspect” were planted. Those first trees, though, had to be protected from the sheep that the Board’s tenant farmer was grazing there.

The first official event was held in the park on July 27, 1854, by the Darlington Recreation Society and attended by 500 people. “The music, conducted by Mr Woodhams, was excellent and gave great satisfaction to the numerous visitors,” reported the Darlington & Stockton Times. “Leaping, quoits, foot-ball etc were joined in by a goodly number, while others chose to ‘trip the light fantastic toe’.”

Other towns in the North East soon followed Darlington’s trail, with Sunderland (1857), Gateshead (1861), Middlesbrough (1865), Newcastle (1873) and Stockton (1893) also opening public parks.

Yet Darlington didn’t stop with just one public park. At our last count in Memories 672, it had 13 public parks with a 14th, at Blackwell, about to open.

To celebrate Darlington’s park history, the Centre for Local Studies in the Crown Street library is holding an exhibition until the end of August of photographs, postcards and paintings from its collection that show the parks in a variety of lights – but always at the centre of the community.

These pictures are taken from the exhibition.

The South Park gardener with a push lawnmower. Park Lodge is in the background, but it still has its observation platform at the top of its tower. The lodge was built in the late 1850s for the park-keeper, but in 1901, the tower was raised by 10ft and the Potts memorial clock was insertedThe flowerbeds along the River Skerne beneath the Park Lodge in 1904, taken by postcard photographer, AH Harrow. The Potts Memorial Clock is in the clocktowerPark Lodge by Darlington photographer AH Harrow in 1904The opening of the South Park tea house on Thursday, June 4, 1908, by the mayoress, Mrs CW Starmer, and her husband the mayor, Charles Starmer. Cllr Starmer's second wife was the legendary Lady Starmer who featured in last week's MemoriesREAD MORE: MEET LADY STARMER, DARLINGTON'S FIRST LADY

An advert for a fete to be held in South Park in 1916 to raise money for "comforts" for members of the Durham Light Infantry. "Comforts" were little treats - sweets, cigarettes, perhaps gloves - for soldiers serving in the trenchesA poster advertising a Second World War concert in South Park which is to raise money for Darlington men held prisoner of war in Germany

North Lodge Park pond and boathouse, by P Parsons in 1899. The boathouse and pond had been one of the features of the grounds of the Elmfield mansion on High Northgate, which had been laid out in the 1820s. The pond was filled in in 1932 and the boathouse was demolished in 1955Roller skating in South Park in 1973