PalenQ

A neat thing about Europe that always fascinated me were the lovely parks that grace many cities - not only lovely places to stroll and people watch but places to in good weather picnic and take a rest from the rigors of sightseeing.

WHAT ARE YOUR FAVORITE PARKS?

My favorite parks:

PARIS
- the Tuileries Gardens (with the Louvre as a backdrop - my favorite picnic place is on the benches at its west end that overlook the hectic Place de la Concorde - just love watching those Parisian crivers scooting thru this chaotic traffic circle)

Luxembourg Gardens (people watching at its best from joggers to mums with kids sailing small wooden boats around the ponds - nice formal gardens)

Buttes-Chaumont - off the radar for many tourists but to me one of the most interesting, unique and beautiful parks in Europe!

AMSTERDAM
- Vondel Park - one of the quirkiest parks in Europe in many ways - never know what you will see there!

MUNICH
- the sprawling Englischer Gardens - wow in nice weather a virtual nudist colony (like many a park in today's Germany - folks sun bathing in the raw right along the main walking paths) plus the fantastic Chinese Pagoda - a huge Chinese-style pagoda that is a popular beer garden with traditional beer garden fare - really popular with locals on a nice day.

VENICE - the park at the very eastern tip on the main island - great picnic spot (many Venetian locals ban picnicking now) - watch the many boats going by and totally escaping the tourist mobs in this very very quiet part of Venice that few folks stumble on..

LONDON
- ah the city of parks - and so many great ones - Hyde Park and its pond with folks rowing boats - the tea shops - the vastness - again on a nice day a multi-ethnic brigade of folks taking in the sun (whenever they can in this climate!)

Green Park - to me the nicest looking park from a landscape point of view - flowers and trees that is and at noon on a nice day many workers sitting around during their lunch hours.

Victoria Park - Not the most beautiful of London parks but to me one of the most interesting - on a canal and always thronged with families on a nice day - in East London with its varied ethnic crowds - people watching as colorful as the park!

Crystal Palace - my favorite London park - a vast park known for its real-life Dinosaur models, outdoor concerts in summer and the remains of the famous Crystal Palace, erected in Hyde Park in the 1850s or so for a world's exhibition it was a vast glass structure - after the fair ended it was moved up here to Sydenham Hill on a site overlooking London from one of its highest elevations. Sadly it burnt to toast in the 1930s or so in a fire reports say was seen from all over London - today their foundations remain to evoke its faded statue

Greenwich Park - Not only can you cross from the Western Hemisphere to the Eastern hemisphere here this is where time is kept - in the old Greenwich Observatory - and there are the graceful buildings of the Naval War college and views over the Thames - a hilly part though.

WINDSOR GREAT PARK
Ah this vast park that stretches up for miles from Windsor Castle offers from on up fab views over Windsor Castle, huge equestrian statues, a deer park .

Well those are some of my favorite parks -

WHAT EUROPEAN PARKS DO YOU LOVE?

flanneruk

I've never really understood this American fascination with parks. But Pal Q might be interested in one plan for Crystal Palace.

The park evolved when the Crystal Palace building was moved to suburban oak woodland in 1854. It wasn't a building "for a world's exhibition": it was an extraordinarily beautiful building, conceived, designed and built in months, for The Great Exhibition of 1851, intended to demonstrate Britain's technical domination of a world that had never thought of things like "World Fairs".

It turned out to be dominated by foreign manufactures, and marks the precise point at which the Industrial Revolution stopped being a Britocentric oddity. As well as the moment big cities discovered how much business came to town if you threw a World Fair.

Be that as it may, the building - designed by the supreme park architect, Joseph Paxton (who didn't just design most of Victorian Britain's great glasshouses, but whose influence on Birkenhead Park really made him the key influence on New York's Central Park) - is probably the greatest loss of Victorian architecture we've suffered.

Till now. The Chinese company ZhongRong Holding is discussing rebuilding it, and the plan is far more advanced than these things usually manage. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...-unveiled.html

But,however beautiful, the plan eliminates hundreds of acres of greenery (and the pics don't show how much of that will be for carparks, conference centres and all the other space-eating junk these things need to be viable). My betting is it won't take off.

Josser

You should visit Birkenhead. New York's Central Park was based on its public park
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england...yside-22112363

quokka

My candidate is not a city park but out in the countryside, a fantastic landscape park from the era around 1800: Wörlitz garden realm.
http://www.gartenreich.com/en/visit/...itz/index.html

flanneruk

Americans might be amazed to know that what impressed Olmsted about Birkenhead Park when he stated designing Central Park wasn't just its approximation to "normal" English landscape, with winding paths etc. But its egalitarianism.

Olmsted (and Vaux) got their landscaping inspiration for Central Park from the kind of English landscape that doesn't really exist naturally around Birkenhead (so Central Park undulates, and Birkenhead doesn't). What gobsmacked Olmsted, though, was that in Birkenhead the oiks (including a fair proportion of my ancestors, fresh off the boat from the Auld Country, because it often called at Birkenhead first to let the cattle off) were allowed in free and unrestricted.

The idea that the Lower Orders (and Irish lower orders at that) could be humoured in such a way was the kind of namby-pamby European idea the burghers of New York thought they'd fought a war to free themselves of. Took a lot of work by Olmsted to convert them.

JulieVikmanis

I enjoy the modern parks of Paris--Andre Citroen and Bercy. The former has interesting modern fountains and a tall glass "greenhouse" and the latter, lovely terraced fountains, a vineyard, a Frank Gehry-designed building and leads across a city street to the fun area of Cour Saint-Emilion.

PalenQ

I enjoy the modern parks of Paris--Andre Citroen and Bercy.>

Yes and also La Villette, on site of former slaughterhouses and now known for its many follies - whimsical small structure that more look like a child's play park but are not though they are great for kiddos to clambor over.

thanks flanneruk for that hopeful (?) insight into the Phoenix of the Crystal Palace.

PalenQ

flanner: Thanks a lot for that article - the pictures are stunning - years ago when I was a virtual resident of Crystal Palace Camping and Caravan Harbor - the campground that was there and I presume still is - smack under the bigger of the 2 BBC towers - there was floated a scheme for a Leisure Center on the site - kind of tacky - I do hope this new clone of the original takes off!!

Again thanks for the update on a place that is dear to me.

PalenQ

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Palace_Dinosaurs

https://www.google.com/search?q=imag...bih=1099&dpr=1

the dinosaurs in Crystal Palace are a favorite with Londoner families - as the photos show they are immense - note they were designed several years before Darwin's studies became known - for something different in London check out Crystal Palace Park's dinosaurs.