River Park

The passing of time in this tranquil space is an endless play between the riverbank moving through rocks, children summoning the spirit of play, and birds beckoning to the lounging humans to toss a cracker or two. You delight in your own smile, letting the ancient river's water vapor soak through your skin, sizzling in the rays of the sun. The earliest purpose built public park, although financed privately, was Princes Park in the Liverpool suburb of Toxteth, England. This was laid out to the designs of Joseph Paxton from 1842 and opened in 1843. The land on which the park was built was purchased by Richard Vaughan Yates, an iron merchant and philanthropist, in 1841 for £50,000. The creation of Princes Park showed great foresight and introduced a number of highly influential ideas. First and foremost was the provision of open space for the benefit of townspeople and local residents within an area that was being rapidly built up. Secondly it took the concept of the designed landscape as a setting for the suburban domicile, an idea pioneered by John Nash at Regent’s Park, and re-fashioned it for the provincial town in a most original way. Nash’s remodelling of St James’s Park from 1827 and the sequence of processional routes he created to link The Mall with Regent’s Park completely transformed the appearance of London’s West End. With the establishment of Princes Park in 1842, Joseph Paxton did something similar for the benefit of a provincial town, albeit one of international stature by virtue of its flourishing mercantile contingent. Liverpool had a burgeoning presence on the scene of global maritime trade before 1800 and during the Victorian era its wealth rivalled that of London itself. This sound uses the following file from Freesound: http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=123484