Fun run joins sporting history of Darlington's South Park

The Samaritans offered 24/7 support, by telephone and email, staffed by unpaid volunteers. They kept going throughout the pandemic but, just like many charitable organisations, their traditional fund raising methods have disappeared, and so they now rely on donations and grants.

Which makes the It’s OK to Talk fun run all the more important to them. It is held in conjunction with Darlington Harriers, and there are two categories of entries: Junior (under 16s) and Senior (over 16s). Juniors cost £5 and Seniors £10, although it is hoped that each entrant will be able to add a £10 donation.

Simple registration is done through the Harriers website, darlingtonharriers.com/events. On Wednesday, the number collection desk opens in the park at 4pm. A briefing will be held at 5.45pm, with the running commencing at 6pm.

Spectators and supporters are very welcome. They may even care to donate to the event by texting DARLOSAMS, for £5, or DARLOSAMS2, for £2, to 70085.

Skating on the ornamental lake has been a feature of the park for many generations, as this picture from February 1954 shows. During the cold winters of the 1880s, ice festivals on the lake featured skate hire which raised enough money to build the bandstand

As well as raising money, the event is about boosting people’s mental health by getting them active in the beautiful surroundings of South Park, with all the spring flowers bursting forth.

The park is also steeped in history. It was a pioneering park as it came into being around 1855, making it the oldest municipal park in the North East, and the third oldest in the north – only Sheffield (opened 1841) and Liverpool (1842) have earlier local authority parks. This was partly because the town’s Quaker rulers, who were being heavily criticised for building big walls around their big mansions to keep the people out, felt the workers needed somewhere green to exercise. To help them, Joseph Pease, the founder of Middlesbrough whose statue stands in the centre of Darlington, even donated several tons of slag from the bottom of one of his blast furnaces to create the first paths around the park.

The runners will be following the route of the weekly Park Run, passing some of the historic bric-a-brac that has been collected over the decades.

There are, for instance, three pairs of coronation oaks, planted by mayors in 1902, 1911 and 1937 as part of the town’s celebrations.

A lawn tennis court was laid out on the terrace of South Park in 1885 and lasted for several decades. In 1923, an 18-hole putting course was opened beside the bowling green, seen here in 1929. It lasted until the 1940s. Another early sporting venue in the park was a gymnasium built in a shed on the showfield in 1886. It included "a maypole, swings, parallel bars and horizontal rings" and lasted until after the First World War. The two trees in the centre of this picture of the putting green are the coronation oaks planted in 1911. Today, they look nothing like a pair as the one on the right has grown extremely gnarled and stunted

The runners will be following the footsteps of previous generations of Darlingtonians who have used the park as a place to exercise themselves, either via a gentle walk or something more energetic on the water, on two wheels, on skates, on the greens, on parallel bars as our pictures show…

All pictures come from either the Darlington Centre for Local Studies or The Northern Echo’s archive.

If you have any stories to tell about park life, we’d love to hear from you. Please email chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk, and good luck to all taking part in Wednesday’s fun run.

In 1895, gunsmith Joseph Forestall Smythe, who had just accidentally blown up much of Darlington town centre, presented the first bowls to the park, and the greens have been a feature of the park ever since

The St Hilda's Cycling Club meeting in South Park by the lake - you can just see the Fowler steam plough monument at the top of the bank - in 1895. St Hilda's Church in Parkgate was built in 1887 so the club members could be drawn from its congregation, although perhaps these splendidly moustachoed cyclists have pedalled on their boneshakers over from the St Hilda's area of Middlesbrough

An early 1960s picture of rollerskating on the rink in front of the South Park bandstand. Darlington council bought its first 100 rollerskates to hire to people to use on its new rink in the summer of 1938. This was part of the "keep fit" movement that the government was encouraging as, with war looming, the people needed to be in the best shape possible

The first sport in the park was boating, with the Skerne being dug out in the 1880s to create a boating lagoon beneath the Park Lodge. The lodge was originally a farmhouse, and an observation tower was added so people could get an overview of the park and the boating. A game of water polo was played in the lagoon in 1885 when the river's shingly bed was described by the players as perfect for their sport. A crowd of 1,500 lined the banks to watch the action. This picture was taken before 1901 when the tower was raised by 10ft and the observation platform was replaced by the Potts Memorial Clock

The Victoria Embankment entrance to South Park on an Edwardian postcard with the rowing boats moored up ready for hiring. From the seventh tree down the Embankment to the bridge at Parkside was exactly a quarter-of-a-mile so Darlington Swimming Club helds its annual regatta in the river, which must have been considerably deeper than it is today. The regatta always coincided with Darlington FC's first home match of the season at Feethams on the opposite bank of the Skerne. Were the football fans appreciative of the energetic efforts of the human fishes?

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