A tour through time: 3 Darlington parks steeped in history

Due to the foresight of the town’s late Victorian fathers, swathes of green were saved when the estates of the Qauker industrialists were broken up and built upon, and over the next three days, we're going to look at the history of 12 of the town's parks.

There are blurred lines between what is a municipal park and what is a nature reserve, a play area or a community garden, but let's start with the first of the town’s parks which have defied the 21st Century age of austerity to remain a defining feature of Darlington’s character…

South Park

Park Lodge, South Park, on a 1920s postcard

A PIONEERING park: the first municipal park in the North East and only the third in the north after Sheffield and Liverpool. It was created on land left for charitable purposes in the 17th Century by James Bellasses, and it was a response to criticism that the industrialists were enclosing their magnificent estates behind tall walls which kept out the working classes, who lived in cramped terraces with only back yards for outdoor space.

The park had no formal opening, but Joseph Pease had donated enough slag from the bottom of his blast furnaces to make the paths ready for public perambulation by November 1851, and the Darlington Recreation Society held the first recorded organised event – music, dancing, sports and football – on July 27, 1854.

The Fothergill Memorial Fountain, which was once in the middle of Bondgate, at the entrance to South Park around the time it was moved there in 1926

Originally the park was known as Bellasses Park or the People’s Park and consisted solely of the narrow terrace but in 1878, following the bankruptcy of the stockbrokers Robert and William Thompson, the council was able to buy 24 acres of the Little Polam Estate for just £3,800 which became the showfield.

They also straightened the River Skerne so you could sail boats on it, and they dug out the ornamental lake.

Mums walking in South Park in July 1966

In the 1920s, they expanded southwards, using unemployed labour to create a massive boating lake opposite Blackwell Grange.

In the park’s 170 year existence it has collected the town’s historical bric-a-brac that didn’t fit in anywhere else – fountains, monuments, memorials – so that now it is practically a walk-through museum. Indeed, it is a living museum, as many of the trees are commemorations of royal weddings, coronations or past mayors.

If not the jewel in Darlington’s crown, it is the rare specimen tree in its acres of grassy parklands.

On Tuesday July, 1893, 3,000 people gathered to hear the first concert performed in the bandstand in South Park

Darlington show being held on the South Park showfield in the mid 1970s

Carpet beddding beneath Park Lodge celebrating the council's centenary in 1967

A paddling pool being built in South Park in May 1971

Skating on the South Park lake in February 1954. When the lake froze in the 1870s and 1880s, ice festivals were held on it and raised money to buy the bandstand

In South Park, Darlington, in the late 1950s

Fun with snowballs in South Park, Darlington, January 3, 1961

Rex the lion cub being is carried by showmen back to the travelling fairground, after going on the rampage in South Park, Darlington in 1935

Mayor Cllr Heather Scott unveils the 1988 South Park floral decoration which was the emblem of the Women's Royal Voluntary Service which was marking its 50th anniversary. She is flanked by Maggi Charlton and Doris Johnson

Mayor of Darlington Councillor Joe Anderson and his wife, Margaret, planting a flowering cherry tree in South Park in 1985, accompanied by parks manager Derek Hubbard, left, and his deputy Gordon West. The tree was originally meant to honour the victims of the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan during the Second World War but, after huge political controversy, it was reconfigured to honour everyone who died in the war - but beyond the four people on the picture, no one else turned up to see it planted

The 2004 Darlington Bikeathon sets off from the Clock Tower in South Park

Stanhope Green

A 1920s postcard of Stanhope Park, Darlington

IN the 1870s, Darlington expanded westwards onto land owned by the Duke of Cleveland, which is why many of the streets in the Duke Street area bear his family names: Raby, Powlett, Outram, Stanhope, Vane…

In April 1878, the council voted to buy one acre, two rods and 18 perches of land in front of the newly-completed Queen Elizabeth Grammar School from the duke for £5,348 11s 10d, although local residents had to raise £1,000 of that. Arthur Pease, of Hummersknott, contributed much of that.

There was then a debate about what it should be named – Stanhope Square and College Green were also in the running – but by nine votes out of 17, it was named Stanhope Green in April 1879 when it was open as the town’s second public park.

In the 1920s, it even had a putting green.

North Park

A very rare early picture of North Park, with a young lad called Stan Craddock with his mother and with Honeypot House behind him

DARLINGTON’S third public park was opened on May 16, 1896, when 2,000 people processed up Cumberland Street from North Road to watch Alderman Thomas Taylor Sedgwick open the new park gates with a silver key so everyone could see the 10,000 shrubs and trees which had been planted inside.

The council had bought the land from the estate attached to Honeypot House, which once stood on the north side of the park – the house fell derelict after its owner committed suicide in it in 1926 and rumours of his ghost stalked the place. Honeypot House was demolished in the 1960s.

Additions to the park included a bowling green in 1903 and a bowls house in 1934.

In those days, a fair used to be an annual attraction to the park. It featured boxing booths, coconut shies and a bearded lady.

• To be continued tomorrow