Birkenhead Park

Birkenhead Park is known as the People’s Garden and is much loved by the local community. For almost two hundred years, it’s been a major landmark on the Wirral, greatly valued by locals, as well as visitors from across the UK and around the world. This beautiful open space in the heart of Birkenhead, on the other side of the Mersey estuary from Liverpool, is open every minute of every day for anyone who wishes to enjoy it.  

Birkenhead Park is one of Britain’s foremost historic parks, and is a pioneer in the development of public parks across the world. In the rapidly growing industrial town, the idea of creating a park which would be freely accessible for everyone to enjoy was a real innovation. At Birkenhead Park, the barriers of social class, age, and color were non-existent. When Frederick Law Olmsted visited the new Park in 1850, he was amazed by this “People’s Garden” where “the poorest British peasant is as free to enjoy it in all its parts as the British Queen.” The ideas and principles which the creation of Birkenhead Park embodied were so revolutionary that Olmsted took them back across the Atlantic, applying them initially in his design for Central Park, and then subsequently for many other parks across the United States.