Birkenhead Park is one of Britain’s foremost historic parks, and indeed, 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 colour were non-existent. When F.L. Olmsted – who later went on to design New York’s Central Park – 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.