Britannia Illustrata: or Views of Several of the Queen’s Palaces. As also of the Principal Seats of the Nobility and Gentry of Great Britain by Johannes Kip and Leonard Knyff; it was published in London from 1707 and contains eighty bird’s-eye views of parks, houses and gardens.

It is economic growth, partly driven by population growth, that has produced a surplus of income over expenditure on the necessities of life; part of that surplus is spent on luxury consumption such as gardening.

money spent on gardens comes from whatever is left after we have provided for our basic needs for food, clothing and housing, together with the energy required for work.

The commercial Brookwood, still the largest cemetery in Europe, occupied more than 350 acres of Surrey heathland, partly financed by selling off building plots on surrounding areas; it was famous for having two railway stations, to which bodies and mourners were conveyed – by first, second or third class – from a special terminus at Waterloo Statio

We do not normally think of gardening as an industry; it is a hobby, a pastime, a search for beauty, even an obsession. But, as well as these, gardening is something on which we spend money: it employs people; it uses tools and machinery; it occupies land, from the smallest patio to the largest park; it constructs hedges and pergolas, temples, foun

Gardens are, in the main, a form of luxury.

Sarah Rutherford, ‘Landscapes for the Mind: English Asylum Designers, 1845–1914’, Garden History, 33 (2005), pp. 61–86.

The story of activist local government in the late nineteenth century – spearheaded and symbolized by Joseph Chamberlain in Birmingham – is a complex one, but two landmarks in a convoluted progress were the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, which reformed a corrupt and inefficient system of local government, and the Public Health Act of 1848. The

Today, even though land prices have risen so rapidly in recent years, we still devote 15 per cent of the land area of our towns and cities to parks and gardens, most of it taken up by the individual front and back gardens that we tend so lovingly. This is changing, and the average new house has a smaller garden than it would have had a century ago,