An Economic History of the English Garden

Gardens, in short, are far more important to our economy and society than even their greatest devotees have realized.

London, as usual, did best of all. There, governments built and refurbished palaces, parks and gardens to uphold the dignity of the royal family. The money went to builders and contractors, artists, furniture makers, sculptors, plant nurserymen, landscape designers and gardeners. Much more was spent, in London and then throughout the country, both

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

Actually, as an unlikely saviour – the Heritage Lottery Fund – has found, over 57 per cent of the British population use their local park at least once a month and, for those with young children, it rises to 90 per cent.44 The fund is financed by Britain’s gamblers – perhaps the least well-off sector of the public – and has been spending millions e

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

Recent history is, for garden and park visitors, a much less happy one.43 Providing open spaces was – unlike education, libraries or social services – never a statutory duty imposed on local authorities by law. When governments in the last quarter of the twentieth century and especially since 2010 started to try to cut public expenditure, they look

In past centuries, every upper-class and most middle-class households would have employed a gardener, but today only 5 per cent of us still do so.

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.

Today, we have far more leisure time and we spend a good deal of it on gardening. On average across the whole population of the UK, we spend ten minutes per day, or over an hour a week, on that pastime, men slightly more than women; this may not seem much, but in 2014 – things may have changed a little since then – it was as much or more than the t