The Invention of the Park: From the Garden of Eden to Disney's Magic Kingdom (review)

The idea of producing a global history of the park, as concept, embodied and virtual reality, lived experience, and imagined space, would be daunting enough if the project were confined to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But Jones and Wills try to top even this vaunting ambition by taking in the whole span of human existence, from creation myths to computer-generated realms of the imagination. It must be said at the outset that not only do they lack the cultural capital to make this grand design effective, but they also lack the control and grasp to develop themes and provide convincing overviews and comparisons across time and between distant and disparate places. As historians of the contemporary United States, with interests in national parks and environmental history, they are at their strongest in dealing with those themes in that setting, and they also have isolated useful passages on the theme park, the mall, and the various worlds of Disney. But the book is a series of disconnected episodes rather than a synthesis, and it is hard to understand the reasons for omitting the spa and seaside promenade, the open-air museum, all sports grounds except the baseball park, the holiday camp, the linear park, the alternative technology park, the car park (perhaps because the authors think of it as a parking lot), or indeed, apart from a stray mention, the garden city, from what purports to be a complete survey of the phenomena to which this word has been applied. And there is no convincing analysis of conflict over entitlements to, and use of, space, a theme that emerges occasionally, as it must, but which the authors do not seem to be at home with.

To make matters worse, the book is appallingly written, in a faux-populist transatlantic style which entails some serious mangling of the English language, with an abundance of malapropisms and neologisms. We are told, unintentionally, that Woody Allen was originally designed by Frederick Law Olmsted (2), and this sets the tone for what follows. A reference to "sentimental peons" presumably substitutes for "paeans" (63), and we encounter "a sleuth of land claims" (75). The word "organic" is frequently misapplied, and the verb "to motion" appears in a variety of bizarre contexts. The authors are not to be trusted on anything that happened before the nineteenth century, with errors of chronology of up to half a millennium passing unnoticed, and a very shaky grasp of both the Renaissance and Enlightenment. They seem to believe that the Battle of Covadonga took place in the twelfth century (78) and that citizens of Venice were "wiling their time away" in the Piazza San Marco in 1000 (41), while Canterbury Cathedral was apparently built as a Gothic edifice in 1175 (19). Category errors involving social structure and status labels are frequent, and we encounter that stock inhabitant of the weak undergraduate essay, "the average medieval peasant" (17). Not that the authors are reliable for more recent centuries, as in the banning of "soccer" by Halifax's People's Park in 1857 (53). The examples cited here are taken from a five-page list of errors, misleading statements, misinterpretations, and failures of logic and contextual understanding—the book seems to have been produced without the benefit of an editor.

This is only part of the story. The bibliography is full of holes, with (as the tip of the iceberg) important books such as Hazel Conway on the British public park, John Barrell on landscape and art, and Harvey Taylor on the "outdoor movement" passing unnoticed, nothing on the extensive historiography of the Grand Tour, and nothing on British seaside resorts and amusement parks except Bennett's commissioned history of Blackpool Pleasure Beach. No fake contemporary parallel is allowed to pass unmolested: park keepers in the nineteenth century (or possibly the seventeenth—let us not be...