Barnes Park is a historic public park in

Sunderland Sunderland () is a port city in Tyne and Wear, England. It is the City of Sunderland's administrative centre and in the historic county of Durham. The city is from Newcastle-upon-Tyne and is on the River Wear's mouth to the North Sea. The ri ...

Tyne and Wear Tyne and Wear () is a metropolitan county in North East England, situated around the mouths of the rivers Tyne and Wear. It was created in 1974, by the Local Government Act 1972, along with five metropolitan boroughs of Gateshead, Newcastle u ...

, England. Taken together with its post-war extensions, which run to the former

county borough County borough is a term introduced in 1889 in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, to refer to a borough or a city independent of county council control, similar to the unitary authorities created since the 1990s. An equivalent t ...

boundary, it is the largest park in the city.

History

Barnes Park was laid out in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The land for Barnes Park, set in a valley through which the

Bishopwearmouth Burn Bishopwearmouth Burn or the Barnes Burn is a stream flowing through the city of Sunderland. A tributary of the River Wear, the stream originates between Thorney Close and Hastings Hill farm It proceeds to run through Barnes Park and its extensi ...

flows, was bought in 1904 for the sum £8,500. Three years later, when the depression of trade struck in 1907, the laying out of the park was started – this became a source of employment for a number of practical gardeners from the area, with a total of 2,798 men being employed. The park was then opened in August 1909. Many of the established trees were retained with oak, ash, beech and elm trees constituting its main wooded growth. Paths meandered throughout the park in all directions and at the west side, on the most elevated piece of ground, two

bowling green A bowling green is a finely laid, close-mown and rolled stretch of turf for playing the game of bowls. Before 1830, when Edwin Beard Budding of Thrupp, near Stroud, UK, invented the lawnmower, lawns were often kept cropped by grazing sheep ...

tennis courts A tennis court is the venue where the sport of tennis is played. It is a firm rectangular surface with a low net stretched across the centre. The same surface can be used to play both doubles and singles matches. A variety of surfaces can be u ...

, and a cafe were established. The park has since been home to a wide range of wildlife and with nesting boxes being provided, breeding birds have regularly returned to the park over the years. Water hens, starlings, linnets, snipes, tits, diving ducks, and chaffinches can be frequently observed.

Restoration

After a two-year bidding process, the Sunderland City Council secured over £3 million in Heritage Lottery funding to restore the historic features of Barnes Park and to redevelop its amenities for

future generations Future generations are cohorts of hypothetical people not yet born. Future generations are contrasted with current and past generations, and evoked in order to encourage thinking about intergenerational equity. The moral patienthood of future ge ...

. Brambledown have been appointed the main contractors in the restoration.

History

Restoration

References

See also