Queen's Park is a public park in

Brighton Brighton () is a seaside resort and one of the two main areas of the City of Brighton and Hove in the county of East Sussex, England. It is located south of London. Archaeological evidence of settlement in the area dates back to the Bronze A ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe ...

. In 1825, Thomas Attree, a property owner and developer in Brighton, acquired land north of Eastern Road—already known as Brighton Park—to build a residential park surrounded by detached villas, inspired by

Regent's Park Regent's Park (officially The Regent's Park) is one of the Royal Parks of London. It occupies of high ground in north-west Inner London, administratively split between the City of Westminster and the Borough of Camden (and historically betwee ...

in London. He commissioned architect Charles Galloway to design it. Attree renamed it after

Queen Adelaide , house = Saxe-Meiningen , father = Georg I, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen , mother = Princess Louise Eleonore of Hohenlohe-Langenburg , birth_date = , birth_place = Meiningen, Saxe-Meiningen, Holy ...

, consort of

William IV William IV (William Henry; 21 August 1765 – 20 June 1837) was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and King of Hanover from 26 June 1830 until his death in 1837. The third son of George III, William succeeded h ...

patronised the German Spa opened in 1825 by Dr F A A Struve of

Dresden Dresden (, ; Upper Saxon: ''Dräsdn''; wen, label= Upper Sorbian, Drježdźany) is the capital city of the German state of Saxony and its second most populous city, after Leipzig. It is the 12th most populous city of Germany, the fourth ...

at the south end of the park, which remained in operation until 1886 when it continued as a mineral water plant until 1960. On the site now stands the Royal Spa Nursery school. Attree's plan never fully materialised and the surrounding housing is mostly late Victorian with some late 20th century infill and replacement. Pepper Pot, Tower Road, Queen's Park, Brighton

Pepper Pot, Tower Road, Queen's Park, Brighton

At the north-west corner is Pennant Lodge, once the home of

Charles Freshfield Charles Kaye Freshfield (11 March 1808 – 6 July 1891) was a 19th-century lawyer and Conservative Party Member of Parliament in the British House of Commons. Freshfield was born in Lothbury, London the son of James William Freshfield and his wi ...

. Also to the north-west of the park itself, on Queen's Park Road, stands the Pepper Pot (also called the "Pepper Box"). Probably originally built as a horizontal wind-powered water pump, and later used for the publishing of a local newspaper, it was later an artist's studio and by the 1990s a public convenience. In the 21st century it has been sealed and unused. The park itself, without the houses but including the Spa and the Pepper pot, was bought by the Race Stand Trustees in 1890 for £13,500 and donated to the town. Today Queen's Park has a large pond, frequented by ducks, geese and herring gulls. A popular myth is that the pond was created when a First World War plane crashed in the middle of the park creating a crater lower than the water table. Although untrue, this myth is probably based on a real-life event when a recreational biplane, piloted by retired Air Marshall Phillip Austin, crash landed in the pond in 1923. Austin and the pond emerged unscathed. The park is also home to a children's play area, a café, an extensive dog-free area, a scented garden for people with disabilities, a former bowling green, tennis courts, and an area that is left untended in order to encourage wildlife. Kemp Town Bowling Club stopped using the bowling green in 2007, it had previously provided a filming location for the 1987 film "Wish You Were Here" starring Emily Lloyd

References

External links

Parks link
on council site
History and personal recollections
on ''My Brighton and Hove'' site {{Brighton and Hove Brighton and Hove Parks and open spaces in East Sussex Urban public parks Conservation areas in England Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen