The Regent's Park has a history stretching back through seven centuries, well before the designer and architectural genius John Nash and his patron the Prince Regent laid it out at the beginning of the nineteenth century as the first of the improvements they had planned for London. Rabbitts recounts the story of the park from its origins as a tiny part of the Middlesex Forest to the Dissolution of the Monasteries, when it became Henry VIII's hunting ground, to its subsequent development in the nineteenth century as London's new West End. This comprehensive history of one of the United Kingdom's most popular outdoor spaces also takes into account the wider history of Britain and its public parks.
Dr Paul Rabbitts has over 35 years of experience in designing, managing and restoring urban parks across the UK. As a qualified Landscape Architect, he is also a published author and regular contributor to journals and periodicals. As well as being a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Member of the Chartered Institute of Horticulture, he currently works full time for Norwich City Council as their parks manager. He is an author of books on architects Sir Christopher Wren and Decimus Burton as well as Regents Park, Richmond Park, Hyde Park, the wider Royal Parks and that icon of public parks, the Victorian and Edwardian bandstand, on which he is acknowledged as a UK expert and which was the subject of his PhD at the University of East Anglia. He lectures frequently on all things parks and can be contacted via his website www.paulrabbitts.co.uk . He lives in Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire.
