NZ Visual Diary - entry 366
love song for Silo Park
Urban dwelling requires a reckoning, especially for a fella like me who spent the better part of his first 4 years as a Kiwi nestled so comfortably at the edge of Cornwall Park.
Living these past three years in the city-centre precinct of Wynyard Quarter, my sensibilities have had to reconcile the unmistakable trappings of core urban life - of steel, glass, concrete & asphalt, and brick; of horizon lines marked by building tops and not sky; of sounds and smells manufactured by the industry of commerce and not tree and wildlife.
Which is why today’s entry is a love song to Silo Park (located in Wynyard Quarter) and, more broadly, to the urban park movement.
It should not be surprising that the earliest English immigrants who settled in and developed Auckland brought with them the British ideal of an urban park. A site in Grafton (Auckland), named originally by local Māori as Pukekawa, would be reserved in 1845 by then Governor George Grey and renamed the Auckland Domain, Auckland’s first large-scale urban park.1 And, as a park explicitly informed by the narrative vernacular of the urban park movement, Myers Park in central city Auckland gave public voice to the importance of public parks “[as] a tool for strengthening national feeling and social coherence and ameliorating the social and
environmental problems of industrially developed cities.”2
I remain transfixed by the natural beauty of Cornwall Park and feel the constancy of its gravitational attraction. That said, I am also so grateful to have at my current doorstep an urban park like Silo Park in which on any given weekend hundreds of people flock to enjoy and celebrate the novelty of a legacy-rich interplay amongst natural, marine and urban forms and their histories.
The Auckland Domain - Wikipedia website entry
< https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auckland_Domain >
The Birth of Urban Park Movement
< https://www.landscape-portal.org/the-birth-of-urban-park-movement/ >