We visited Birkenhead Park in June 2022. The park is open 24h a day, 7 days a week, free of charge. You can easily park your car (for free as well) along the streets around it, or access it by public transport (by train from Liverpool, which is just on the opposite bank of the Mersey).

Birkenhead Park offers everything you can expect from a typical English city park : wide open greens and wooded areas ; an artificial lake (with ducks and swans) and meandering paths around it, bridges, a bandstand, a boathouse on its shore ; all sport facilities : tennis courts, bowling greens, and of course a cricket ground where the local junior team was practicing on that day. This makes it a very nice place to spend a leisure afternoon. It advertises itself as “the People’s park”, having been thought and created from its very origin as a public park and opened as early as 1846. Open to everyone, all the time. It would even have inspired the creator of Central Park in New York city during a trip he made to Liverpool soon after Birkenhead park had opened. All in all, I think we spent two hours in the park, including some time to enjoy ice creams.

This being said, what makes it so special or outstanding? Well, the leaflet you can pick up at the Visitors’ centre proudly reads “World’s First”. And, I would say, that’s it. We were lucky enough to live in central London for five years, half way between Regent’s Park and Hyde Park. They both exceed  Birkenhead Park in beauty, size, design, variety of landscapes, age. Of course they were initially private parks, for the upper class only (and are still “Royal Parks”), but from a visitor or user experience, that does not really matter nowadays. British people are without any doubt experts for parks and landscapes design, but is Birkenhead really “outstanding”? Looking out of the UK, parc des Buttes Chaumont or parc Montsouris in Paris, just to name a few, are not less valuable and are almost as old as Birkenhead park : it will need a top class nomination file to explain why Birkenhead should be the one to inscribe.

Still, this is an unusual nomination and for sure no such park has been inscribed yet on its own. Would this be enough? The recently updated UK tentative list is quite disappointing – only four new sites, of which another medieval town with a nice cathedral, and a duplicate of the already inscribed Wadden Sea – so I would still prefer to see Birkenhead put forward by the UK administration for inscription. And they will want to “heal” the delisting of nearby Liverpool, too. While you are there, do pay a visit to Port Sunlight model village : we were very positively surprised by the quality of that place and the number and preservation state of the buildings. We visited both Port Sunlight and Birkenhead on the same day, that’s a 20 minute drive between the two places.