Great Linford Manor Park

Great Linford Manor Park is a landscape from the mid-period of the English Landscape Movement and is likely to be the work of Richard Woods. The park is the only significant heritage landscape in Milton Keynes and an interesting complement to a new town whose design was strongly influenced by landscape considerations.

Client and Contract Period

The Parks Trust

2017 – 2023

Project Objectives

Arkwood are acting as Lead Consultant, leading a design team including Hydreau, Huntley Cartwright and Webb Yates.

The project is concerned with the restoration of the ‘Woodsian’ landscape – the central formal gardens with a series of linked ponds and cascades, the ‘Wilderness’ Garden, the adjoining parkland and key framing views of the main landscape components.

The project will also focus on current needs through the provision of a new play trail and will provide infrastructure for the broad-based activity and events programme being planned by the Parks Trust.

Issues Challenges and Outcomes

Great Linford is a village to the north of Milton Keynes town centre that has been subsumed into the expanding town over the past thirty years. The village is recorded in the Doomsday Book and the Manor has been the most significant building in the village since the middle ages.

The village carefully protects its identity as a distinctive element within Milton Keynes and the Manor is a significant part of this distinctiveness. At the same time, local residents strongly identify with the design principles that informed the development of Milton Keynes which might not be wholly consistent with those that informed the development of the design of the Manor Park. The approach to landscape design needs to merge the aspiration to preserve an historic landscape with the need to provide an open, accessible, flexible and robust public open space in the Milton Keynes tradition.

As a consequence, the project has been informed by a detailed consultation and engagement process that has reassured users and stakeholders that their needs and aspirations are being respected as part of the restoration project.

Services