ABSTRACT
The ‘greening’ of European cities has been one of the most important, widespread and controversial of modern urban developments. Notions of the ‘green’ city go back at least to the seventeenth century, when Thomas Fuller described the English provincial town of Norwich as ‘either a city in an orchard or an orchard in a city, so equally are houses and trees blended in it’. But it was in the nineteenth century that references to green space in the urban context multiplied. The need for ‘zones of open country’ around London was mentioned in the 1820s and ‘green corridors’ in the 1880s, and similar phrases were picked up and disseminated in other cities and towns across the continent.1 Increasingly, the concern was less with natural open space, which was increasingly built over and developed, than with artificial or planned open space. In the 1920s London County Council published a map of open spaces in the capital, including parks and sports grounds, and marked them all in green. However, the notion of an all-embracing urban green space appears to have emerged after the Second World War.2
