ABSTRACT
Public parks meant different things to their various visitors, and this final chapter revisits the main themes of the book from Chapter 1. It provides an overview of the main outcomes of the research and seeks to connect parks more firmly to the ideas that their users had about them—the public imagination. However frequently they were used, parks had a predominantly positive connotation in the public mind. Regardless of the original motivations behind their establishment, parks were often used very differently to how they were intended. This remained a strong part of their appeal to the general public—they could try to make the space their own, regardless of attempts to regulate their usage, either formally through the enforcement of the relevant bye-laws or informally by means of social conventions. Public parks marked a new kind of space in the urban environment and one that required new forms of public behaviour to emerge.
