Inspired by Kevin Walker's post on our facebook page, I started looking at the history of the park.

The park and all the surrounding area was owned by the Stanford family, who lived in Preston Manor, and due to restrictions in William Stanford's will, it wasn't possible to sell any of the land until an act of Parliament in 1871 and from then onwards tracts of land were sold for housing.

William Bennett-Stanford started to develop the area of the park as enclosed pleasure grounds but in 1883 the council purchased the area for £50,000, this and £22,868 for the initial layout were funded with a bequest from a local bookmaker, William Edmund Davies and the park was formally declared open on 8 November 1884.

The velodrome was the first in the UK and is the oldest in the world that is still in use and is the longest in the UK at 579m - the unusual shape is due to the fact that there weren't any international standards at the time - these were introduced after Olympic track cycling became popular after 1900 and early velodrome came in all shape and size.

Originally the area was a polo ground when owned by the Stanford family and the cycle track as dug out by hand by the army, the first races were in May 1887 - entries were 2 shillings (10p) and prizes of up to £7 were awarded!

As the safety bicycle (driven by a chain rather than the more dangerous Penny Farthing) were first made in 1885, the velodrome must have been at the forefront of bike racing at the time.

The Chalet cafe was built in 1887 with the upper rooms housing the park police and the clock-tower was unveiled on 17 June 1892.

The park has 2 connection with tanks - for about 20 years for 1920 a WW1 tank was there, a gift to the town in recognition of Brighton's contribution to the war savings campaign.
This must have been a common thing - my dad recalls playing on one in the park where he lived in Worcestershire - he particularly remembers it becasue as an 8 yrs old he fell of it and split is head open, going home covered in blood! Probably they were removed during WW11 for the metal to be re used.

The interesting fact that Kevin drew our attention to was the tank waterproofing testing tank that was build just north of the tennis courts - roughly where the fitness group normally are when we're running on a Saturday.

(Click on photos to enlarge)

The aerial photo taken of the park in 1946 shows the tank and also that the top field was taken over for use as allotments as part of the Dig for Victory campaign.

That's the end of the history lesson! Info collected from Wikipedia & Brighton Museums.

Best wishes to all, hop you are keeping well.

John

Hi all, we're doing our best to keep in touch with facebook posts, please share your thoughts and experiences on there, we're open to suggestions!

Let’s start by looking back to this week in 2014 - we were coming toward the end of our first year and had a record attendance of 329 finishers (our current record is 867!) including 9yr old Kit Monti running his 50^th.

In 15^th place was Bill Mullett who finished his one and only parkrun in 19:54 breaking Andrew Haig’s VM65-69 record. This is currently held by Pete Witcombe with 19:18.

Bill was a track and cross country international with a 5000m track PB of 14:03.2 from 1975 and his Olympian son Rob holds the Hove Park SM25-29 record with 14:35.

Worldwide there were 374 events with 65991 finishers compared to around 1500 events and 250,000 finishers now, we’ve grown lots over those 6 years!

Moving on to the current situation, since last week, the only change is that all parkrun events worldwide have been cancelled until the end of April, possibly beyond then but that’s all that has been confirmed so far.

Hopefully many of you will still be out running, I’m working from home now which means it’s easier to go for a run at lunchtime so hopefully by the time we can run in groups again I’ll be a bit closer to my PB.

parkrun HQ have been busy with ideas to keep us engaged with the weekly on-line quiz - week 1 was hastily created in a day and there were separate versions for Asia Pacific, Europe and USA but now it has settled at 8pm on Friday so that it’s in daytime for all regions. You don’t have to be an expert, some questions you might know the answer if you’ve been parkrunning a long time but others can only be a best guess, for example ‘How many people in this photo!

The quiz and other items are on https://www.youtube.com/c/parkrunglobal.

From Monday there will be parkrun themed ‘School of parkrun’ homework to keep the kids occupied https://blog.parkrun.com/uk/2012/03/27/the-school-of-parkrun/.

There are 2 weekly parkrun podcasts which will fill up an hour or so each - With Me Now https://withmenow.libsyn.com and Free Weekly Timed http://www.freeweeklytimed.com which have included interviews with directors and staff and If you want to catch up on some history, the parkrun show was the original pr podcast from 2011 to 2015. It’s amusing now to hear presenters getting excited because there were 10,000 runners worldwide! I think they knew that we would grow but I'm not sure if they knew just how much. http://parkrun.libsyn.com

Finally, when you’re out running, please try to say Hi, or give a nod or a wave to runners and walkers – if they are self isolating alone your cheerful greeting might be the only contact they have all day.

John