Bisected by the River Soar just north of Leicester city centre, Abbey Park is the city's premier public park, a Grade II*-registered landscape laid out on former floodplain marshland. It was opened on 29 May 1882 by the Prince and Princess of Wales, after the corporation bought the meadows from the Earl of Dysart and tackled the site's chronic flooding by widening the river and lowering its bed; the layout was designed by the Derby firm of William Barron and Son. The park divides into two parts connected by a footbridge. The Victorian park east of the river holds formal gardens, a boating lake, a bandstand, a sensory garden and lavender maze, a miniature railway, a Pets Corner and a children's play area. West of the river, added to the park in the early twentieth century, lie the Abbey Grounds, containing the ruins of the medieval St Mary's Abbey, enclosed by long medieval walls, and the burnt remains of the seventeenth-century Cavendish House, which briefly sheltered King Charles I after the 1645 siege of Leicester. Abbey Park has a long history as an events site. It hosted the Abbey Park Show from the late nineteenth century until 1995, was home to the Abbey Park Festival music event for more than twenty years from 1981, and stages the city's annual bonfire and fireworks display around Guy Fawkes Night. For Leicester it functions as the main city park, busy with walkers, picnickers and tennis and bowls players, while its abbey ruins and royal-opening heritage give it historical weight beyond its recreational role. Entrances off Abbey Park Road place it a short distance from the city centre and the River Soar towpaths. The medieval abbey within the grounds was a wealthy Augustinian monastery dissolved in 1538, and it is remembered as the place where Cardinal Wolsey died in 1530 on his way south to face Henry VIII; a memorial in the grounds marks the spot. The surrounding Abbot Penny's Wall, parts of it up to six metres tall, is listed at Grade I, and the park as a whole is registered at Grade II* for its historic landscape. Long a focus of civic life, the park grew from a Victorian flower show into the events programme it carries today.

Type: Outdoors

Address: Abbey Park Road, Leicester, United Kingdom, LE4 5AQ

Opening Date: 29/05/1882