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.....

In the far north of Singapore, where the island looks across the strait towards Malaysia, Admiralty Park is one of the largest parks in the country, a sprawling expanse of woodland, mangrove and open space that combines protected nature with one of the most ambitious playgrounds anywhere in the city-state. The park is divided into distinct zones, a tranquil nature area threaded with boardwalks and trails through secondary forest and coastal mangrove, and a lively activity area famous for an eno.....

In the central desert south-east of Dubai about 40 minutes by road from the central downtown business district, the Al Marmoom Conservation Reserve is the largest unfenced wildlife conservation reserve in the United Arab Emirates and one of the largest desert conservation areas in the broader Arabian Peninsula. The 10 percent of the total area of the Emirate of Dubai (approximately 1,000 square miles) was formally designated as a conservation reserve on 1 April 2018 by the Emirate's Supreme Coun.....

Launched in 2018 as the UAE's first unfenced nature reserve, Al Marmoom Desert Conservation Reserve covers around a tenth of the emirate of Dubai in the Saih Al Salam desert to the south of the city. It was announced by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum and is managed by Dubai Municipality, conceived as a large environmental and tourism destination intended to draw around a million visitors a year. The reserve protects a desert ecosystem of dunes, grasslands and man-made wetlands, the best.....

In the central Khalid Lagoon of downtown Sharjah just east of the historic Sharjah Heritage Area, Al Noor Island is a 45,000-square-metre artificial island that has been transformed into one of the most thoughtfully designed small public garden and leisure parks in the broader United Arab Emirates. The island opened to the public in December 2015 following a comprehensive three-year landscape-and-architecture development programme led by the Sharjah Investment and Development Authority, fulfilli.....

Carved out of the desert as a series of man-made lakes, Al Qudra is a popular outdoor escape within the Al Marmoom Conservation Reserve in Dubai's Saih Al Salam desert. Created to promote eco-tourism, the lakes turned a stretch of bare desert into a thriving oasis of open water, reeds and planting that quickly became a favourite weekend retreat for residents. The wider Al Qudra Lakes are made up of several interconnected pools, drawing flamingos, swans, ducks and other wildlife, with gazelles .....

Al Warqa, sometimes spelled Al Warqaa, is a residential district in the east of Dubai, best known to visitors for its large and well-kept community park. The leafy, low-rise area offers a quieter side of the city away from the towers. The district is chiefly a quiet suburb of villas and family homes, set back from the busy heart of the city. It has a calm, residential character. Its chief draw for visitors is a great community park, one of the larger green spaces in the city, opened in recent .....

The Alameda Central is the oldest public park in the Americas, a leafy rectangle of trees, fountains and pathways in the heart of Mexico City, laid out in the late sixteenth century on land that had once been an Aztec marketplace and, more grimly, a site of executions during the Inquisition. Its name comes from the alamos, or poplars, originally planted there, and over the centuries it has been a fashionable promenade for the city's residents, redesigned and embellished in various styles, partic.....

Spread across some eighty hectares of slopes and woodland in north London, Alexandra Park surrounds the great hilltop palace of the same name and provides one of the city's most expansive areas of green space combined with far-reaching views. Laid out in the Victorian era alongside the palace it was designed to complement, the park rises steadily to a ridge from which the skyline of central London, more than ten kilometres away, unfolds across the horizon, taking in landmarks from the financial .....

Tucked beside one of the most admired pieces of post-war public housing in Britain, Alexandra Road Park in the Camden district of London is a rare example of a modernist designed landscape created as an integral part of a residential estate. It was laid out in the 1970s to accompany the Alexandra Road Estate, a striking development of stepped concrete terraces designed by the architect Neave Brown, and the park was conceived not as an afterthought but as a deliberate green heart for the new comm.....