Originally an enclosed area used for hunting, in the 18th century the term applied to the grounds of a country house. It now refers to open land used for recreation in a town or city. Within the UK, parks were a feature of 19th-century urbanization, in order to relieve the ‘artificiality’ of urban living. However, Brainard et al. (2006) CSERGE, ECM-2006–05 argue that parks have usually been sited with little regard for the geography of where different social groups live: within Birmingham, UK, ‘even within the most deprived areas, whites have better access to park areas than non-whites’. Conlon (2004) Sexualities 7, 462 describes Christopher Park, Greenwich Village, New York, as a specific space that ‘highlights the relationships amongst queer theory, identity and material public spaces’.