The rapid growth of nineteenth-century English cities produced leafy suburbs, and an occasional feature of these was the development of the estate park of modestly secluded Victorian villas. To preserve their valued amenities, such parks bound the middle-class owners of houses within them by restrictive legal covenants. The documents relating to such parks are often inaccessible, but for three of them in Liverpool, the available records enable their early history to be studied.

The first part of this book deals with the legal basis and evolution of the restrictive covenant, a device still of considerable importance in housing development and amenity protection across England. The second part deals individually with the three Liverpool parks, the social reasons for their foundation and growth, and the problems that beset the entrepreneurs who established them in the mid-nineteenth century (and often then lived in them) during the early years of the parks’ existence. After more than a hundred years, all three of the parks studied continue not only as highly favored residential areas, but also as exemplars of the success of the deployment of the restrictive covenant.