Alderman William Edwin Pease, who doubled as Darlington’s mayor and MP, opened the Cockerbeck Valley Park – now known as the Denes.
After the Peases vacated their mansions of Pierremont and Brinkburn at the start of the twentieth century, the project to turn their steeply sided valley into a public park was held up by the First World War. The war was followed by an even more protracted battle with allotment holders, who had created piggeries and hen runs by the beck.
The westernmost dene, Brinkburn, was opened to the public on 11 September 1923, but the battle – ‘rather a violent one’, remembered a councillor – with the allotment holders was not settled by the Ministry of Agriculture in London until mid-1924. Unemployed men were put to work converting the allotments, planting more than 10,000 trees and shrubs and laying 1½ miles of path.
About 2,000 people watched Alderman Pease perform the opening ceremony at the Salisbury Terrace entrance. ‘Darlington’s latest lung is the Cockerbeck Valley Park, a mass of green slopes and shrubberies to the extent of 23 acres through which flows, like a silver ribbon, the charming beck,’ said the Evening Despatch. ‘The new park is very beautiful and will be a source of pleasure and health to children and adults who reside in its neighbourhood.’
(Lloyd: A History of the Denes of Darlington)