Adelaide Parklands - The City of Walking

Adelaide is called the City of Churches. It could also be called the City of Parklands or the City of Walking.

It takes only a glance at the map of Adelaide to understand the draw. Look at those expansive parklands that circle both Adelaide and North Adelaide.

Named in honour of Queen Adelaide, consort to King William IV, the city was founded in 1836 as the planned capital for the only freely-settled British province in Australia. Colonel William Light, one of Adelaide's founding fathers, designed the city centre and chose its location close to the River Torrens, in the area originally inhabited by the Kaurna people and known as Tarndanyangga ("place of the red kangaroo"). Light's design, now listed as national heritage, set out the city centre in a grid layout, interspaced by wide boulevards and large public squares, and entirely surrounded by parklands.

Adelaide is a planned city, designed by the first Surveyor-General of South Australia, Colonel William Light. His plan, sometimes referred to as "Light's Vision" (also the name of a statue of him on Montefiore Hill), arranged Adelaide in a grid, with five squares in the Adelaide city centre and a ring of parks, known as the Adelaide Parklands, surrounding it. Light's selection of the location for the city was initially unpopular with the early settlers, as well as South Australia's first governor, John Hindmarsh, due to its distance from the harbour at Port Adelaide, and the lack of fresh water there. Light successfully persisted with his choice of location against this initial opposition.

The benefits of Light's design are numerous: Adelaide has had wide multi-lane roads from its beginning, an easily navigable cardinal direction grid layout and an expansive green ring around the city centre. There are two sets of ring roads in Adelaide that have resulted from the original design. The inner ring route borders the parklands, and the outer route completely bypasses the inner city via (in clockwise order) Grand Junction Road, Hampstead Road, Ascot Avenue, Portrush Road, Cross Road and South Road.

Last year, before his bout with back issues, CJ biked the parklands regularly. There is a bike path that encircles the city although there are many routes along that path.

Here are a few of our first walks.