From the ashes of disaster sprang this green lung for the city centre. Once a great Norman castle stood here and a quarter of the medieval town. Oliver Cromwell had the castle demolished. That created an opportunity to expand the city’s fashionable shopping district, but the whole district was destroyed in the Blitz. It was laid out as a park in the 1970s. Twenty years later works of art, attractive fittings and a herb garden gave Castle Park an imaginative new look.