This isn't the first threat to Greenwich's glorious park

With growing fears that Olympic equestrian events may damage the ancient beauty of Greenwich Park, residents are campaigning to get Olympic chiefs to amend their plans. As south London's most spectacular green space, the park must be protected. And the campaigners can take inspiration from their Victorian predecessors, who defeated an even greater threat more than a century ago.

Few parks can match Greenwich's extraordinary history, from its Roman temple to its Anglo-Saxon burial mounds. But the park itself dates from the 1430s, when Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the youngest brother of Henry V, was given a licence to "empark 200 acres of land, pasture, weed, heath and furze".

A century later, it had passed into the hands of the Tudor monarchs, along with Humphrey's manor house by the river. It was a great favourite of Henry VIII, who used it for hunting deer, while the Stuart king James I enclosed it with a 12-foot brick wall, marking a boundary that survives today.

But it was under Charles II that Greenwich Park acquired its familiar landscaped look. Keen to emulate the grandeur of Versailles, the Merry Monarch hired Louis XIV's gardener André Le Nôtre to design a more formal layout. Although his plans were never fully realised, the long avenues of today's park follow his original design. And in 1675 Charles approved plans for the Royal Observatory, a lasting marriage of pastoral pleasure and scientific enquiry.

By the early 1700s the park was a firm favourite for Londoners rich and poor. Locals were granted special passes to visit the park, while it was thrown open to the public twice a year for the rowdy Greenwich Fairs, when hundreds held "tumbling" races down the observatory hill. "Is it not fine?" sighed Dr Johnson, visiting in 1763.

The park was opened to the public for good in 1830, but it soon faced a lethal threat to its existence. In 1833 Parliament approved the capital's first railway line from London Bridge to Greenwich. The developers planned to drive the line right through the centre of the park, carried above ground on a gigantic viaduct past the Queen's House and Royal Naval College.

The Greenwich Gazette called it "so preposterous a suggestion that none but a madman could have engendered it", and damned the "private speculators" for trying to destroy "that which indefeasibly belongs to the public". When the paper called for London's voters to mobilise against MPs who backed the scheme, the developers lost their nerve. The viaduct was abandoned; instead, the railway went through a tunnel.

Thanks to these 19th-century nimbys, Greenwich Park has survived unscathed. They saved its green expanses from the railway for us to enjoy - and we must not betray their legacy.