[1] He was a son of John Parke the oboist, was intended for the bar, and studied under a special pleader; but a speech impediment led him to abandon the law.
He studied architecture, and his father placed him with Sir John Soane, who used him as a draughtsman for his Royal Academy lectures.
[2] Between 1820 and 1824 Parke visited Italy, Sicily, Genoa, Greece, and Egypt, ascending the Nile in 1824 with a fellow-student, John Joseph Scoles.
[2] In 1829 Parke published a Map of Nubia, comprising the Country between the First and Second Cataracts of the Nile, and gave a plan of the island of Philæ.
[2] Parke exhibited at the Royal Academy drawings of an Interior of a Sepulchral Chamber, 1830, and Temples in the Island of Philæ, 1831.