Parklife therefore has attained a cultural significance beyond its considerable sales and critical acclaim, cementing its status as a landmark in British rock music.

[6] In 2010, Parklife was one of ten album covers from British artists commemorated on a UK postage stamp issued by the Royal Mail.

"[11] After the completion of recording sessions for Blur's previous album, Modern Life Is Rubbish, Albarn began to write prolifically.

[12] Due to their precarious financial position at the time, Blur quickly went back into the studio with producer Stephen Street to record their third album.

While the members of Blur were pleased with the final result, Food Records owner David Balfe was not, telling the band's management "This is a mistake".

[14] Blur frontman Damon Albarn told NME in 1994, "For me, Parklife is like a loosely linked concept album involving all these different stories.

[16] The songs themselves span many genres, such as the synthpop-influenced hit single "Girls & Boys", the instrumental waltz interlude of "The Debt Collector", the punk rock-influenced "Bank Holiday", the spacey, Syd Barrett-esque "Far Out",[17] and the fairly new wave-influenced "Trouble in the Message Centre".

Albarn stated tongue-in-cheek, "That was the last time that Dave Balfe was, sort of, privy to any decision or creative process with us, and that was his final contribution: to call it London".

Johnny Dee, reviewing Parklife for NME, called it "a great pop record", adding "On paper it sounds like hell, in practice it's joyous.

"[28] Paul Evans of Rolling Stone stated that with "one of this year's best albums", the band "realize their cheeky ambition: to reassert all the style and wit, boy bonding and stardom aspiration that originally made British rock so dazzling.

In a retrospective review, AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine commented: "By tying the past and the present together, Blur articulated the mid-'90s zeitgeist and produced an epoch-defining record.