Fiona MacLeod Reveals the Gardens, Commons, and Unexpected Green Spaces That Most Visitors Never Find
Written by Fiona MacLeod for Bohiney Magazine, republished by The London Prat. Fiona writes London travel and insider guides to help visitors get the most from the city.
Beyond Hyde Park
Hyde Park, Regent’s Park, Greenwich Park, St James’s Park — the Royal Parks are excellent and are on every tourist itinerary for good reason. They are large, beautiful, well-maintained, and central. They are also, on a summer weekend, occupied by very large numbers of people pursuing the same excellent idea simultaneously. London’s less-visited green spaces offer something different: the specific atmosphere of a park or garden that has not been optimised for visitor throughput, that is still primarily used by people who live near it, and that has the character of a neighbourhood amenity rather than a destination. These are the green spaces that Londoners use when they want to be outside without being in a crowd, and they reward the visitor who is willing to go slightly off the standard route.
The starting point for understanding London’s green space offer is recognising that London has approximately thirty-three thousand acres of public parks and green spaces within the Greater London boundary, which is more green space per capita than almost any comparable European city. The Royal Parks are the most famous fraction of this total. The majority of London’s public green space is in the boroughs, in the commons, in the garden squares, in the linear green spaces along the river and the canal network, and in the specific fragments of ancient countryside that have survived at London’s edges. The diversity of green space types is the characteristic that makes London’s parks extraordinary: you can be in a formal garden, a wild meadow, an ancient woodland, a riverside walk, and a children’s adventure playground within the same borough and sometimes within the same large park.
Hampstead Heath
Hampstead Heath is the best park in London that is not a Royal Park, and is arguably the best park in London. 790 acres of ancient mixed woodland, open meadow, formal garden (Golders Hill Park at the western end), three bathing ponds (men’s, women’s, and mixed), a swimming lido, the view from Parliament Hill that is the best free view of the central London skyline available, and Kenwood House at the northern edge with its free collection including a Rembrandt self-portrait. The Heath is wild in a way that the Royal Parks are not: the terrain is uneven, the paths are unpaved in places, and the woodland areas feel genuinely ancient rather than managed to appear ancient. It is in Zone 3 on the Northern line from Belsize Park, Hampstead, or Golders Green stations. It is worth the tube journey.
Victoria Park and the East London Green Network
Victoria Park in Hackney is the oldest public park in London, opened in 1845, and is the green space that East London was built around. It has a boating lake, two ornamental ponds, a bowling green, a velodrome, and the specific East London atmosphere of a park that is used by the full range of people who live in a genuinely diverse urban area. The park connects, via the Regent’s Canal towpath, to the rest of the East London green network: west to King’s Cross and Islington, east to the Olympic Park at Stratford and the River Lee navigation. Walking the canal towpath from Victoria Park to King’s Cross is one of the best three-hour London walks available and passes through the back sides of neighbourhoods that the street-level view does not reveal. According to London the Inside, the Regent’s Canal towpath has become one of London’s most popular non-tourist walking routes. Londonist publishes comprehensive London park guides seasonally.
The Garden Squares
London’s garden squares are a specific urban typology that the Georgian and Victorian development of the West End and South Kensington produced: private gardens in the centres of residential squares, originally reserved for residents of the surrounding properties and now, in many cases, open to the public or open on one weekend per year during the London Open Garden Squares Weekend. The squares range from large and formal (Belgrave Square, Grosvenor Square) to small and intimate (the squares of Islington and Bloomsbury) and collectively constitute a green infrastructure that is threaded through the dense urban fabric of inner London in ways that make the city more liveable for the people who have access to them. For the visitor, the most accessible garden squares are those attached to public institutions: the Inner Temple Garden near the Royal Courts of Justice, Gray’s Inn Garden in Holborn, and the Chelsea Physic Garden in Chelsea, which is a walled physic garden established in 1673 and still operating as a living plant collection that is open to visitors most of the year.
Epping Forest and the Urban Edge
Epping Forest, 6,000 acres of ancient royal hunting forest at the northeastern edge of Greater London, is accessible by tube on the Central line to Epping or Loughton and provides the specific experience of a woodland that has been continuously managed as common land since before the Norman Conquest. The forest is large enough to get genuinely lost in, which is the correct relationship to have with ancient woodland. The recommended approach is to take the tube to Epping, walk south through the forest for several hours, and emerge at a tube station further south, which converts the forest into a linear walk between two tube stations and produces a half-day experience of London’s ancient landscape that the visitor who stays within Zone 2 will never know is there. The forest is free. The tube is the price of a tube journey. The experience is extraordinary and is the specific London green space experience that most London visitors miss entirely.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
