Fiona MacLeod on Hyde Park, Regent’s Park, Greenwich Park, Hampstead Heath, and the smaller green spaces that make London one of the world’s most livable cities for those who know where to find them
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
London has more public green space per capita than any comparable European capital. This is a fact that London regularly forgets to mention when talking about itself, perhaps because the things that generate tourist attention — the history, the museums, the theatre, the food — are more obviously marketable than the quality of the park nearest your hotel. It is also a fact that becomes immediately apparent when you live in London and discover that wherever you are in the city, something green is within approximately fifteen minutes on foot. The royal parks, the commons, the heaths, the garden squares, the smaller municipal parks that serve specific communities — taken together, they constitute a public amenity of extraordinary quality that distinguishes London from most cities of comparable size.
The Royal Parks and When to Use Them
Hyde Park is the largest of the central royal parks and the one most visitors go to, partly because it is adjacent to Kensington and the museums and partly because it is very large and easy to find and has a lake (the Serpentine) and chairs you can sit in and a gallery (the Serpentine Gallery) and cafe facilities and is, in short, everything a large city park should be. It is also very busy during summer weekends and peak tourist season. The recommendation: go on a weekday morning, walk to the less-used western end near the Kensington Gardens boundary, and use it as a transit space between the museums and Kensington High Street rather than as a destination in itself, unless you have specific reason to be there (the summer Proms in the Park, the winter ice rink adjacent, the open-air swimming in the Serpentine on summer mornings).
Regent’s Park contains the London Zoo (paid entry required), the Open Air Theatre (summer season, exceptional), the rose garden in Queen Mary’s Gardens (peak season May and June, genuinely beautiful), and a canal path that connects it to the Granary Square development at King’s Cross in one direction and Little Venice in the other, both of which are worth the walk. The park is less crowded than Hyde Park on equivalent days and its facilities — cafes, sports areas, tennis courts — are excellent and well-distributed.
The Parks Worth Going Out of Your Way For
Greenwich Park, in southeast London near the National Maritime Museum and the Cutty Sark, offers something none of the central parks can: a hill. The view from the top of Greenwich Park, over the former Royal Naval College and the Thames and the City skyline beyond, is one of London’s great views and is entirely free. The park itself is excellent — large, varied in terrain, with a deer enclosure — and the Greenwich area around it (the market, the covered market, the pub by the river) makes a full day’s outing. The DLR from Bank station reaches Cutty Sark station directly; the journey takes about twenty minutes and the elevated view from the DLR provides its own tour of East London en route.
Hampstead Heath in north London is the city’s wildest green space: 790 acres of ancient common land with woodland, ponds for open-water swimming (men’s, women’s, and mixed ponds, open year-round including winter for those inclined toward that form of fortitude), views from Parliament Hill over the whole London skyline, and an atmosphere that is more like a managed country park than a city amenity. Getting there requires either the Northern line to Hampstead or Belsize Park and a walk, or the Overground to Gospel Oak, and the journey from central London takes twenty to thirty minutes. It is worth every minute.
The Garden Squares
One of London’s least-known pleasures is the network of private garden squares whose residents share access and whose occasional open days admit the public. The National Gardens Scheme coordinates open days at gardens across London and the wider UK, and the London ones include private gardens in Notting Hill, Islington, and South London that are genuinely extraordinary and genuinely invisible for the eleven months of the year they are not open. The NGS website lists all open days for the year and the cost of entry is typically a few pounds donated to nursing charities. This is one of the better-value garden experiences in the city and it is entirely off the tourist itinerary, which is its own recommendation.
The lesser-known green spaces of inner London deserve specific mention, because they serve the daily needs of London’s residents in ways that the royal parks, with their tourist infrastructure, do not quite capture. Arnold Circus in Shoreditch, a small circular garden on a raised mound built from the rubble of demolished Victorian slums, is one of London’s strangest and most beautiful small parks: the bandstand at its centre is the focus of occasional summer performances, and the garden itself is maintained by a volunteer group with evident care and affection. Lincoln’s Inn Fields, adjacent to the Soane Museum, is a large square garden used at lunchtime by lawyers and office workers from the surrounding legal district, and whose open-air concerts and events make it one of the better summer destinations in the centre. Postman’s Park in the City, near St Paul’s, contains the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice: a covered cloister of ceramic tiles commemorating ordinary Victorian people who died saving others, an installation that is simultaneously Victorian in its sentimental earnestness and genuinely moving in its specific details. None of these appear on the standard tourist itinerary. All of them are worth twenty minutes of a London afternoon. The density of worthwhile things within walking distance of each other in London’s central areas is such that the visitor willing to deviate from the primary itinerary will almost always find something worth finding. This is what makes London unusual among major cities: the interesting things are not concentrated at landmarks. They are distributed throughout the urban fabric in ways that reward attention and movement.
Fiona MacLeod writes about London travel for The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Her homepage is at prat.uk/author/fiona-macleod.
Also outside at NewsThump | The Daily Mash | The Poke
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/london-parks-secret-weapon-visitors-only-see-one-fiona-macleod/
