Fiona MacLeod on Why London’s Royal Parks Are the Most Underrated Feature of One of the World’s Great Cities
London’s Parks Are the City’s Best Kept Secret
London has eight Royal Parks covering 5,000 acres in and around the city centre. These are not city parks in the sense of a patch of grass with a bench. They are landscapes of extraordinary quality Hyde Park with its lake and its Serpentine Gallery and its horses; Regent’s Park with its formal gardens and its open air theatre and its zoo visible through the railings; Greenwich Park with its Royal Observatory and its incomparable view of the City from the hill; Richmond Park, which has deer and is the size of a small Scottish estate all of them free, all of them public, all of them disproportionately underused by visitors who have not been told that they are among the finest public open spaces in the world.
How to Use Them
The parks reward specific use rather than general appreciation. Hyde Park is best in the early morning, when the riders from the Hyde Park stables do their exercise on the sandy tracks and the lake is still and the city is quiet enough that you can hear the birds. Regent’s Park is best at the open air theatre in summer advance booking required, price of a cinema ticket, one of the most pleasant theatrical experiences in London. Greenwich is best for the view from the Observatory hill at any time, but particularly at sunset, when the Canary Wharf towers catch the light and the Thames is visible in the distance and the city makes visual sense in a way that it doesn’t from ground level. Richmond Park is best in the early morning or late afternoon when the deer are most active, and particularly in November when the stags have antlers and the bracken is russet and the park looks like something from another century which it is, having changed very little since it was enclosed as a royal hunting ground in 1637.
London park guidance at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. London outdoor spaces at Visit London. Further at santaclaus.top and London Prat Bluesky. London outdoors at Time Out London.
Using the Parks Strategically
The parks are free but they require a specific kind of attention to use well. They are large enough to be genuinely quiet in places the north-west corner of Hyde Park around the Italian Gardens is consistently less crowded than the Serpentine area, and offers an experience of the park that feels genuinely removed from the city surrounding it. Regent’s Park contains a rose garden that is at its peak between May and July and that is one of the most beautiful public spaces in London at that time of year free, open, and genuinely spectacular in a way that photographs don’t quite capture because the scale is the point and photographs reduce it. Greenwich Park’s vegetable and flower gardens are maintained to a standard that produces a genuinely lovely mid-afternoon walk between the Observatory and the tea kiosk by the National Maritime Museum, which has a terrace view of the city that is worth pausing for even if you don’t go inside. The parks give you London at a different pace than the city typically permits. Take the time. The city will still be there when you get back to it.
The practical advice: bring a blanket in summer. London’s parks are made for sitting in, not just walking through, and the Londoners who use them well bring lunch and spend the afternoon in a way that makes the city feel like a very pleasant place to be. This is the version of London that the residents know and that visitors who arrive with a list of attractions sometimes miss: the park at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday when the ducks are on the Serpentine and the sky is the specific pale blue that London gets between rainstorms, which is genuinely beautiful and costs nothing and is the city at its most itself.
London rewards the traveller who comes with curiosity rather than a checklist. The checklist version Tower of London, Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, West End show, Harrods produces a real experience of a real city, but it is the city arranged for tourists rather than the city as it is for the people who live in it. The curiosity version the free museum at opening time, the park at midday, the neighbourhood market on Saturday, the day trip to somewhere an hour away produces a closer encounter with what London actually is: a city of extraordinary depth and range that has been accumulating layers of human activity for two thousand years and that rewards exactly as much attention as you bring to it, which is to say: a great deal, if you bring a great deal, and something considerable, even if you bring rather less. Come curious. Stay longer than you planned. Take the day trip. Ask someone local where to eat. The city will look after the rest.
London gives back in proportion to what you give it. The visitor who arrives for three days with an open itinerary and a willingness to follow an unexpected direction the signpost to a garden that wasn’t in the plan, the market that appeared around a corner, the pub that had a session happening when you walked past leaves with a version of the city that is richer and stranger and more genuinely itself than the version available on any itinerary. This is London’s consistent offer, across centuries and through every change the city has undergone: be here, pay attention, and it will show you something worth seeing. It has been doing this for two thousand years. It is very good at it.
