Kensington Gardens

“Is there a more gay and graceful spectacle in the world than Hyde Park ... in the merry month of May or June?”—Beaconsfield.

TheLondon parks certainly do not deserve the epithet “unnoticed,” but I have met few people who knew anything about their story. Foreigners coming to London for the first time always exclaim at their beauty, but the Londoners take them as a matter of course, and hardly anyone stops to inquire their history or even the reason for their names. Yet much of the city’s history is bound up with that of the parks, and their story is a mirror of the changing fashions of London.

Hyde Park, for instance—that vast space of 390 acres in the very heart of the city, enjoyed by prince and plutocrat and pauper with equal freedom so long as they keep on their feet, for the rule of the roadway is not so democratic—what a tale it could tell of the brave sights it has seen since it was first enclosed in 1592! Before Charles I.’s time the park, that took its name from the Manor of Hyde, was only to beenjoyed by the king and court, who hunted and hawked there; but in Stuart days there were foot and horse races and drives and merry-making. It has always been a favourite haunt of Mayfair. Evelyn used to “take the aire in Hide Park,” very annoyed at having to pay one shilling and sixpence for the privilege, and so did Pepys, obviously gratified that his wife attracted attention. De Gramont, the witty observer of Charles II.’s court, is quoted as saying: “Hyde Park everyone knows is the promenade of London—the promenade of beauty and fashion.”

In the days of Charles II. all the world went to the Ring, a circular course of about 350 yards laid out by the Merry Monarch, between the Ranger’s Cottage and the present tea-house. How fashionable the drive was Pepys tells us when he says: “Took up my wife and Deb and to the park, where being in a hackney and they undressed, was ashamed to go into the Tour but went round the park and so with pleasure home.”

In those days there was a cake-house, where cheese-cakes, syllabub and tarts were sold—refreshments probably more attractive than those of to-day.

Places of refreshment might so easily add enormously to the amenities of the London parks and gardens if good food, attractively and quickly provided, could be obtained. Nature has furnished an exquisite background for asylvan meal, but anyone who has ordered tea at one of these places carries away a regret for what might have been. Perhaps that is why it has never been fashionable to take tea in the park since the Georgian days when people stood on chairs to see the beautiful Miss Gunnings pass by.

The latest fashions were always worn first in Hyde Park. The daring of any Parismannequinat the Grand Prix pales before the effect made by the Lady Caroline Campbell of George III.’s reign, who “displayed in Hyde Park the other day a feather four feet higher than her bonnet.”

In Victorian days the smart world strolled on the south walk between Hyde Park Corner and Alexandra Gate, but to-day that is given over to the curious strata of society, vomited up from a volcanic war, that now fill the stalls in the theatres and the restaurants that used to call themselves exclusive.

Fashion is slowly retiring—first to the part of the park opposite Park Lane and then to the northern side opposite Lancaster Gate. Perhaps it is making the tour, and when the profiteer and his family have discovered that they are in sole possession of this south-east part of the park, they will move off and the wheel will turn once more.

Why the big statue close to Hyde Park Corner is called the Achilles Statue is one of London’s mysteries for which there is no more reason than the nursemaid had when she familiarly designated Watts’ “Physical Energy” in Kensington Gardens as “The Galloping Major.” “Achilles” is a copy of one of the horse trainers of the Monte Cavallo in Rome. The Pope gave the cast, the Ordnance Department gave the metal of the cannon taken in the battles of Salamanca, Vittoria, Toulouse and Waterloo, and the women of England subscribed £10,000 to this memorial of the Iron Duke and his comrades-in-arms. Where Achilles comes in, I do not know.

Each of the great London parks is associated with some special English sovereign. Charles II. is the godfather of St. James’s Park; Regent’s Park, like Regent Street, was planned for the glorification of the man who was afterwards George IV.; Battersea is associated with Prince Albert the Good, and we owe Kew to the Princess Augusta, mother of George III.

Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens owe their allegiance to Queen Caroline, George II.’s queen. It was she who converted the ponds and the Westbourne stream into the fifty acres of water of the Serpentine which, now derived from the Thames, feeds the ornamental water in Buckingham Palace Gardens and St. James’s Park. The king thought she was doing it all out of her own purse and smiled at all her schemes, little dreaming that with Walpole’s aid she was letting him in for some £20,000—a fact he only discovered after her death.

Unfortunate Parisians, who are obliged to skirt the Tuileries gardens, closed inexorably atseven o’clock on a summer evening, envy the Londoner who may enjoy the leafy cool of his parks till long after dark, the carriage entrances not being closed till midnight.

You may see an extraordinary number of quite different phases of English life in Hyde Park. There are the loafers, including the errand boys and that mysterious class of people who seem to have nothing to do in life but “invite their soul” at eleven o’clock of a fine morning. Unless they are content with a bench, the peace has made this feat more expensive than it used to be, for when the price of everything else was happily falling, the rusty individual who was wont to interrupt true lovers’ conversations by heartlessly demanding a penny, was suddenly inspired to double the price of the chairs that have been hired in the park for the last hundred years.

Then there is the gallant sight of Rotten Row, named from the Route du Roi that William III. used when he rode from Whitehall to Kensington. The present Rotten Row was made by George I. when he wanted a shorter cut through the park. The best time to see the riders is the early morning, and the bathers have to get up still earlier if they want to plunge into the Serpentine, for the bathing is over at 8.30 a.m.

In the afternoon the Hyde Park orator comes into his own and the whole of the Marble Arch corner turns into a factory for letting off steam. It is let off by the partisans of different religionswho vociferate side by side, each demonstrating that his particular set of tenets is the only means to salvation. It is let off by socialists and communists and bolsheviks, and everyone who fancies he can alter the existing conditions to his own advantage,—and behind all these fiery-tongued speechmakers stand the placid good-natured policemen who look on with all the indulgence of a kindly nurse towards a fractious child, answering an amused inquiry with a paternal: “It don’t ’urt anyone and it does them a power of good to get it off their chests!”

Among the phases to be noticed are the picnic parties who come to the park prepared to make a day of it, and the children of every class of society, and the nursemaids whose very name reminds one of his Majesty’s forces both military and naval, who are also ardent patrons of the park.

There are many minor points of interest,—the queer little dogs’ cemetery near the Victoria Gate on the north side, the dell, a sub-tropical garden near the east end of the Serpentine not far from the fountain with the charming Artemis statue—but the most delightful way to see the park at its very best is to go there in the early morning carrying a picnic breakfast and take a boat at the boathouse south of the rangers’ lodge. I have always envied the park ranger who lives in this mansion. The first of his race was appointed by Henry VIII. at the princely salary of sixpence a day, but when this wasobjected to by the Government economy enthusiasts of that time, it was reduced to fourpence.

The tiny stone cottages of the keepers, with the classic architecture that makes them look so ridiculously important, are not really the smallest houses in London. I think that honour must surely belong to the porter’s lodge at the Fetter Lane entrance to the Record Office, unless you count as a house No. 10, Hyde Park Place. Though it certainly has a street door all to itself, it has only one room.

The park authority, so careless when it is a matter of eating and drinking, is careful to provide more artistic pleasures for the Hyde Park crowds. Bands play there on many summer evenings—the announcements are made in the Press—and now and then the League of Arts arranges an entertainment, when thousands of people flock to see the Morris dancing or some old play performed with a background of green trees.

“Sometimes a child will cross the glade.”Matthew Arnold.

Henry James once expressed the opinion that the view from the bridge that crosses the Serpentine where Hyde Park joins Kensington Gardens has an “extraordinary nobleness,” and there is something indescribably beautiful and unexpected about it. The grey buildings in the distance look like some palace of thefata morganaover the shimmering water. I do not know if Sir James Barrie is responsible for the feeling that you would not be surprised at anything that might happen in Kensington Gardens. Who would be bold enough to assert that when the last child has left the Peter Pan statue the squirrels do not come and play with their stone brothers? Kensington Gardens are the paradise of the child and the flower lover. There are ugly things in it, of course, like the Albert Memorial, though everyone does not think it ugly: I was once startled at hearing that souvenir of Victorian taste fervently admired by some fellow bus passengers. But the Serpentine, and the Round Pond on a sunny morning when the fleet is engaged in serious manœuvres—and the Broad Walk: Wren’s orangery—the lovely sunk garden with its pleached walk of lime trees with the avenue Queen Caroline planted—and above all, the Flower Walk in the sunlit air after a shower,—if visitors to London have time for nothing else they should carry away a memory of Kensington Gardens.

“Satirists may say what they please about the rural enjoyments of a London citizen on Sunday.”—W. Irving.

Walking along Piccadilly from Hyde Park Corner on the “sulky” side, as Mr. Street calls it in his charmingGhosts of Piccadilly, many

PETER PAN STATUE IN KENSINGTON GARDENS

people wonder at the meaning of the ledge on the curb of the pavement nearly opposite the entrance to 128, Piccadilly. It owes its existence to a benevolent old clubman who, from his comfortable window armchair, noticed the porters bearing heavy burdens on their backs and toiling up the slope of Piccadilly. The ledge was fixed at the right height, so that they might rest their burdens without unfastening them.

Green Park was once much larger than its present sixty acres or so, but George III. took some of it in 1767 to enlarge the gardens of old Buckingham House. It is now the happy hunting-ground of the gentlemen who love to lie full length on the grass—the not inconsiderable army of people who would dread communism if they ever thought about anything, and would bitterly regret under any other régime the halcyon days when the out-of-work dole of a benevolent government of bourgeois permitted these free Britons to lounge at peace.

Their presence is perhaps the reason why the Green Park is not a fashionable rendezvous, like Hyde Park, although some of the great London houses, Stafford House, Bridgewater House, Spencer House, etc., border it on the east side. The wrought iron and gilded gates bearing the Cavendish crest and motto that were formerly used as the entrance to Devonshire House have now been placed in GreenPark opposite the building they guarded so long. These beautiful old gates have had a chequered history. Seven generations ago, in the eighteenth century, they began their existence at Turnham Green, where they guarded the approach to the house of the second Lord Egmont and bore the arms of the Perceval family. The house changed owners and was pulled down, and in 1838 the gates were bought by the sixth Duke of Devonshire for his Chiswick house. They stayed there for fifty-nine years, before they came to spend a brief quarter of a century watching the ebb and flow of Piccadilly.

The Duke of Devonshire already had beautiful gates at Chiswick when he bought these, for the Earl of Burlington who got the house in 1727 and whose daughter and sole heiress married a Duke of Devonshire, was also a connoisseur in gates, and had begged a beautiful pair of Inigo Jones design from Sir Hans Sloane, who did not appreciate them. When they were being moved, Pope wrote:

Passenger.Oh Gate! how cam’st thou here?Gate.I was brought from Chelsea last year,Battered with wind and weather;Inigo Jones put me together,Sir Hans SloaneLet me alone,So Burlington brought me hither.

Green Park has another gate, part of which I am sure is unnoticed, for how many people know that in the Wellington Arch at the top of Constitution Hill, at the upper end of theGreen Park, sixteen policemen and an inspector have their happy home. Their special task is to direct the traffic at Hyde Park Corner, no easy matter in the season or when the king and queen and other notabilities come driving out to take the air. From their bedroom in the Arch they can climb on to the wide flat top, and under the shadow of the splendid group of Peace in her flying chariot, look over a wonderful vista of park and palace and highway.

“La beauté de Londres n’est pas dans ses monuments mais dans son immensité.”—Zola.

What would old Lenôtre, Louis XIV.’s court gardener, who laid out St. James’s Park, think if he could see his handiwork to-day? He would make a witty jest of it, perhaps, for he was a charming old man of a guileless simplicity that made him beloved of everyone, even in the most artificial court in Europe. Charles II. invited the famous French landscape gardener, who had created Versailles out of a sandhill, to come and transform the swampy meadow that adjoined the palace Henry VIII. had fashioned out of the twelfth-century Lepers Hospital, dedicated to St. James the Less, which has given its name to the palace and park.

St. James’s has always been a very royal park since the days when the young PrincessElizabeth rode through it from her father’s new palace to the court at Whitehall, attended “with a very honourable confluence of noble and worshipful persons of both sexes.” Charles I. took his last walk through it on his way to the scaffold in Whitehall. Charles II. spent much of his time playing with his dogs and feeding his ducks there, and he planted some of the oaks from the acorns of the royal oak at Boscobel. His aviary on the south side is still remembered in the name of Birdcage Walk, and the tradition is carried on by the aquatic birds that again haunt the ornamental water as before the war.

Walpole in his reminiscences quotes George I. as saying:

This is a strange country. The first morning after my arrival at St. James’s, I looked out of the window, and saw a park with walls, canal, etc., which they told me were mine. The next day, Lord Chetwynd the Ranger ofmyPark, sent me a fine brace of carp out ofmycanal; and I was told I must give five guineas to Lord Chetwynd’s servant for bringing memy owncarp out ofmy owncanalin my own garden.

I always loved, too, the reply of Walpole’s father to Queen Caroline when she asked how much it would cost to close St. James’s Park for the royal use and he answered, “only three crowns, Madam.”

“London is before all things an incomparable background.”—F. M. Hueffer.

Regent’s Park to most people spells the Zoo, the place where one may see the best menagerie in the world. It is the successor of Marylebone Park, a royal hunting-ground until Cromwell’s day. It was laid out in its present style after 1812 by Nash, the man who designed Regent Street, and named after the Prince Regent, who thought he would build a country house here.

It is so far removed from Mayfair that its glories have been neglected, but now that fashion has drifted north of Hyde Park and even Bloomsbury is having its recrudescence, Regent’s Park may wake up any day and find itself famous. It is beautifully laid out and tended, and garden lovers from other lands will like it immensely if they take a tube to Baker Street and spend an hour or so there, either boating on the lovely lake or walking in the gardens.

The Royal Botanic Gardens, enclosed by a circular walk, are reached from York Street by a road running north between Bedford Women’s College and the Toxophilite Society (which ordinary people are content to call the Archery Club). It is only open to the general public on Mondays and Saturdays on payment of one shilling.

On this west side of the park is St. Dunstan’s Lodge, the home of Mr. and Mrs. Otto Kahn, who gave their house for some years to the late Sir Arthur Pearson for his hostel for the education of the blind.

It was once the home of the Marquess of Hertford, who was the original of Thackeray’s Marquis of Steyne inVanity Fair

“It takes London of all cities to give you such an impression of the country.”—Henry James.

Battersea Park is another of London’s lovely gardens. It takes its name from the old parish and manor of Battersea, a gradual corruption of the Patricesy or Peter’s Isle, by which it was known in Domesday Book as belonging to the Abbey of St. Peter at Westminster.

There is nothing very interesting historically about the park, as it was only laid out in 1852, on Battersea Fields, the scene of a duel in 1829 between the Duke of Wellington and the Marquis of Winchelsea, but it is one of the favourite parks of London and the only one that fringes the borders of the Thames. It has a lovely sunk garden, that is a dream of beauty in the summer time, and letters are always appearing in the papers about the birds that nest among its trees. Four of the 188 acres are laid out as a sub-tropical garden. There is a lake withrowing boats to hire, and arrangements are made for cricket and other sports.

If the park has no history, one can find curious bits of old London quite close to it by turning out of the west gate and asking the way to Church Road, off the Battersea Bridge Road, and near the river. First there is the old church of St. Mary’s, ugly enough in itself, but it was where William Blake was married, and where Turner used to sketch the wonderful effects on the Thames. Lovers of quaint epitaphs will find a delicious one composed by himself to the famous Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, who “was Secretary of State under Queen Anne and in the days of King George I. and King George II. something more and better.”

Lord Bolingbroke was a true Battersea man, for he was born there in 1678 and died in 1751. His second wife, who shares the honour of his monument, was a niece of Madame de Maintenon. Battersea has been closely connected with the St. John family for four hundred years, though they sold their manor to the Spencers in 1763. A bit of it may still be seen in the adjoining flour mills, where, I believe, it is possible to see the wonderful ceiling and staircase, and the lovely cedar-panelled room overlooking the river, where Pope wrote hisEssay on Man.

“Go down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn’t far from London).”Alfred Noyes.

Kew is too far afield to be called unnoticed London, but it is the most wonderful of all the London gardens and so easy to reach that to miss it would be a matter for perpetual regret.

Anyone can tell you the way to get there: either from Waterloo to Kew Bridge, when you will have to walk across the bridge to get to the main entrance of the gardens, or by the District Railway to Kew Gardens station, or by tram from Hammersmith.

There is so much to see there that over-much direction destroys the greatest pleasure of finding out what you like best, and everyone has his own opinion as to what time of the year the gardens are most beautiful. The poet loves “Kew in lilac-time,” the lover of gorgeous colour goes down to see the regiments of tulips, massed as they are nowhere else outside Holland. Kew in rhododendron and azalea time ought not to be missed, but I think the loveliest sight of all is Kew in bluebell time, when it looks as if a bit of the sky had fallen earthwards on either side of the Queen’s Walk, and in the middle of the wilderness you come across the deserted little ivy-clad cottage, the sea of blue sweeping up to the very door to which no pathway now leads.

It was once the Queen’s Cottage, built byGeorge III. for Queen Charlotte, in the days when they led the domestic existence that Fanny Burney described in herDiary; but no one now uses it and it stands there with a mute air of resignation at its fallen fortunes, little dreaming how much its unexpected beauty adds to the pleasure of the discoverer of this lovely corner.

Kew, like the other parks, had its royal origin. Its founder was the Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, the wife of Frederick Prince of Wales, who, eight years after her husband’s death, interested herself in the laying out of the exotic garden at Kew that was the nucleus of the vast collection of 24,000 different varieties of plants.

Kew has always been beloved by artists. Sir Peter Lely had a house at Kew Green and Johann Zoffany the painter, whose fame has so lately been augmented by the publication of his life and memoirs, lived in Zoffany House at Strand-on-the-Green, a delightful old-world riverside village close to Kew Bridge. He is buried in the early eighteenth-century church of St. Ann, where Gainsborough also lies.

And now come back to London and I will show you a Lilliputian park I am sure you have never noticed. It is so tiny; long ago it was the churchyard of St. Botolph without Aldersgate, dedicated to that kindly patron of all travellers, but now it is a charming retreat with an additional attraction that I leave you to discover, and because it is so close to the General Post Office it is always called The Postman’s Park.

There are other lovely unnoticed oases of green round about London town; Brockwell Park with its fine old walled garden, and Dulwich and Southwark. Their tales must wait for another time, for now it only remains for me to say with Pope:

Dear, damn’d, distracting town, farewell.

A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,Q,R,S,T,Y,Z,W.

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