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just as he was setting off for a walk in the gardens, was
the last monarch to live here. If you’ve got the legs for
it you can cross Kensington Church Street and head
directly West for a few streets to take you into Holland
Park having cut through some four miles of central
London all the way from Trafalgar Square almost
entirely through public parkland.
"
Thick, squat, dwarf figure with round head, snub nose
and little eyes" is how John Nash described himself.
Born on the Isle of Wight he was a failed property
developer who gambled a bit and went bust. In London
he set himself up as an architect of the
Picturesque
on
the back of a legacy left by an uncle. He married well
and that his wife was the Prince Regents mistress did
his career no harm at all. In 1811 the future George IV
engaged Nash to remodel the Marylebone Gardens
named for the church of St Mary by the Tyburn river.
Henry VIII took the gardens from the monasteries to
add to his hunt-until-Hampstead master plan. Later
divided into a series of leased farms the gardens had
supplied London with milk and hay. By 1811 London
had spread to meet this once rural outpost and when the
farm leases came up Nash presented a grandiose and
costly plan to the Prince Regent, (who absolutely loved
a grandiose and costly plan), to turn the whole area,
into a garden city with grand houses flowing along a
grand processional Regent Street from the Prince’s
Whitehall home to a new palace to be built at the centre
of a new Regents Park. Conveniently the canal in
which Nash had invested heavily but which was
Hyde Park is open every day from 5.00am.
The swimmers arrive first from about 5.30am
followed by the runners and the dog walkers.
The horse riders come soon after to ride along the
bridleway on the south side of the Park known as
Rotten Row, a corruption of the route de roi, a broad
avenue lit by hundreds of oil lamps for the safe
passage of William III from the old Palace of
St James to his new (pox free) Kensington Palace.
You can hire a horse from the Hyde Park Stables
from £64 an hour but only if you weigh less than
12.5 stone. Horse hire starts from £60 an hour across
the road at the Ross Nye stables in Bathurst Mews
and they allow up to 14 stones of rider, any bigger
and you’ll have to bring your own. Ross Nye is an
Australian who grew up on a cattle station in
Queensland that is not only bigger than Hyde Park
but at 600 square miles is as big as Greater London
itself. The Metropolitan Police and the Household
Cavalry are the other folk who ride in the park. Oh
and if you want to be in the know, riders don’t call
it Rotten Row. They call it The Mile.
Hyde Park was always popular with footpads but the
pickings were always better in Kensington Gardens,
which attracted a better sort of person keen to be
neighbours of the family that lived in the park at
Kensington Palace. Even George II fell victim to the
robbers being relieved of his purse, watch and shoe
buckles. Although Queen Victoria was born here in
1819 King George II who died at the palace in 1760,