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struggling to make its way through London from the
Paddington Basin to the Thames at Limehouse
crossed the new park. Nash’s plan went ahead but
with many amendments, not least that the canal was
shoved to a corner and provided with high
embankments to prevent the tarnishing of upper
crust eyes by the sight of the lowly bargees.
Today Regents Park is famous for the Zoo, the rose
gardens and the Open Air theatre where any summer
you can see Shakespeare performed in the rain. Judi
Dench, Edward Fox, Michael Crawford, Vivien
Leigh and Deborah Kerr have all performed here.
The American Ambassador lives in Regents Park in
a grand property called Winfield House. That’s
Winfield as in Woolworths. The house replaced a
Nash Villa demolished in the 1930s and was built
for the Countess Haugwitz-Reventlow as Barbara
Hutton, the daughter of Woolworth’s founder Frank
Hutton, was known before she married Cary Grant.
Some of you may have joined us for a tour of the
Central London Mosque, which sits inside Regents
Park, ten years ago as part of our Cosmopolitan
London tour before they stopped answering the
telephone and we started going instead to the Hindu
Temple at Neasden where they always answer the
telephone but sometimes ask if we could call back in
twenty minutes after they’ve had their tea!
Parks Against Revolution
By the 1600s there were eight Royal Parks in London
but they were to a large degree the exclusive preserve
of the upper classes. Public parks were an invention of
the Victorians
intended to improve not only the health
but also the morals of the working-classes. They were
also to be valves to release a building pressure which
might otherwise lead to social unrest.
If the Royal
Parks ‘blew away the heatness of the ballroom’ the
new Victorian public parks were designed to blow
away the heat of revolution.
The early 19th century was an era of political and
social unrest in Britain. Within the first thirty years of
the 19th century a prime minister was assassinated, the
Cato Street Conspirators tried unsuccessfully to kill the
whole cabinet, textile workers in the midlands and
north of England, called Luddites, wrecked the new
machines they feared would replace their labour. In
Kent and Sussex farm labourers broke agricultural
machinery for the same reason and in Dorset the
Tolpuddle Martyrs were deported to Australia when
they tried to form a trade union. Five years before
Victoria ascended the throne John Stuart Mill and
Jeremy Bentham had warned that public parks should
be established in an urgent war against social evils,
potential revolution and the threat to private property.
Cruise through Regents Park on Hidden London & the Regents Canal, see page 16