Imperial London sketches from the history of a great city
Hyde Park

London's Square and Parks in 1900: Hyde Park

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Arthur H. Beavan, in his survey of London's Squares and Parks in Imperial London, first published in 1901, had this to say about the great Hyde Park:

When the late Horace Greeley saw Hyde Park on a fine afternoon for the first time in his life, he described it as the most fascinating spectacle that his eye had ever rested upon.

He had been taken to the park by an Englishman who had been his guest in the Empire city of the New World, and as he approached the Serpentine, he held up his hands in astonishment and murmured under his breath, "To think that I should have shown him our city park at New York and expected him to admire it!"

Horace Greeley would be still more charmed with Hyde Park if he could see it now in May or June, so greatly has it improved since his visit, particularly the part lying between Albert Gate and Hyde Park Corner - velvet lawns shaded by masses of gracefully-outlined trees; horse-chestnuts and hawthorns a mass of blossom; rhododendrons and Japanese azaleas glowing with almost every conceivable tint; flowerbeds arranged to perfection, with tropical and sub-tropical plants artistically grouped amidst them; young copper-beeches just showing the delicate terra-cotta of their opening buds; lilacs of both colours; laburnums "dropping wells of fire"; the cascade down in a hollow framed in masses of palms and tree-ferns, the still waters beneath covered with yellow-flowering water-plants.

Add to this, the multitude of perfectly-appointed equipages, the well-dressed men and women, and the equestrians in Rotten Row, and you have an unsurpassable picture.

Then, for the lovers of flowers, there is the incomparable collection shown along Park Lane, beginning in the spring with bulbs, and continuing until the autumn.

There are the fine stretches of open breezy upland in the middle and west end of the park; the Long Water, and the bridge, from which the most beautiful and wide sylvan views in London can be had.

Hyde Park was at one time a manor attached to Westminster Abbey, and, as in the case of St. James' Park, Henry VIII at the dissolution seized it, and laid the ground out as a harbour for deer, and as such it was used down to the time of the Commonwealth, when both park and deer were sold; but at the Restoration they reverted to the Crown, were enclosed in a wall, and thenceforth thrown open to the public indiscriminately.

Until 1705 the park continued unaltered, when, by additions to Kensington Gardens, its area was reduced to its present dimensions of about 400 acres.

Next: London's Squares and Parks in 1900: Kensington Gardens

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