London's Squares and Parks in 1900

In Imperial London, first published in 1901, Arthur H. Beavan made a survey of London's Squares and Parks. He seems to have particularly appreciated the parks' beautiful flowerbeds. This is what he had to say:

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It has been asserted by many people, usually of the class who "praise every country but their own," that there is nothing approaching to the picturesque in London.

They can hardly have exercised their faculties of observation to much account, for if the word "picturesque" signifies "that kind of beauty which is agreeable," if trees and flowers, always beloved by Londoners, constitute beauty, then there is an abundance of it at all seasons of the year, par excellence in the early summer, the scene in Piccadilly across the Green Park and St James' Park towards the Surrey hills, and the landscape looking east from the highest point in the Green Park, being difficult to match in any European city. Imperial London is pre-eminent for the beauty of its squares and parks; but it seems a pity that, unlike Lincoln's Inn Fields, the former more often than not are used exclusively by nursemaids and their precious charges.

Squares are the growth of the eighteenth century; few existed before 1770.

Lincoln's Inn Fields dates back approximately to 1618; Soho to 1661; Bloomsbury Square to 1665; St James' to 1676; Berkeley to 1698; while the sites of future squares were then sheep-walks, paddocks, and market-gardens.

Trees, chiefly planes of considerable size, which stand the London climate well, are the principal ornament of the squares, particularly the older ones, and in some of them grass lawns are a speciality.

It is rather hazardous to pick out any for special admiration, but I venture to name the following as possessing these features in a marked degree: Lincoln's Inn Fields, Manchester, Portman, Berkeley, Bedford, Russell Square, Grosvenor, Lowndes, St. George's, and Onslow Squares; while the grounds at Chelsea Hospital, though not exactly describable as a square, are most charming, and the avenue in early summer is odoriferous with its lime-tree blossoms.

Next: A 1900 perspective on London's Parks.