When talking about the Royal London Parks in the Regency, the first thing to remember the word “park” held different meanings from how we (especially Americans) typically think of them today.

So get those visions of benches, swing sets, picnic tables and those box-shaped grills on metal posts out of your head, because our Regency folks would often say a “park” refers to a large open tract of land that is often used for grazing cattle or a place where deer were hunted. You’ll often see the land surrounding a country manor house referred to as a park as well and the author just means that there is a lot of open land surrounding the place that may or may not be landscaped or fenced off.

London Parks in the Regency Era

Today, we’re going to talk a bit about some of the parks in London that Regency Era heroes and heroines might have visited. And I’m using Regency Era to mean the long Regency, which continues through the reigns of George IV, William IV and ends when Queen Victoria was crowned.

Hyde Park

• The entirety of the park encompasses nearly 400 acres of land, so finding someone there was by chance or a prearranged meeting in a particular location.
• The Fashionable Hour: 4:30 to 7:30 pm during the Season (late January or February until May). This is when riders and people drove around the park in their carriages, preferably open ones so they could see and be seen.
• Rotten Row; a corruption of route de roi or King’s Route in French. Known for fast riders.
  Rotten Row was the famous stretch of road in the park notorious for speed demons on horseback.
• For the fairer sex, the Ladies’ Mile promised a more sedate bridle path.
• Driving one’s fanciest carriage around the graveled pleasure-driving roads known as the Ring.
• The Serpentine — really a man-made ornamental pond that wound through a section of the park. Very shallow.
• Known location for illegal duels & quite attractive to thieves and ruffians.

St. James’s Park

• 57 acres
• Near St. James Street — location of the gentleman’s clubs… not the safest for women who wished to keep their reputations intact
• Pedestrian except for a few select notables with Royal dispensation to drive carriages there
• John Nash was commissioned by George IV and remodeled the park in 1826-1827.

Green Park

• 47 acres
• John Nash landscaped the park in 1820, as an adjunct to St. James’s Park.
• The park has no buildings or lakes like many of its neighbors.
• Readers familiar with the Victorian era may recognize it as the location of an assassination attempt upon the Queen by Edward Oxford on June 10, 1840.

The Regent’s Park

• a 410 acre site on the North side of London – formerly Marylebone Park and very marshy.
• Prince George commissioned John Nash to redevelop the park in 1811 — terraces, geometric layout with an outer circle and an inner circle, cultivated flowerbeds and classical statuary.
• The terraces — housing for the very wealthy – each situated so as to overlook the park in such a way they might each perceive the park was theirs alone.
• Nearby Regent’s Street, one of the first planned developments of London, was designed and built as a commercial area separating the less than respectable Soho from the posh and fashionable Mayfair.
• Regent’s Park wasn’t open to the general public until the late 1830’s and then only for two days a week.

More information regarding a variety of other Regency-themed topics can be found on my Regency Resource Collection. If you’d like more information on a specific place or topic, please let me know in the comments section below.