Hyde Park, including Hyde Park Corner *

Site on The National Heritage List for England, Parks & Gardens, for Register Entry see https://www.historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list. The Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England was established in 1984 and was commonly called English Heritage. In April 2015 it split into 2 separate entities, Historic England (HE), which continues to champion and protect the historic environment, and the English Heritage Trust, whose role is to look after the 400+ historic sites and monuments owned by the state. HE manages the National Heritage List for England (NHLE) that includes over 400,000 items ranging from prehistoric monuments to office blocks, battlefields and parks, which benefit from legal protection.

The site of Hyde Park was former agricultural land belonging to Westminster Abbey. It was acquired by Henry VIII at the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and enclosed in 1540 as a deer park. The ground is gently undulating, and falls generally from north to south. In addition to hunting, the park was used for military reviews in Queen Elizabeth I's reign, and it was first opened to the public in 1637 when limited access was permitted. After the Civil War, Oliver Cromwell divided the park, then c.250 hectares, into 5 sections in 1652 and sold them to 3 purchasers, and many of the trees were felled. At the Restoration the park came back into royal hands, now a 'barren field'. A brick wall was built round the park and it was stocked with deer, and re-opened to the public.

Changes to Hyde Park took place as a result of William III's purchase of Nottingham House in 1689, which was converted as Kensington Palace (q.v.) and land was appropriated in the western part in order to create formal gardens. What is now known as Rotten Row originated as the 'Route de Roi', a formal ride created by William III in 1690 aligned on Kensington Palace providing a route to Whitehall, and England's first lamp-lit road. Changes were made by Queen Anne, for whom royal gardener Henry Wise (1653-1738) created a Walnut Avenue in the eastern part, shown on a plan of c.1706. In 1725 George I permitted Chelsea Water Works Company to build a reservoir within the Walnut Avenue, which supplied Kensington Palace and its gardens. The site of this reservoir became the location for Alexander Munro's 'Boy and Dolphin' fountain in 1862 set within a circular sunken garden. In the late 1950s when Park Lane was being reconfigured and widened as a boulevard, it was felt that Munro's sculpture was insufficiently grand, and in 1962 it was relocated, initially to Regent's Park (q.v.) but later returned to Hyde Park in 1994 to the rose garden between Serpentine Road and Rotten Row. In its place, Thomas Bayliss Huxley Jones's 'Joy of Life' fountain was commissioned by the Constance Fund following a sculpture competition and installed here in 1963. Later renamed the Four Winds Fountain when it was restored by The Fountain Workshop as part of the Princess of Wales Memorial Walk project in 2000-2001. For information on the commission of this fountain see The London Gardener volume 25 (see Information Sources below).

Queen Caroline, George II's wife, commissioned the creation of the Serpentine and Long Water in c.1730, made from damming the River Westbourne. William Kent is attributed with the design of the lakes, which are related to the (relatively minute) Serpentine Rill at Rousham, in Oxfordshire. The Serpentine Bridge that divides the two lakes dates from 1826, designed by George Rennie, replacing a mid-C18th cascade and bridge. By 1736 the Palace gardens extended to the present boundary, defined by a ha-ha of c.1730, which was the work of Charles Bridgeman who undertook landscape improvements to Kensington Palace gardens.

From the late C18th onwards there was less interest by the monarchy in improving Hyde Park, which became much used by the public for recreation, including riding, fishing and skating. As the residential population grew around the park from the C19th, improvements and better access became a necessity and Lord Euston, who was Park Ranger from 1794-1807, had the old, much decayed Walnut Avenue removed and planted some 25,000 trees in Hyde Park and St James's Park (q.v.). From the 1820s numerous improvements were undertaken for the Office of Works, in a scheme of architect Decimus Burton (1800-81), working with road builder James McAdam, which included constructing new carriage roads, installing iron railings and belts of trees on the east side of the park, new entrances and lodges, and in 1851 the re-siting of Marble Arch (q.v.) from Buckingham Palace to the north-east corner of Hyde Park. The park's numerous C19th entrance gates and lodges include Lancaster Gate and Victoria Gate to the north, Stanhope Gate to the east, and Albert Gate, Edinburgh Gate, Prince of Wales Gate and Alexandra Gate on the south side. The park is crossed north-south by the vehicular West Carriage Drive, and in many directions by horse rides and paths, passing between undulating lawns with scattered mature trees. The Great Exhibition of 1851 was held in Hyde Park to the south of the Serpentine and Rotten Row, after which the Crystal Palace was dismantled and moved in 1852-53 to Sydenham (see Crystal Palace Park q.v.).

From 1847 boating was permitted on the Serpentine and Long Water. The Serpentine Swimming Club was founded in 1864, whose members became famous for their Christmas Day Race in the icy water. The Serpentine Lido swimming area on the south-west of the Serpentine was created in 1931, part of the inter-war scheme of improvements to public amenities by George Lansbury, the First Commissioner of Works between the wars. Funds for these improvements were raised by public appeal in 1929. During WWII the park was used for allotments, and had air-raid shelters on the eastern side, 3 barrage-balloon emplacements, an anti-aircraft battery from 1941-44, and barracks along the main ride north from the Serpentine Dam. The park again lost land to the east when Park Lane road improvements took place in the 1960s.

Hyde Park once had numerous fine elm trees, which were eventually destroyed by Dutch elm disease, and mature trees in the park are now principally London planes, with chestnut, lime, holm oak, sycamore, holly, and ailanthus, but considerable damage was caused by the October 1987 storms. Architectural features in the park include The Magazine of 1805, remodelled in 1830 by Decimus Burton to the north-east of Serpentine Bridge; the extensive Nursery, north-east of The Magazine; and the Police Station and reservoir eastwards from the Nursery. The Hudson Bird Sanctuary is to the east of the West Carriage Drive, with a memorial of 1922 to W H Hudson by Sir Jacob Epstein. There are also a number of fine sculptural features, including a statue of Lord Byron erected in 1880 by R.C. Belt, its marble pedestal supplied later by the Greek Government. At the north head of The Dell is the Westminster Precinct Conduit House Memorial, a sandstone vase on a square Portland stone pedestal on a plinth, bearing the inscription: 'On this spot stood the conduit house which supplied the precinct of Westminster with water till the spring was cut off by drainage in 1861. The building was removed in 1868 and this memorial erected in 1871 to mark the place where it stood.'  

Speaker's Corner is within the park near Marble Arch and was designated as a place where meetings were permitted following the Reform League Riots of 1866. Its use as a place of public oratory on Sundays continues today.

Hyde Park Corner is at the junction of Park Lane, Knightsbridge, Piccadilly, Grosvenor Place and Constitution Hill, and forms a transitional open space between Hyde Park and Green Park. Due to the scale of surrounding roads the site is essentially a grand roundabout and consists predominantly of open grass and monuments. The main feature is the Constitution Arch commonly known as the Wellington Arch, which was designed by Decimus Burton as a memorial to the Duke of Wellington. It was built as a northern grand entrance gate to the grounds of Buckingham Palace (q.v.). Other monuments here include the Wellington Monument by Sir Edward Boehm unveiled in 1888, a bronze equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington with bronze figures of soldiers on the pedestal; statue of Byron, and the New Zealand and Australian War Memorials. The latter, by artist Janet Laurence was officially dedicated on 11 November 2003 in the presence of HRH The Queen, John Howard, Prime Minister of Australia and Tony Blair, Prime Minister of UK. In 1952 'Hyde Park Corner' was used as a code/password to inform the Government about the death of King George VI.

On 6 July 2004 HRH the Queen opened the Memorial Fountain to Diana, Princess of Wales, designed by Gustafson Porter as 'a peaceful, sculptural landscape form, evoking qualities much loved in Diana. The fountain is designed to radiate energy as well as to draw people inwards'. It contains 545 pieces of Cornish granite, and the water is drawn from London's water table, flowing from the highest point in two directions before meeting in a pool at the bottom, with three bridges enabling visitors to cross the water to the heart of the fountain.

An unusual feature found in the park is the Hyde Park Pet Cemetery, where over 1,000 dogs and cats have been buried. One of the first pet cemeteries in the country, it was established in the private garden of the park’s Victoria Lodge by the Gatekeeper, Mr Winbridge. An article entitled ‘A Cemetery for Dogs’, published in The Strand Magazine in 1893, describes how it had begun, including stories about some of the wealthy and aristocratic owners of pets buried here. Burials ceased when the garden became full in the early 1900s and Mr Winbridge moved away, but the cemetery can still be visited as part of a special guided tour of Hyde Park by The Royal Parks.