London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks. Streets Ahead. Story time.
History time.
There’s a park in the very heart of London that has pulled off one of the greatest disappearing acts in the city.
Millions of people walk past it.
Hundreds of thousands cut across it.
And hardly anybody really sees it.
Hyde Park gets the headlines.
St James’s Park gets the pelicans.
Regent’s Park gets the roses. Kensington Gardens gets the palace.
Green Park?
Green Park just quietly gets on with the business of being beautiful.
Which, when you think about it, is a very English accomplishment.
Green Park sits in one of the most expensive pieces of real estate on the planet. The Mall and Buckingham Palace on one side.
Piccadilly on another. Constitution Hill on a third. The Ritz peers across at it. Mayfair leans against it. St James’s presses up alongside.
And yet it somehow feels… detached.
Like it’s politely withdrawn from all the fuss.
That’s part of its magic.
It’s London’s quiet park.
Green Park plays a neat trick on you. It’s the smallest of the Royal Parks, but it never feels like it.
And there’s something else that’s really pretty special. Stand anywhere in Green Park and take survey.
That great sweep of green is almost exactly the same size as the gardens behind Buckingham Palace.
That’s a lovely mental trick. A piece of London magic.
You can’t wander through Buckingham Palace Gardens whenever you fancy. But you can stroll across Green Park. In a curious way, Green Park lets you visualise the scale of the royal gardens next door. It changes how you see both places.
And then there’s the name.
Green Park.
No fancy royal dedication.
No grand historical personage.
Just… Green Park.
It’s almost aggressively straightforward.
Long before it became Green Park, this land formed part of the ancient Manor of Eia, one of the great medieval estates of Westminster. Deer would have wandered here long before diplomats, tourists and civil servants.
Henry VIII turned it into royal hunting ground.
James I improved it.
Charles II added avenues.
Successive monarchs nudged it a little closer to the park we know today.
Its neighbour, St James’s Park, became the elegant, ornamental showpiece. Green Park remained rather more relaxed. More natural. Less manicured.
That distinction still survives.
Walk into St James’s Park and your eye is drawn to the lake, the flower beds, the bridges and the carefully composed vistas.
Walk into Green Park and your shoulders immediately drop.
It’s trees.
Grass.
Open space.
Sky.
There’s an honesty about it.
In fact, one of Green Park’s most distinctive characteristics is what it doesn’t have.
No lake.
No formal flower gardens.
No elaborate bedding displays.
Legend has it that Queen Catherine, wife of Charles II, caught her husband picking flowers for another lady and ordered that there should never again be flowers in Green Park.
Lovely story.
Probably untrue.
Historians have searched in vain for contemporary evidence.
More likely, Green Park simply evolved differently from its neighbouring royal parks.
But one shouldn’t let facts spoil a good story.
The absence of flower beds gives the place a different feel. Less theatrical. More spacious. It’s a park that majors in broad washes of green rather than bursts of colour.
And those trees.
Hundreds of mature planes, limes and oaks.
On a hot July afternoon they perform quiet acts of heroism.
Step beneath one of those great spreading canopies and London instantly cools by several degrees.
The city noise softens.
The traffic on Piccadilly becomes a distant murmur.
You hear birds instead.
Speaking of which…
Green Park is remarkably rich in wildlife considering where it is. Grey squirrels patrol the lawns with supreme self-confidence. Ring-necked parakeets screech overhead in small green squadrons.
Robins, blue tits, great tits, nuthatches and woodpeckers all make appearances. Blackbirds forage beneath the trees. Crows hold committee meetings. Pigeons, naturally, insist on being involved in everything.
If you’re lucky, you might spot a fox slipping through in the early morning or late evening, carrying itself with the air of someone who has every right to be there.
Which, of course, it has.
The park is also one of London’s great crossroads.
Commuters hurry through it.
Office workers eat sandwiches beneath its trees.
Joggers loop around its paths.
Visitors emerge from Green Park Underground Station and instinctively head for Buckingham Palace.
Others drift the opposite way towards Piccadilly, Shepherd Market or Bond Street.
It’s astonishing how many lives briefly intersect here every single day.
For us at London Walks, Green Park has another distinction.
It provides, I think, the finest meeting point in the more than 500 walks in the London Walks repertory.
Our Old Palace Quarter Walk forms up just outside the Green Park exit of Green Park Underground Station exits.
You don’t emerge onto a busy pavement with buses roaring past, traffic lights changing
and pedestrians hurrying every which way.
You emerge into a park.
There’s a little fountain.
A coffee stand.
Trees.
Grass.
Birdsong.
A great green sweep stretching away before you.
No traffic fumes.
No jostling crowds.
No frantic city energy.
What’s not to like?
It’s impossible not to relax.
What a way to begin a London Walk.
Within a couple of minutes we’re strolling along Queen’s Walk towards one of central London’s best-kept secrets. A secret passage leads into a hidden pocket of St James’s. Suddenly we’re in another world. Here are two of London’s grandest hotels, the Stafford and Dukes. Both are wonderfully discreet. The sort of places where royalty, heads of state and celebrities can come and go without fanfare. Spencer House, the Spencer family’s London house, is here. Still owned by Diana, Princess of Wales’s family. Beautifully restored by the Rothschilds. So is the house where Winston Churchill spent part of his childhood. It’s hard to believe Piccadilly is only a couple of minutes away.
Yet just like that we’ve slipped the surly bonds of the city’s bustle and escaped into another London altogether
Green Park also has a cherished place on another of our walks.
It’s the penultimate stage of our Mrs Dalloway’s London walk.
Virginia Woolf sends Clarissa Dalloway through Green Park on her way to buy flowers in Bond Street.
Naturally enough, we follow in her footsteps.
Then comes one of my favourite moments on any walk.
We stop beneath the trees.
I take out a little speaker.
And we listen to Virginia Woolf herself.
Only one recording of her voice survives.
There we are, standing in the very park through which Clarissa Dalloway walked, listening to Virginia Woolf.
As good as it gets, that.
Green Park never shouts.
It doesn’t need to.
It knows exactly what it is.
Tomorrow, though, we’re going to discover that this apparently tranquil corner of London once hosted one of the most extraordinary spectacles the capital has ever seen.
An immense purpose-built firework temple.
A colossal orchestra.
Handel conducting.
A crowd of more than 12,000 people.
Fire.
Explosions.
Traffic chaos.
And enough mayhem to ensure that nobody who was there ever looked at Green Park in quite the same way again.
Now that should have whetted your appetite.
So I expect we’ll meet again tomorrow.