Hyde Park & The Serpentine

Henry VIII seized this land from the monks of Westminster Abbey in 1536, turning it into a private hunting ground stocked with deer. It stayed royal for centuries before Charles I opened it to the public in 1637, making Hyde Park one of the first public parks in London. Today it covers 142 hectares — large enough that you can genuinely lose sight of the city from certain angles.

The Serpentine, the curving lake that runs through the park, was created in 1730 at the request of Queen Caroline, who wanted something more interesting than the straight artificial lakes that were fashionable at the time. Workers dammed the Westbourne stream to create a forty-acre lake with gentle, natural-looking curves — one of the first designed to look wild rather than geometric. The name comes from its snakelike shape, though it really only has one bend. The water was originally pumped from the Thames but now comes from three boreholes within the park.

Every Christmas morning since 1864, swimmers have raced a hundred yards across the freezing Serpentine. In 1904, J.M. Barrie — the creator of Peter Pan — donated the Peter Pan Cup to the winner, a tradition that continues today. The park also hosts Speaker's Corner near Marble Arch, where since 1872 anyone can stand up and say anything they like. Karl Marx, George Orwell, and the Suffragettes all spoke here.

Hyde Park has been the site of protests, concerts, and the Great Exhibition of 1851, which took place in Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace — a structure of iron and glass so radical it helped invent modern architecture. The palace was moved to Sydenham after the exhibition, where it burned down in 1936.