Alida Baxter

Renowned London journalist and author

View from Soho

- The Regent's Park

As I've written before, each of central London 's wonderful parks has different visitors and fans who love it more than any other, and now I come to my own especial favourite, the one I think the best and most glorious of all: the Regent's Park.

Even if you've never been to London, you'll probably have seen this enchanting place without realising there's a formal bit of it behind Colin Firth in a scene from The King's Speech, and in About A Boy Hugh Grant walks around one of its lakes with an attractive woman and picnics beside the rose beds (he can yearn and picnic simultaneously), before defending the accidental killer of a duck.

Vanessa Redgrave strode through it in Mrs. Dalloway when she was supposed to be in another park entirely. And if you like old movies on TV, do keep an eye out for the 1959 version of The Thirtynine Steps, starring Kenneth Moore, which actually names the park, for a change the beginning of the film is set there, against whole stretches of the paths and flower beds, with the larger lake, too, and one of its bridges. Even the Outer Circle is featured, and characters return to stroll with other visitors at the end.

While we're on the subject of TV, this park is forever the scene of action in dramas, although it's rarely given a credit. The Broad Walk was even dug up by Felicity Kendal and Pam Ferris in an episode of Rosemary and Thyme, and I wonder where they chained up the regular gardeners while such desecration was carried out.

I've been going there since I was a baby, and I've got the photos to prove it. Mine is the generation whose mothers were told that fresh air was essential for their offspring, no matter what the conditions, and the conditions in my mother's case were that she had to sew for a living, so she'd gather up not only me and all my paraphernalia, but also the Savile Row jackets she stitched, with needles and thread and gimp and thimbles and wax and scissors, and set off to catch a bus in Regent Street. Once a rug had been spread on one of the lawns within the Inner Circle she would sit beside me, working on swelled edges, sleeve heads and sleeve hands (the tops and bottoms of the sleeve linings), and buttonholes. Later in my life I saw that her stitches were so perfect they were invisible, but as an infant I was more interested in daisies. It was a place for mothers with babies, as were other London parks, despite the war, and if I needed changing, she would wash my nappies in the Ladies and drape them to dry on a hedge.

This was hardly what had been pictured, when the Regent's Park had been envisaged as encircling a palace for the man who would be George IV, by his favourite architect, John Nash. But from the time of its transformation for the Prince in whose honour it was named, it was delighted in by every class of visitor The Regent's Park, wrote the Viscomte d'Arlingcourt, describing a visit to England in 1844, is a scene of enchantment.

While Charles Dickens' son (also Charles), clearly going for a wider audience in 1879, in his Guide Book to London , described it as a great place for skating.

It wasn't just the Prince Regent, of course, who'd cast a proprietary regal eye on the area. The parkland, from its beginnings, had had royal connections: Henry VIII was, typically, the first to appropriate it and use it as his own hunting ground, (well, the dissolution of the monasteries was going on at the time so he could easily seize just about anything he wanted), and his daughter Elizabeth I energetically followed his example. She took parties there for the same sport, hunting deer when the acreage was known as Marylebone Park . James I, her successor, carried on the tradition, as did Charles I, who followed him to the throne, but that headstrong monarch, always fighting Parliament for his rights and for money, granted the park to two noblemen as security for a debt of over two thousand pounds, which he owed for the supply of arms and ammunition.

When the King no longer had a head to be strong with, Parliament ignored the claims of the royal supporters and sold the land elsewhere, so that a regiment of dragoons could have it in settlement of their pay. By that time all the deer and most of the timber had been sold off, and as Cromwell didn't approve of much that was frivolous (not even Christmas), you can imagine what his attitude was to anything so pleasurable to look at: the land was disparked. If the machinery had been invented, he'd probably have bulldozed it, and the manor it contained.

After the restoration of the monarchy, with Cromwell's head on a pike and pleasure so much back in favour that the reigning King, impartial, had both Protestant and Catholic mistresses, the men with the right to the parkland got it back. From then on it was held by various people on leases of varying lengths right up till 1811.

1811 Bingo! The timing was perfect, coinciding with the extravagant wishes of a regal personage, newly created Regent and eager to be a patron: central London was about to be transformed to suit him, not by innumerable uncaring developers with wrecking equipment but by a brilliant, single minded designer. The land was up for grabs, but not for long! The Prince Regent acquired it and invited three architects to submit their designs for its future: John Nash won by a mile, with plans for a garden city with villas, crescents, a canal and lakes, all encircling the proposed palace. More than that, this was to be only part of a far greater project. Incredibly prolific, a human fountain of glorious, graceful ideas, Nash deservedly became the Prince's favourite, his collaborator in recreating fashionable London, working ceaselessly through his sixties (in 1811 he was fiftynine) and into his seventies and eighties, influencing and leaving behind what we recognise now as the distinctive Regency style.

The original intention was to connect the park and a palace there to the Prince's home at Carlton House, in the Mall. There was to be an avenue for this purpose an idea which gave birth to the vision of Regent Street and the area this amazing project was to encompass would also include Trafalgar Square and St. James's Park.

With the designs for Regent Street finished, by 1812 Nash had also completed his plans for the park, and work was beginning. The initial idea of a palace there for the Prince was discarded, in favour of what the present day Park's signage describes as a pleasure pavilion (understandable think of the Brighton pavilion, worked on by the same architect), or, in their words, a guinguette. But this latter description on the signs foxes me completely.

The Park has the correspondence relating to Nash's designs in its archive and know what they're talking about, but a guinguette was an outdoor drinking establishment in the suburbs of Paris, more connected with the gutter than the high life, and I can't reconcile the term (except perhaps as a brief fantasy) with anything in the supreme scheme for the Prince.

That scheme was a vast and ambitious one. From 1812 onwards, we learn, for several years the site presented a most extraordinary scene of digging, excavating, burning and building, and seemed more like a work of general destruction than anything else. In 1817, in David Hughson's Walks Through London, it was described as not likely to receive a speedy completion, despite being even then one of the greatest Sunday promenades about the town. And by 1823 the Brothers Percy were calling it one of the greatest ornaments of the metropolis, around which noble terraces are springing up as if by magic.

Nash's balancing act with his various huge projects was incredible, when you consider that having begun the park in 1812, he started his work on Regent Street in 1813 (not to be completed until 1825), and that during the 1820s he also remodelled Carlton House (finished as Carlton House Terrace) and built Cumberland Terrace, The Royal Mews, the Haymarket Theatre and All Soul's Church in Langham Place! As if all that weren't enough, he created Trafalgar Square .

Meanwhile, in Brighton there was the redesigning and extending of the Royal Pavilion (the fantastic Indian style being in fashion), and back in London how about another little something fit for a reigning monarch to live in, to be built on the site of a villa which had belonged to the Duke of Buckingham? Buckingham Palace ! And Nash drove himself mad over it: wings were built, and he had them torn down again, dissatisfied. He was finally to lose that assignment, and only the west wing remains of his contribution, but from source after source you learn that no-one really succeeded with it, and from Prince Albert to Prince Philip male consorts have found it a maddeningly inconvenient building, in which, for ages, the ruling family couldn't even get a hot meal, such was the distance between the kitchens and dining rooms.

But back in the park, Nash was supervising the first enormous footprint in what was envisaged as a route for the Prince Regent through the capital: like Gulliver in Lilliput, his progress would result in gigantic landmarks. No wonder George poured out money, finding in Nash an architect who understood him: would anyone else ever have come so near to satisfying his ego?

Ironically, given how much Nash completed for him, George IV did not live to see the park finally opened to the public, or to witness the universal admiration it rightly received. (Initially entrance had been limited to the carriage trade, and those who lived in the Outer Circle 's terraces.) And, sadly, Nash may not have been around either, for the park first admitted the wider population in 1835, the year of his death; you can drive yourself insane checking this date, and I nearly did, but I'm indebted to the Regent's Park archives for a map which explains the conflicting information in various places. The explanation lies with the fact that it was opened in stages one area in this year, another in that. However, I can find no records as to whether Nash was still alive at the time of the 1835 opening, to see not only the realisation of his dream but the reaction it created. And if you're surprised at the amount of time that had been taken by then, consider the following.

This was a site of over four hundred acres, in the very centre of London . It was, and still is, almost entirely surrounded by an Outer Circle of magnificent terraces, whilst an Inner Circle , a real jewel in the crown, enclosed the Botanical Gardens which the hoi polloi could not enter. Initially, villas (the contemporary description for the mansions on the outer perimeter) were also to have been built around the Inner Circle , but although the numbers envisaged didn't materialise, there are two to be seen till this day.

Then there were the grounds, laid out between the Inner and Outer Circles with stunning variety, and including a long avenue called the Broad Walk which ran straight as a plumb line from the North of the park to the South, crossing on its way a public road that connected the two Circles, and leading through varying planting and gardens. This was described as a noble road, bordered by trees, and there are references to the fact that the park was traversed in every direction to all points of the compass by broad gravel paths furnished with seats.

At the North end of the Broad Walk was the Zoological Society, occupying land where barracks (discarded like the palace) should have been. Nor was there any sign now of the pleasure pavilion, which might have been built there, but from that point it was possible to make an easy stroll to what was perhaps the park's greatest attraction: an ornamental water, or large curving lake which echoed the shape of the Outer Circle.

Everybody seems to have exclaimed over this it was superior to that of St. James's, and the author of Weale's London and its Vicinity Exhibited described in detail its several islands well clothed with trees and the three bridges, two of which carry the walk across an island in the lake. The waterfowl, the willows it was idyllic, and certainly the scene of enchantment described by the visiting Viscomte d'Arlingcourt only a few years later.

In The Original published in 1835, an author named Walker writes The beauties of the Regent's Park, both as to buildings and grounds, seem like the effect of magic when contrasted with the recent remembrance of the quagmire of filth and the cow-sheds and wretched dwellings of which they now occupy the place.

From the moment it was open to the general public the Regent's Park was a hit, not just with society but with all classes who went there; but it was the very popularity of the lake that led to an horrific nineteenth century catastrophe.

This was indeed, as Charles Dickens Junior noted a great place for skating, but his recommendation rings hollow when you discover what happened in the winter of 1866/67.

As usual, the frozen lake was thick with skaters you have to realise that this was the O2 of its day! We're not talking about some small outdoor rink created especially for Christmas, a Richard Curtis movie scene, decorated with a few hardy souls. The lake's surface was thronged with people, for many of whom this was one of their few pleasure, and that terrible winter, a stretch of the ice cracked, splintered and gave way.

Two hundred people plunged through the broken ice into the freezing water and this on only part of the lake. Forty people were drowned. So imagine how many must have been skating on its whole length!

In the wake of this disaster the lake was drained and filled in, to reduce the depth of the water, and (incredibly) skating resumed. I'm amazed by this because (admittedly in another century) for the whole of my lifetime, the first drop of snow has resulted in a rash of notices warning everybody not to step out on to any ice let alone skate.

But even this horror did nothing to diminish the park's attraction. Its loveliness was extolled everywhere, while the growing Zoo was so novel that a man named Thomas Hook wrote a poem about a newly-acquired chimpanzee, and Colburn's Calendar of Amusements published the tragic story of a lion's bereavement when his lioness died.

The Regent's Park went on growing in the public's affection, from one century to another: there were significant changes in the 1930s, when the Royal Botanic Society laid out the rose beds of Queen Mary's Rose Garden, and the grounds inside the Inner Circle were open to the public for the first time. This was also the decade when performances began at the Open Air Theatre the whole park was enchanting, but the world within the Inner Circle was already the setting of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

And so, in the following decade, we come to my personal acquaintance with this lovely place. Apart from my baby pictures on a blanket, there's a photograph of pre-school me taken in the late 'forties, on the exquisite little island within the Inner Circle 's small lake. You can see the park's café in the background at that time it was a mock-Tudor building with chimneys, softly weathered and blending with the trees and shrubs all around it.

But in late 1949 family snaps were eclipsed by cinema newsreels a polar bear cub had been born at the Zoo, the first to be successfully reared in the UK and, named Brumas, it was the greatest animal celebrity of the day. Pandas hah! It was pictured drinking milk from a bottle demand for milk (which had been rationed during the war) soared. It was filmed being cuddled by keepers and waved at by visitors in 1950 the Regent's Park Zoo marked an all-time record attendance.

Of course I was taken to visit, and not just to see Brumas. The Zoo had a children's corner, where a goat tried to eat my coat and I fought it, and elsewhere in the park was a children's playground, with a sandpit and a wonderful slide.

In summer, when the huge trees were in leaf, the Broad Walk then, between Chester Road (which crossed it) and the Outer Circle , was a place of deep shade. There was a very ornate drinking fountain, decorated with dolphins, and the water tasted of metal, tainted by the cups from which you drank.

In the late 'fifties I was at school nearby, and our class was taken to performances of Shakespeare at the Open Air Theatre, shocked at the filthy innuendos in Twelfth Night and pretending not to be. Fifth formers took a rowing boat out on the lake and it capsized, so that they returned dripping the place wasn't nearly as dangerous if you fell in as our teachers, but nothing much else had changed.

It wasn't until the 'sixties that radical alterations began. The old Tudor-style café on the Inner Circle was replaced in 1964 by a building that divided people as sharply as Marmite. It was the roof in particular if you imagine a huge version of Madonna's Jean Paul Gautier cone bra, but horizontal, with the cups multiplied over and over, you'll have some idea. Oh, and with a few spikes sticking out. Park regulars thought they'd never get used to it, but of course over time people did, and it has become very popular.

There was another storm of protest years later when the mature trees in the southern stretch of the Broad Walk were felled. The deep shade of a leaf and branch canopy overhead disappeared, and the beautiful and intricate patterns of beds, shrubs, young trees and ornamental fountains that you can see these days were decades away. A plan of such complexity takes a long time to fulfil, as Nash knew long ago.

I remember the 'seventies, though, as an idyllic time, because of the frequency of the band concerts throughout the summers usually twice a day. The deckchairs on the lawns by the lake were filled with visitors enjoying the music, and people forgave the café for being modern because they could have a drink and listen while they sat there.

But that pleasure was ended by another catastrophe, and this time not a natural one. On the 20th July, 1982, an IRA nail bomb had been detonated in Hyde Park, killing and maiming soldiers of the Blues and Royals and their horses, and injuring watching tourists, and nightmarish updates were still all over news bulletins, when two hours later a second bomb exploded.

Somehow it was even more heart-rending that the Royal Green Jackets were cheerfully playing a selection from Oliver when that second bomb tore upwards through the Regent's Park Band Stand. It killed or terribly wounded every one of them. The blast threw a dead body on to a fence thirty yards away, and ripped the iron of the stand to shrapnel: many were injured in the crowd that had been the audience.

The Day the Music Died may be about Buddy Holly, but it also sums up the atmosphere after what happened that day in the park.

Of course the band stand was rebuilt it is in part a memorial to those who died but there's no hiding place for a bomb beneath the new, open structure. And though regular music returned, there weren't to be as many concert performances as in the untouched past.

The Regent's Park's wounds have healed, though, just as they did after bombs struck it during the Second World War. Not only healed as the years have passed the place has been rejuvenated; it has changed enormously, in some respects, without in another sense changing at all.

It's the same size, the same shape, the Zoo is still there, and the Nash terraces, but it offers a greater variety of interest and attraction than ever before, everywhere. When I used to walk up Chester Road to the Inner Circle , there was a shrubbery and a wilderness of bluebells behind the right-hand fencing. Now there's an Allotment Garden , which aims to inspire and educate, and where you can ask advice from experts, and learn how to grow your own fruit and vegetables.

The planting has never been lovelier or more ambitious, and not just in the Broad Walk. A waterfall cascades into the small Inner Circle lake, from what was once a simple hill, gathering in a pond and flowing beneath a bridge, a fresh addition to the one still leading to the delicate rockeries and inlets of the little island there.

The long lake stretching alongside the Outer Circle has brand new, great big luxurious paddle boats, like a cross between a pedalo and a schooner, so that some people can lie flat and sunbathe on a deck while others turn their thigh muscles into cast iron. But if you're nostalgic, or just modest, there are still rowing boats.

The tennis and netball courts at the centre on the York Bridge Road (between the Circles) are very smart and very busy, and for the sickeningly active there's a Boris bike rack, so they can cycle to get here if they want to. If they don't they can join the rest of us, and sit at the delightful café (this one's more traditional in style, and gabled), content to have tea and cakes and watch the energetic getting sweaty.

I used to be brought here from school to learn how to play tennis, and was so short-sighted that I couldn't see the ball and kept attempting to swat small birds back across the net. Opponents dropped their rackets and ran screaming, but for all the wrong reasons

As to the Open Air Theatre, once another scene of school visits, it may be home to the New Shakespeare Company, but that has long since ceased to proscribe its productions this year you can walk across the lawns to see Lord of the Flies, The Beggar's Opera and Crazy for You.

There are many events you don't have to pay for, like the early morning bird walks in spring and autumn, or this summer's jazz performances (you can check the park's website for all that's scheduled), and of course you can roam as far as you like, without paying a penny.

But not everyone walks: a striking change for me now is the number of people cycling up the Broad Walk towards the Zoo, or back from it. Boris Johnson has made London thick with pedal bikes, and the park is too.

And you can understand anyone heading for the Zoo at the moment: a sensational new penguin pool has just been opened. Hardly a pool, perhaps, at one thousand two hundred metres square; it's the largest made for penguins in England , and completely eclipses the birds' previous accommodation. There's a beach, a nursery, an underwater viewing area you name it. Visitors are flocking who wouldn't be, after films like March of the Penguins, and Happy Feet? This is the biggest thing since Brumas!

And I haven't even begun to tell you about the landscaping and sports fields to be seen as you approach the Zoo, stretching into the distance westwards, or the ornate Sir Cowasjee Jehangir fountain, at the northern end of the Broad Walk. It's a Victorian icing sugar creation, but sorry, I love it (I'm the same about cuckoo clocks).

I was puzzled that modern maps on park signs refer to it as the Readymoney fountain, until I did more research, and discovered to my amazement something omitted from the original details about the donor. A plaque tells you that the fountain (dated 1869) was a gift from this wealthy Parsi gentleman, in gratitude to the people of England , but doesn't mention the philanthropist's fortuitous and rather amazing last name: wonderfully for a generous man, it was Readymoney!

For too many reasons to count, the Regent's Park is a must see take a step and it can be the start of a life-long relationship. And if you want to please me, enter it the way I always used to.

There are Tube stations, buses, bicycles, taxis, perhaps your own car, and various entrances, but try going in at the Chester Gate. I would get off a bus in Albany Street at that stop, turn left and walk through the little way towards my goal, passing houses of more than usual interest. On the right, just by the Terrace, the door that John Profumo was filmed leaving, at the height of the Christine Keeler scandal (he and his wife used to live in the elegant building with its own garden), and then you come to the Outer Circle itself.

Ralph Richardson lived in a house on the right-hand corner, and walked his dog on the lawns. He talked to everybody (oh, that wonderful voice), waving his stick and gesticulating, and the dog being the flat-faced kind that tends to snuffle, my mother continually worried that it had a cold.

If you come into the park here, it will unfold slowly for you, gently at first, till it stuns you with the exquisite Broad Walk. And you can choose now to sit and stare, see the Rose Garden, have a coffee, a glass of wine, visit the Zoo. Whatever you decide, I can guarantee you one thing: unless you are in London for only twentyfour hours, never to return, you will come back again. And maybe, like me and all the others who love it, again and again and again.

© Alida Baxter

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