Alida Baxter

Renowned London journalist and author

 

View from Soho,

St James's Park

An absolute, indisputable glory of central London is its parks – wonderful open green spaces, heavy with mature trees. Each is completely individual, each has different types of visitor who like it better than any other, and each of them has its own particular landscape, assets and drawbacks.

St. James's Park isn't only pleasant in itself, but surrounded by so much of interest that I'll make it my first choice, but I do ask you to walk to it from a particular point. Just North of Piccadilly Circus, half a dozen yards back from an entrance to the Underground Station, stand on the grey pedestrianised area, and look up to check that a couple of storeys above you and on your left, you can see a sign with the name Glasshouse Street on it (though the street itself is no longer here now).

At the same height, behind the first sign and around the other side of a sharp corner, is another for Sherwood Street , which still exists, in part.

This was once the convergence of tides of taxis as they flowed together, having picked up from, or deposited guests at, the famous Regent Palace Hotel. But Westminster doesn't like cabs any more than it likes cars, so the roadways are gone. Nor are interesting buildings much cared for – if they were the hotel would never have been demolished. After all, when it opened in 1915 it was the largest in Europe , and its range of amenities, spread over more than an acre, included over a thousand bedrooms, an imposing vestibule, restaurants, a palm court, and smoking and billiard rooms. At some point it acquired a reputation for illicit trysts (just as Brighton did, for naughty weekends) but there isn't an hotel in London that can claim to be one hundred per cent pure, in that respect. Even so, the Regent Palace Hotel has gone now, to become a megalith of shops, and I'm sad, because if we can lose a location John Betjeman used in one of his poems – “Banana Blush” – we can lose anything.

One reward has been left, though. Stand at the junction of what were once two streets thronged with cabs full of visitors, and stare ahead of you, through an arch which is a trace of John Nash's Regency vision for the Street that was named after his Prince and patron, and you will see Big Ben framed in the distance, with the pillar topped by the Duke of York's statue ahead of it. The view is one of those chance enchantments that, once found, you remember – particularly because from here on Big Ben will be lost for a while.

Pass Eros, and remember the little God's aluminium bow should always be aimed towards Shaftesbury Avenue , because it is a monument to Lord Shaftesbury (although it's been turned around like a top, as well as being repeatedly boarded up in its time).

And walk down the steep hill of Regent Street to Waterloo Place . The architecture facing us becomes beautiful here, and stately, as we approach more of Nash's spectacular Regency work, but the area is thick with memorials and statues of a far later date. So many and so solemn - do they all sympathise with each-other when the tourists have gone?

First is the Crimean memorial, and below that the statues of Florence Nightingale and Sydney Herbert (he was the one who sent her out to the Crimea, and worked himself to death striving for reforms afterwards).

Florence attracts a lot of attention, but didn't she always – from the time of her christening she was unique, when girls certainly weren't named after foreign towns or cities and no-one before had ever been called Florence, let alone Parthenope (her sister). Her parents must have been the “let's call her Walnut Whip” types of their era, and her bronze is respectful enough, but isn't it a stroke of fate that this was the Lady with the Lamp and the lamp she's depicted with may well be wrong?

The one she holds here is the kind that Alladin rubs in a panto. It's small, and familiar to an audience, but apparently it's far more historically likely that she would have used the kind like a vertical concertina. Statues aren't infallible depictions ….

Take the one of Edward VII, as you walk on. Yes, he did ride often, as he's shown here, but was he ever that slim, as a monarch? I thought they had to find particularly strong horses, to bear his weight! This is how he'd have looked with a personal trainer, and without all those eleven-course meals.

But now we're coming to Carlton House Terrace, and into the landscape of some of John Nash's brilliant work for George IV. Whatever you think of that Prince Regent who became King – Beau Brummel's “Fat Friend”, staggeringly extravagant, appalling to his official wife – the way he let John Nash loose to transform London has given us so much grandeur and elegance to be thankful for.

Perhaps it's just as well that neither of them could know what would happen in the distant future, when we'd peer not just at the architecture, but at one of London 's most famous curiosities. At the corner of the Duke of York Steps, in the garden of No. 6 Carlton House Terrace, you'll see a dog's grave, but so much more than that – it is the only Nazi grave in London.

I'd dispute naming it that, because I don't believe a dog can be political, but it's true that an owner can be, and in the nineteen thirties this house was the German Embassy, and the German Ambassador was Dr. Leopold von Hoesch. He must have adored his Alsatian, because when it died he not only had it buried in his garden, but put up a little gravestone. The carving reads “GIRO” and then, rather touchingly, Ein Treuer Begleiter, (A True Companion), London Im Februar 1934. This is followed by the owner's name – Hoesch.

Isn't it incredible that a regime which was to carry out some of the most appalling mass crimes in history should have an Ambassador who cared so much for his pet? But Dr. von Hoesch did die in 1936, and I like to hope he might have considered himself well out of it.

It's a strange area as far as World War II is concerned, and if you turn to the right and walk along Carlton House Terrace to Carlton House Gardens , you'll find one of the best examples I've ever seen of “Yah Boo Sucks!” At No. 4, a stone's throw away (and I wonder whether he tried it) there's a blue plaque to tell you that this is where Charles de Gaulle set up the Headquarters of the Free French Forces in 1940! You can almost see him sticking out his tongue and making rude signs at the building only yards down the pavement.

Perhaps you're beginning to see why I wanted you to walk here, for it's only now that we're coming to the park. You can climb down the Duke of York Steps, or choose the less frequented steps from Carlton House Gardens, though they'll take you past more statues – this time of George VI and the Queen Mother – but here we are at last in the Mall, with Buckingham Palace in the distance to our right, and Admiralty Arch at the opposite end of the coloured roadway.

St. James's is a pretty park, but it's probably the most touristy of them all (understandably, given its surroundings) so practically everybody around you will be attached to a winking camera at the end of a outstretched arm – it's like being in an huge outdoor classroom, where the pupils are all trying to get attention and signalling “Please Miss!” Even its pathways have them clicking and cooing, because of what's under their feet – silver discs every few yards, commemorating the Queen's Jubilee in 1977.

But don't be put off this wide green breathing space. You can have a coffee in the big new café, or sit on one of the benches outside it, but best of all is walking down to the lake, to see the light shimmering on the water, the squirrels coming running from the shrubbery and the ducks clamouring for bread.

As I've said, masses of people come here, either as Londoners wanting a break, or as visitors from out of town or abroad, but how many of them are aware that even for this we are indebted to John Nash, after the Prince Regent became George IV?

Out of what had been a straight canal, little more than a swamp, Nash made a long, curving lake with islands, and if you stand on the bridge across its middle you'll have a choice of views, one of which I have loved since childhood. Buckingham Palace is obviously the tourist attraction, if you look in that direction, but stand with your back to it, facing towards Horse Guards Parade, and in the distance, to the left of an island, rises a magical grouping of towers and turrets like a landscape from a fairytale. Up until a few years ago, what you see could have transported you effortlessly into the past, but now only a slight turn of the head or your glance and you're smacked in the face by the sight of the London Eye.

Yes, it is striking, and yes it is extraordinary how London 's complicated geography can suddenly present you with a distant feature, seen from the centre of St. James's Park. But for me it spoils the atmosphere, not because there's anything wrong with it, but simply because its modernity is such a violent contrast to these surroundings, and most especially because it clashes with the cluster of towers I love.

You can walk all around the lake, of course, beneath the trees, and go to either Buckingham Palace or Horse Guards Parade. St. James's is smaller than most of the other parks, so that everything is within easy reach. The lawns are lovely, and bands play in summer; you can stroll past, or sit and dream by the flower beds, take toddlers to the children's playground, have an ice-cream, feed the ducks and be wary of the pelicans.

But I only wish you could still enjoy a treat which St. James's once offered to the public.

When my mother brought me to this park as a child, she used to tell me that there had been cows and milkmaids here, and that her family remembered them, but even then it sounded like a folktale, and as an adult I regarded it as an urban myth.

I was wrong, and the truth is this: in time gone by cows were grazed on the grass around the island at the Horse Guards' side of the park, and at midday and in the evening they were driven nearer to Whitehall, where they were tethered to posts and milked so that people could buy milk for a penny a mug. This was so much a part of London life that right up into the twentieth century, in the early years before the First World War, there was a small area between the point where the park now ends and Admiralty Arch, and cows were kept there and milk sold.

If it's possible to be nostalgic for something you haven't witnessed, I am nostalgic for that scene which I never saw, but which members of my mother's family recalled. The idea of cows and milkmaids so near to the Mall and to Nash's architecture enchants me – spare a moment to imagine them, as I do. And, though they have disappeared, enjoy St. James's Park.

© Alida Baxter

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