On the hottest day of 2018 so far, a group of Society members and their guests enjoyed a walk through the royal parks led by Caroline Piper (Society member and tour guide). We started at the beautiful Bomber Command memorial in Green Park which captures in a poignant bronze sculpture the moment a bomber command crew touch down safely after a dangerous flight. Green Park takes its name from the lack of formal flowerbeds – in the 17th century Queen Catherine of Braganza found her husband Charles II picking flowers for one of his many mistresses and demanded all the flowers in the park be pulled up! Whether true or not, the royal parks gardeners still refuse to plant flowers today in her memory. We crossed Hyde Park Corner, admiring the impressive Wellington Arch, and made our way into Hyde Park. Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens form the largest of London’s royal parks (approx 625 acres) and are divided into lots of individual areas with their own feel and character. The Rose Garden is sheltered, colourful and sweetly scented, the Holocaust Memorial garden is simple and serene and the Serpentine bustling yet calm. Amongst the normal swans, geese and ducks this summer you can find a temporary sculpture called The Mastaba – 20 metres high and shaped like a flat topped pyramid made up of red, pink and blue barrels – floating on the Serpentine. If you want to know more about the artists, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, then visit the co-ordinating exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries on their work.
Crossing into Kensington Gardens we reflected on how Queen Caroline shaped the landscape of the park we see today, creating the Serpentine and Long Water from the Westbourne stream in the 1720s and 30s. The highly decorated Albert Memorial is the most dramatic 19th century addition to the park. It sits just to the west of the site of the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works and Industry of all Nations, an event Albert masterminded and which had an enduring legacy in the creation of nearby “museumland”. We strolled past beautiful Kensington Palace and the statue of Peter Pan, a story inspired by the people and things the author JM Barrie saw as he strolled through Kensington Gardens himself. We finished our tour at the Italian water gardens, a token of love from Prince Albert to Queen Victoria and where Colin Firth dunked Hugh Grant in the water in Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason!
Organised by Caroline Piper