The Green Park, London

In London you don’t have to look in special places to find secrets. They’re all around you. All you have to do is look and ask and read a little bit.  Londoners like to chat about their city and will usually break out with, “Bet you didn’t know….”

A very old map of the Green Park area, but it gives you an idea of the layout.

I’ll give you an example of history hiding in plain sight:  The Green Park, or as it’s usually called, simply Green Park.  When you get off at the Green Park underground station for a stroll to Buckingham Palace or to have a drink at the Hotel Ritz, as soon as you get above ground, you’ll notice a huge expanse of green grass, bordered by ancient, towering trees.  That’s it.  Green Park. 

Buckingham Palace with monument to Queen Victoria in front.

Note:  By the way, Buckingham Palace wasn’t the Royal Residence until Queen Victoria moved the court there in 1837.  Before then, the royal residence was in the nearby St Jame's Palace. There’s a large monument to her in front of Buckingham palace.

St Jame's Palace, built by Henry VIII between 1531 and 1536.

Most people will just walk on through Green Park, without realizing they’re walking in one of London’s Royal Parks and a place that’s ripe with history.  There are eight Royal Parks in London, and Green Park is the smallest at 47 acres.  Most of these parks used to be the hunting grounds reserved for royalty, including Green Park, but Green Park also has a darker history.  Where St James Palace stands, St. James Hospital once stood, where lepers were treated.  Green Park is thought to be the lepers’ burial ground.

You have to realize, when the crown created these parks, the land was well away from the city of London.  Times change.

Unlike so many of the other Royal Parks, The Green Park has no buildings, no lakes and very few monuments. You may also notice that except for daffodils in the springtime, there are no flowers.  Oh, yes faithful readers, there are interesting stories behind all these very noticeable omissions.

No flowers in a Royal Park?  True, apparently by order of Queen Catherine, wife of Charles II.  One day the queen caught her husband picking flowers for one of his mistresses and thereafter banned flowers from being grown in Green Park.  There are doubters, including yours truly.  It’s more likely the lack of flowerbeds is because originally The Green Park was an extension of St James Park, with its open spaces.  And there’s little doubt the Queen was not suddenly stunned by the King’s attractions.

Let’s move on to the lack of buildings and ponds or lakes or streams.  Once upon a time, The Green Park had all of these. There was a pond to supply water to St. James Palace and the pond (The Queen’s Basin) was fed by the Tyburn stream on its way to the Thames (Tims) River. As the city encroached, the pond, as water supplier, was no longer necessary and was eliminated.  How about the stream?  Tyburn stream still flows through Green Park, although you won’t ever get to see it.  Now it’s an underground stream and generally follows the path of the central walking path and also flows under Buckingham Palace. By the way, Green Park is the only Royal Park that doesn’t have a water feature, although a modern drinking fountain was installed in 2012.

The buildings.  Yes there was a library and a couple of temples dedicated to this and that, as well as a Ranger’s House for groundskeepers. The temples were destroyed during fireworks extravaganzas in the early 1800s. Other buildings were torn down.

What about the Queen’s Walk?  Created for Queen Caroline, George II’s queen.

The Queen's Walk

And Constitution Walk?  Britain had a constitution?  NO.  Constitution refers to Charles II’s habit of taking a daily walk along this path, a constitutional.

All sorts of nefarious deeds took place in Green Park, in addition to the assassination attempt on Queen Victoria.  In earlier years, the park was an area of robbers and highwaymen.

A young Queen Victoria

It was in Green Park that the first of eight assassination attempts was made on Queen Victoria.  She and Prince Albert, newly wed, left Buckingham Palace about 4 p.m. on 10 June 1840 and had gotten about a hundred yards up Constitution Hill when Edward Oxford, then 18 years old and armed with two pistols, waited for her open carriage to pass. He fired at close range, but missed.  The Queen was four months pregnant and neither she nor her husband were hurt.  Oxford was found to be insane and spent most of the rest of his life in a lunatic asylum

An older photo of Edward Oxford, the would be assassin.

With the Crown Land Act of 1851, the public has the right to cross the green. Wanna feel like royalty? Try a walk up Constitution Hill, which you can find on the map or the Queen’s Walk on the edge of the park, beginning right next to the Hotel Ritz.  And as I told you, look around!  London’s colorful history flows, even in the serenity of a blissful, royal park.  Not only colorful, but dark.  Lots of skeletons in London’s pretty closets.

 

The elderly Queen Victoria

The Bunch of Grapes - A Choice Pick!

I’ve been to The Bunch of Grapes pub a bunch of times.  It’s on Brompton Road, a few short blocks from the polished brass doors of Harrods Department Store. Convenient.  But, in London, convenience does not trump great beer, wonderful food, or startlingly posh décor.  The Bunch of Grapes has all three, PLUS the convenience.  Don’t bother to search. Great is right down the street.

In 1777 The Bunch of Grapes had just opened, making it older than the United States.  Wait a sec.  Didn’t the U.S. start in 1776.  Nope.  Not until 1783 and the Treaty of Paris. Win that bar bet!

Inside this pub, the pure Victorian décor dates from the late 19^th Century.   Dark wood.  Magnificent cut-glass privacy panels.  Privacy was essential to the Victorian upper classes. Women and men did not sit together, for the simple reason that upper class men did not drink or smoke in the presence of ladies.  For the upper classes, the key was etiquette and decorum in all things. 

Discretion ruled, as did Queen Victoria, from 1837 until her death in 1901.  Often called the Pax Britannica, it was not as stagnant as some think.  The population of England, Scotland, and Wales nearly doubled.  Peace has a tendency to do that.  Unfortunately, it was also the time of the potato famine, which cut the population of Ireland nearly in half.

Victorian names you might remember:  Disraeli, Gladstone, Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes), Charles Dickens.  In this pub, you’re in the middle of that famous era.

The etched glass panels are extraordinary!

It's the small touches that add atmosphere

During Victoria’s reign, both prosperity and poverty increased.  Child labor at it’s worst. Sections of London were poor, in the dire sense that those of us in the west can no longer comprehend.

Time to get back to the pub, but it pays to remember the time period that envelopes you as you sit on your comfortable posterior and sip a pint of English ale.

The very word pub comes from the Victorians.  It’s short for Public House and it was often asked of a man, ‘Where do you drink?” as opposed to “Where do you live.”

Want to read more about the Victorians and pubs?  http://www.victorianlondon.org/entertainment/publichouses.htm

So sit back, have a pint of The Bunch of Grapes eponymous ale, and enjoy stepping into another era.  Eponymous??? Means taking the same name.

While you’re ordering that second pint, take a gander outside, along Brompton Road.  It began as open country, morphed to gardens, which in turn gave way to grand houses. King William III, established his court at Kensington Palace in 1686, and a town grew around it.

1851 brought The Great Exhibition.  Buildings sprang up, many of the stately homes came down, and after The Exhibition museums and Harrods took their place. The Piccadilly Metro Line opened in 1906 and is still one of the main arteries and the one you rode if you got off at Knightsbridge or South Kensington station.

See what you can learn sitting in a stylishly elegant Victorian pub, in the heart of upper crust Knightsbridge, sipping a real ale and washing down some steak and ale pie, or fish and chips?  Some folks only wander through the wonders of Harrods and rush off to another place, blissfully ignorant of the history in front of them and beneath their feet.

A great lesson for all of us:  The more beer you drink, the smarter you get!

http://gkpubs.co.uk/pubs-in-london/bunch-of-grapes-pub/