I have spent three to four full years and many summer weeks in London over my 86 years, and I know several of its parks intimately. The parks whose structure and life I knew best—Hampstead Heath, Regent’s Park—were bound mainly by upper-middle-class neighborhoods and were meticulously cared for. I must admit, however, that my wife and I have rarely visited parks in London’s low-income areas, so I don’t know how they are maintained and what happens when their budgets are cut. As a result, I will avoid generalizing about the city’s immense network of parks and green areas that I have never seen. What I know is that London’s parks are funded through a diverse range of sources, including traditional local authority funding, grants from various government agencies, charitable organizations, and private donations. New York City’s Central Park, which is kept beautifully, is owned by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation but has been managed by the Central Park Conservancy since 1998 under a contract with the government of New York City in a public-private partnership. Consequently, it is maintained with a great many corporate donations, including much of its staff being sustained in that manner. However, London has the advantage of a significantly higher percentage of green space (47 percent) compared to New York City (14 percent), and that includes parks, gardens, and private green areas. And London’s green spaces are more evenly distributed across the city, offering many smaller gardens and green squares in addition to large parks. It means the parks never get quite as crammed or noisy as Central or Washington Square Park do on weekends. The London parks we have wandered about offer a vaster openness to a green world, many more places to find tranquility, a relatively crime-free environment, and a greater feeling of being cut off from the city’s activity.
There are many other parks in London’s center—St. James’s Park, Green Park, Hyde Park, and Kensington Gardens, all of them royal parks. St. James’s, which is bounded by Buckingham Palace, has a small lake and many waterfowl, including pelicans. Green Park is just 47 acres and is marked as one of London’s most serene places to have a quick retreat from city life. It is within walking distance of Buckingham Palace, St. James’s Palace, and Piccadilly Circus. Hyde Park is the largest of the royal parks and contains an abundance of historical monuments and memorials. There is also Speaker’s Corner, where Karl Marx, George Orwell, and speakers to this day have engaged in political polemics and arguments. Hyde Park contains tennis courts, a large lake, and bridal paths. Adjacent to Hyde Park is Kensington Gardens, which includes famous landmarks like the grandiose Albert Memorial and symmetrical Italian gardens and cascading fountains close by. In addition, there are wild expanses and the Serpentine Galleries—a complex of two galleries that show about three exhibitions per year. The exhibitions show art, design, architecture, performance, and community projects and are free of charge.
The park I know best is Hampstead Heath, located only four miles from the city center. Over the years, my wife and I have explored most of its 800 acres, which consists of a more formal park around Parliament Hill (the highest point in London where people often fly kites), which contains a playground, a running track, bathing pools, duck ponds, a cricket ground, a public pool, tennis courts, lawn bowling, and a modest café. In those years, I could walk easily and long distances, so there were times we walked from Parliament Hill through its wilder landscape to Kenwood House—a stately home, on the northern boundary of Hampstead Heath. Kenwood contains a major art collection that includes Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Dyck, Reynolds, and Gainsborough and had formal gardens of rhododendrons, azaleas, and magnolias. On the walk, we explored the park’s woods and meadows, picked blackberries, observed magpies, and tried out different trails and lanes that one could take to reach Kenwood. I loved the Heath’s mixture of the wild and the controlled and its closeness to neighborhoods like Hampstead, Highgate, and Dartmouth Park. To this day, I continue to closely scan photos I took those years when we lived near or visited the Heath. They remain indelible memories of a park that has no parallel in New York City.
