Public parks

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Regent's Park, London c 1833.



Hyde Park, London and part of Kensington Gardens, c 1833.


Green Park and St James Park, London c 1833.

Chip in with the odd pic by all means, if the spirit moves you.

I love parks, here is St James's, London

Water fowl in St James park.

Water fowl in St James park.

St James park with Buckingham Palace in the background.

St James park.

Fashionable people thronging St James park, c 1745.

Ramble in St. James's Park

by John Wilmot , Earl of Rochester

Much wine had passed, with grave discourse
Of who fucks who, and who does worse
(Such as you usually do hear
From those that diet at the Bear),
When I, who still take care to see 5
Drunkenness relieved by lechery,
Weent out into St. James's Park
To cool my head and fire my heart.
But though St. James has th' honor on 't,
'Tis consecrate to prick and cunt. 10
There, by a most incestuous birth,
Strange woods spring from the teeming earth;
For they relate how heretofore,
When ancient Pict behan to whore,
Deluded of his assignation 15
(Jilting, it seems, was then in fashion),
Poor pensive lover, in this place
Would frig upon his mother's face;
Whence rows of mandrakes tall did rise
Whose lewd tops fucked the very skies. 20
Each imitative branch does twine
In some loved fold of Aretine,
And nightly now beneath their shade
Are buggeries, rapes, and incests made.
Unto this all-sin-sheltering grove 25
Whores of the bulk and the alcove,
Great ladies, chambermaids, and drudges,
The ragpicker, and heiress trudges.
Carmen, divines, great lords, and tailors,
Prentices, poets, pimps, and jailers, 30
Footmen, fine fops do here arrive,
And here promiscuously they swive.
brkAlong these hallowed walks it was
That I beheld Corinna pass.
Whoever had been by to see 35
The proud disdain she cast on me
Through charming eyes, he would have swore
She dropped from heaven that very hour,
Forsaking the divine abode
In scorn of some despairing god. 40
But mark what creatures women are:
How infinitely vile, when fair!
brkThree knights o' the' elbow and the slur
With wriggling tails made up to her.
brkThe first was of your Whitehall baldes, 45
Near kin t' th' Mother of the Maids;
Graced by whose favor he was able
To bring a friend t' th' Waiters' table,
Where he had heard Sir Edward Sutton
Say how the King loved Banstead mutton; 50
Since when he'd ne'er be brought to eat
By 's good will any other meat.
In this, as well as allthe rest,
He ventures to do like the best,
But wanting common sense, th' ingredient 55
In choosing well not least expedient,
Converts abortive imitation
To universal affectation.
Thus he not only eats and talks
But feels and smells, sits down and walks, 60
Nay looks, and lives, and loves by rote,
In an old tawdry birthday coat.
brkThe second was a Grays Inn wit,
A great inhabiter of the pit,
Where critic-like he sits and squints, 65
Steals pocket handkerchiefs, and hints
From 's neighbor, and the comedy,
To court, and pay, his landlady.
brkThe third, a lady's eldest son
Within few years of twenty-one 70
bWho hopes from his propitious fate,
Against he comes to his estate,
By these two worthies to be made
A most accomplished tearing blade.
brkOne, in a strain 'twixt tune and nonsense, 75
Cries, "Madam, I have loved you long since.
Permit me your fair hand to kiss";
When at her mouth her cunt cries, "Yes!"
In short, without much more ado,
Joyful and pleased, away she flew, 80
And with these three confounded asses
From park to hackney coach she passes.
brkSo a proud bitch does lead about
Of humble curs the amorous rout,
Who most obsequiously do hunt 85
The savory scent of salt-swoln cunt.
Some power more patient now relate
The sense of this surprising fate.
Gods! that a thing admired by me
Should fall to so much infamy. 90
Had she picked out, to rub her arse on,
Some stiff-pricked clown or well-hung parson,
Each job of whose spermatic sluice
Had filled her cunt with wholesome juice,
I the proceeding should have praised 95
In hope sh' had quenched a fire I raised.
Such natural freedoms are but just:
There's something generous in mere lust.
But to turn a damned abandoned jade
When neither head nor tail persuade;
100
To be a whore in understanding,
A passive pot for fools to spend in!
The devil played booty, sure, with thee
To bring a blot on infamy.
brkBut why am I, of all mankind, 105
To so severe a fate designed?
Ungrateful! Why this treachery
To humble fond, believing me,
Who gave you privilege above
The nice allowances of love? 110
Did ever I refuse to bear
The meanest part your lust could spare?
When your lewd cunt came spewing home
Drenched with the seed of half the town,
My dram of sperm was supped up after 115
For the digestive surfeit water.
Full gorged at another time
With a vast meal of slime
Which your devouring cunt had drawn
From porters' backs and footmen's brawn, 120
I was content to serve you up
My ballock-full for your grace cup,
Nor ever thought it an abuse
While you had pleasure for excuse -
You tht could make my heart away 125
For noise and color, and betray
The secrets of my tender hours
To such knight-errant paramours,
When, leaning on your faithless breast,
Wrapped in security and rest, 130
Soft kindness all my powers did move,
And reason lay dissolved in love!
brkMay stinking vapors choke your womb
Such as the men you dote upon
May your depraved appetite, 135
That could in whiffling fools delight,
Beget such frenzies in your mind
You may go mad for the north wind,
And fixing all your hopes upon't
To have him bluster in your cunt, 140
Turn up your longing arse t' th' air
And perish in a wild despair!
But cowards shall forget to rant,
Schoolboys to frig, old whores to paint;
The Jesuits' fraternity 145
Shall leave the use of buggery;
Crab-louse, inspired with grace divine,
From earthly cod to heaven shall climb;
Physicians shall believe in Jesus,
And disobedience cease to please us, 150
Ere I desist with all my power
To plague this woman and undo her.
But my revenge will best be timed
When she is married that is limed.
In that most lamentable state 155
I'll make her feel my scorn and hate:
Pelt her with scandals, truth or lies,
And her poor cur with jealousied,
Till I have torn him from her breech,
While she whines like a dog-drawn bitch; 160
Loathed and despised, kicked out o' th' Town
Into some dirty hole alone,
To chew the cud of misery
And know she owes it all to me.
brkAnd may no woman better thrive
brkThat dares prophane the cunt I swive! 165






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Aerial view of Hyde Park, London.

Achilles Statue "To Arthur, Duke of Wellington, and his brave companions in arms", by Richard Westmacott, 1822.

There's something of a discrepancy here. Last time I looked at the inscription at the base of the Achilles statue, it read something like, "To Arthur, Duke of Welligton, erected in deepest gratitude by all the women of England".

Since Wellington was a notorious lecher, this always used to make me fall about laughing.

Sanitisers of History at work here, methinks. Has anyone read the Achilles inscription recently?

Speakers Corner, Hyde Park on a busy Sunday.


Danny Shine, arguing against the absurdity of society at Speakers Corner.

19th c Punch cartoon of the fashionable world taking exercise in Hyde Park.

Hyde Park memorial to the victims of the 7/7 Tube bombings.

Horse riding in Hyde Park.

The Serpentine, Hyde Park at sunset.

Green Park, London.

Green Park, London.

Green Park and Constitution Hill, London.

Vauxhall Gardens: A History by David E Coke and Alan Borg – review

London's famed pleasure gardens, now lost to history, provided a fascinating clash between high and low art, noble and vulgar pleasures

Rowan Moore guardian.co.uk, Friday 1 July 2011 18.10 BST


A photograph of Vauxhall Gardens circa 1859.

If you go to the site of Vauxhall Gardens now, you will find a ragged patch of grass near to a demonic concatenation of bad architecture and violent traffic engineering. All trace of the gardens' purpose – pleasure – has vanished. Mentioned in Pepys, Fielding, Keats and Thackeray, and many other writers, the gardens now seem a myth, a figment, little more than an evocative name for something that seemingly was never there.


Vauxhall Gardens: A History (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art) by David E. Coke

Yet the gardens very much were there, remarkably, from 1661 to 1859: how many other places of entertainment, subject to fluctuations in taste and fragile finances, last two centuries? Its success was despite the fact that this open-air place was exposed to the weather, and for most of its life was reached by a precarious boat ride from central London. And despite, too, the legendary expense of its food and the money-saving, extra-thin slicing of its meat. It even survived the attempt of Jonathan Tyers, its forceful proprietor from 1729 to 1767, to make it a place of morally improving entertainment, which might be thought a suicidal business proposition.

David Coke and Alan Borg have written a weighty, scholarly book that gives substance and detail to this chimera. If feels as if every possible detail and document relating to the gardens have been scanned and assimilated. The result is the most complete reconstruction of this vital place there is likely to be.

What emerges is an alter ego of London, essential to the city but apart from it, a magical-tawdry place of appearances, shadows, sensuality, transience, tolerance and other things suppressed by the hard forms of the city proper. Historically, it stood between the aristocratic gardens of the European Renaissance, and the music hall and the seaside pier of Victorian mass entertainment, between Tivoli and Blackpool. It offered dining and drinking, music, art and, increasingly as it struggled to fight off competitors near the end of its life, acrobatics, fireworks, wild animals and balloon flights.

It was a social mixer, patronised by the Prince of Wales and aristocrats, but also by writers, artists and ordinary people. One of Tyers's more idealistic aims was to make a place of freedom, a prototype for a more egalitarian future. He also achieved a fusion of high and low art: music by Handel, paintings by Hogarth and Francis Hayman, mixed up with the spirit of the fairground. Music was not heard, as in a concert hall, in silent rows facing the players. It permeated the gardens, forming a background to everything else that was going on.

When the gardens are remembered now, it is often as a place of sex, paid for and otherwise. And so it was, especially in the first decades before Tyers took it on. His campaign of moral improvement did not – unsurprisingly – make the gardens chaste, but it made the prostitution and assignations less blatant, just enough to make it respectable for royalty and families to visit. His gestures of propriety were not so dumb after all – they allowed the gardens' attractions to take many forms.

Fashions could be displayed, patriotic triumphs celebrated, and great music performed at the same time that shady walks and shrubberies allowed ample scope for shagging, or for the Victorian man who delighted in hiding in the bushes so he could hear "hundreds" of women urinating. Possibly, the gardens were no more Bacchanalian than central London: according to Dan Cruickshank's Secret History of Georgian London, most of Fleet Street, the Strand, Covent Garden and St James's Park was in effect an open-air brothel. One secret of the gardens seems to have been their relative subtlety, their tempering of function with fantasy.

The design of the gardens was simple: a rectangle divided by a grid of avenues and paths, with light, playful pavilions in classical, gothic and Chinese styles. There was interplay between the built and the planted, and structures and trees combined to make the spaces needed for the gardens' pleasures. Near the entrance sinuous colonnades contained supper boxes, which like theatre boxes were places for seeing from and being seen. In the centre was a pavilion for musicians. The essential architectural element was light, with artificial lamps to prolong the enjoyment of food and music, and increase the management's financial take, and the equally necessary darkness of the shady walks.

Tyers was a sort of entrepreneurial Prospero, and under his and his heirs' management the gardens had their best decades. The authors of the book are uncertain why they finally declined and fell. Bad weather was blamed at the time, but as the gardens had been there since the 17th century, this is hardly convincing. Coke and Borg cite the growth of the city, which made the gardens less of a rural idyll, and the rise of rival attractions, such as early music halls, and the Crystal Palace, which was relocated to Sydenham from Hyde Park in 1854. There was also more money to be made by building houses on the site (whose streets, after bombing in the second world war, would return to grass). Surprisingly, the authors do not dwell on one reason sometimes given for the gardens' decline, which is that railways made it easy to reach more distant attractions, such as the seaside.

With their methodical style, Coke and Borg do not quite conjure the gaiety of their subject. But at the end of the book are published the only two known photographs of the gardens. They catch your breath. Here is a creation from the age of Samuel Pepys, a thing of legend, captured with a camera. It is like seeing a photograph of a unicorn, or a dodo, or Atlantis.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011