London Parks - Regent’s Park part 1

Regent’s Park is a large, 410 acre, open park about 1.5 miles northwest of Trafalgar Square. It’s around a fifteen minute walk from Oxford Circus, just head north up Regent Street until it becomes Portland Place, walk round past the famous John Nash designed terraces in Park Crescent and you’ll be at the park’s southern entrance. Part of Regent’s aprk is in the borough of Westminster and part in the borough of Camden.

The park was originally another one of Henry VIII’s exclusive hunting areas and it only became enclosed as a park in 1812 when the then Prince Regent commisioned John Nash to design and landscape the whole area.

His plan included the beautiful terraces that surround the park, a lake and canal, villas and a summer palace for the Prince Regent that was never built. Regent’s Street was the route built to link St James’s Palace and the palace planned for Regent’s Park.

One of the villas designed by Nash that was completed is The Holme which looks out over the southern end of the boating lake. Someone out there must be kicking themselves because a few years ago it sold for £5million, now with the rampant property inflation in the UK its market value is £101million. It’s currently owned by Prince Khaled Al-Waleed , whose uncle is the King of Saudi Arabia, and he apparently spends about two weeks a year there.

Inside the park there is an outer ring road called the Outer Circle that goes the whole way around the outside and an inner, much smaller ring road called the Inner Circle, in the southern part of the park.
The Inner Circle surrounds Queen Mary’s Garden’s which is a large set of gardens with formal planting, tree lined walks, fountains and hedges and plenty of secluded areas if you want to sit and read or eat some lunch. The Inner Circle gets very little traffic and because the gardens are a distance from any main road its very quiet and peaceful in there.

Regent’s Park is known for its rose gardens and they have over 30,000 plants from 400 different varieties

As you walk into Queen Mary’s gardens from the western side there’s a restaurant called The Garden Cafe that is open from 10am-9pm in summer and 10am-4pm in winter.

On the west side of Queen Mary’s garden is Regent’s Park’s open air theatre, first opened in 1932 and home to the the UK’s oldest fully professional theatre company. The open air theatre is famous for its productions of Shakespeare plays especially its annual A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but they also put on musicals and children’s plays and in recent years have been holding Sunday evening concerts that have featured the Finn brothers from Crowded House, KT Tunstall and Ronan Keating amongst others.

The theatre seats 1200 and their season runs from May to early September. Ticket prices vary with the event that’s on, Sunday night concerts were around £18, Shakespeare plays anywhere between £10-30 depending on where you’re sitting.

The theatre grounds open up 90 minutes before performances start and you can bring picnics with you if you want or they have a barbecue and buffet and what they say is one of the longest theatre bars in London. You can take drinks into the auditorium and the bar stays open until midnight. A nice way to spend a summer evening.