madeinatlantis LONDON TRAVEL GUIDE PARKS AND PALACES THE West-end, as distinguished from the west side of London, might have been defined as the quarter environing a group of parks, nominally the pleasure-grounds of our royal palaces, but now treated as practically belonging to the sovereign people. For much of what is to be said about them, one may go to Jacob Larwood's Story of the London Parks, a quarry of historic slabs and fossil curiosities, out of which several authors have already built up their own pages. There, as elsewhere, can be learned how, like many other parks about London, these green spaces were originally demesnes of the Church that became the greatest landlord in Middlesex. St. James's, name once a proverb for wealth and fashion, with St. Giles as its antipodes, began humbly as a leper-hospital, whose inmates were pensioned off by Henry VIII., and he turned it into a palace, making an annexe to Whitehall, already acquired from Wolsey. The swampy fields between them, stretching down to Westminster Abbey, he improved and enclosed as a park for this double residence. His successors sometimes lived in one house, sometimes in the other. Charles I. spent his last night in St. James's, before being marched to execution at Whitehall, where Charles II. died more ignobly. Whitehall was accidentally burned, and William III. preferred the quiet of Kensington Palace; but the first Georges lived a good deal at St. James's, till it came down to be rather the official headquarters of George III.'s royalty. Under James I., St. James's Park contained an early "Zoo," for here he kept a collection of wild animals, including an elephant, a troop of camels, and foreign deer, as well as cormorants and other rare wild-fowl. At either end were the Spring Gardens and the Mulberry Gardens, which grew to be rendezvous for the polite public. But the Park was still the King's private pleasance; and even under Parliamentary domination, access to it seems to have been a matter of favour. It was then for a time docked of its saintly prefix. We remember how Roger de Coverley, as a boy, asked a Roundhead the way to St. Anne's Lane, and was rebuked as a young popish cur; but the next passer whom he shyly asked after Anne's Lane, broke out upon him: "She was a saint before you were born, and will be a saint after you are hanged!" The St. James's restaurant, which vanished the other day, had suffered greater ignominy among un-Puritan frequenters, too familiar with it as "Jimmy's." Parliament, however, took care of James Park, and even had it restocked with deer, when the Lord Protector hoped to fix a new dynasty at Whitehall. Charles II., in his careless good nature, threw the Park more open to his loyal subjects, while trusting himself to walk about it, sometimes with little or no attendance. It was on the road beside Constitution Hill that he met his brother escorted by a troop of guards, and gave a smart answer to James's remonstrance on his own want of caution: "I am sure no man in England will take away my life to make you king." Loyal and curious subjects, like Pepys and Evelyn, could here see their anointed master strolling with his dogs, feeding his ducks, chaffing with Mrs. Nelly Gwynne and her like, or playing at paille-maille, a French game appearing to have been a cross between elongated croquet and hooped golf. When first introduced, early in the century, it had been played in an avenue that is now Pall Mall; but as this became disturbed by coaches, Charles laid out a new course farther within the Park, where it was kept strewn with crushed cockle-shells, to make a rebounding surface for the balls. The vogue of this game called forth other Malls in London, at Hammersmith and Chiswick for instance; Piccadilly also began fashionable life as a Mall; but that royal play-place in St. James's was the Mall, which grew to be a chief resort of idle London, though now more thronged with hasty passengers making for Victoria Station. The Bird-cage Walk on the other side was so called as being actually furnished with prisoned songsters; and beyond this the enclosure seems to have extended over the site of the barracks and mansion-blocks that now hem it in. In memory of his Dutch exile, Charles made a canal through this Park, on which he set an example of skating, a sport hitherto practised in England only after the rough street-boy manner. He took great interest in the wild-fowl caught and kept about Duck Island at the Whitehall end of the canal, where a decoy was set up in what should rather be called a group of islets. Duck Island had a governor pour rire; it was perhaps as a joke that George II.'s queen bestowed this dignity upon her protégé Stephen Duck, the "thresher-poet," whom she afterwards raised to a more worthy post in the Church. There are probably descendants of Charles's pets among the wild-fowl that still may be admired in the lake, while of late years they have had greedy rivals for public favour in the gulls which winter brings up to hang in a screaming crowd about the bridge, swooping and snapping at morsels of food thrown to them. The Park in former days was peopled with deer so tame that they would eat out of anyone's hand. Also we hear of a herd of cows, kept to supply the visitors with milk. A survival of this enterprise lasted till the other day, when the owner of a milk-stall near Spring Gardens made a stand for immemorial vested interest, and had to be dealt with on the truly British principle of compromise, the cows being banished, but the stall granted another site not far off. The zoological attractions of the Park were renewed in George III.'s time by elephants and other animals presented to his queen, which made a show for country cousins on visits to town then as rare as the sight of an elephant in the flesh. At the west end of the canal, near Buckingham House, was a sheet of water known as Rosamond's Pond, which acquired a romantic celebrity, not only as trysting-place of lovers, but, when the course of true love did not run smooth, despairing hearts were notoriously in the way of drowning themselves there. Under George II., the pond came to be drained and filled up; then some cynical wag fixed a notice to a tree that, whereas here "gentlemen and ladies cannot be accommodated as formerly . . . the basin in the Upper Green Park is a most commodious piece of water, in admirable order, and of depth sufficient to answer the ends of all sizes and conditions." The name of Rosamond's Pond was, in fact, transferred to another lakelet on higher ground, near Piccadilly; and thus certain writers have been led into some confusion of topography. The first pond had been railed in on account of accidental immersions, for even then London might be bewildered by fogs, not to speak of citizens who befogged their brains with liquor. Besides the occasional fishing out of "one more unfortunate" from Rosamond's Pond, loungers in the Park had no want of exciting spectacles from time to time, wrestling matches, hopping matches, and foot races in which men sometimes ran naked, to the shocking of well-dressed promenaders, who in one case showed their resentment by taking the shameless athlete at disadvantage, obliged to run a gauntlet of switches plucked from the trees. Eccentric wagers were now and then carried out in St. James's Park. It made a parade ground for the Guards, and, as during the Gordon riots, might be turned into a camp. For brutal tastes there was the diversion of soldiers stripped and tied up to be cruelly flogged in public. But His Majesty's Guards seem to have needed sharp discipline, if it be true that they would play the footpad in dark corners of the Park. At an unfrequented side of it duels might come off, when the law had lost its edge that dealt sharply with bloodshed within the royal precincts. Larwood points out how the hot-headed Colonel Bath of Amelia would not draw sword in the Park; and when Alfieri fought with Lord Ligonier, they passed from Pall Mall into the Green Park, looked on as less sacred. Constitution Hill seems to have been at one time a usual duelling-ground. The Park also made a sanctuary in which bailiffs could not exercise their office, as must have been a matter of satisfaction to some frequenters, like Amelia's unlucky husband, when he durst not show himself in other resorts. An exception was in case of high treason; and treasonable utterances in the King's own park appear to have been punished with extra severity. All through the eighteenth century St. James's Park, unless on special occasions, stood open as a public promenade, while the right of driving through it was guarded as a privilege. We can remember how, quite recently, the road by Constitution Hill was not free to all carriages; and still the Horse Guards' gateway is barred except to a favoured few. George III., who complained of being overlooked in his gardens at Buckingham House, had no mind to keep his people at a distance. Early in his reign a German traveller describes the Mall as crowded with people of all ranks, both by day and after dark, then lit by numerous lamps; and "when the sun shines, the ground sparkles with pins which have dropped from the ladies' dresses." Sir Richard Phillips could remember the Mall one moving mass of lovely ladies by thousands, with as many smart beaux, who, in a former generation, counted it an exploit to make handsome women blush by their stares and audible innuendoes, if we can trust Congreve's Way of the World. Before the end of the century chairs were introduced as a speculation. But then St. James's began to go out of fashion, while for a time the adjacent Green Park became the choice resort. This, originally a stretch of meadows beside the road to Exeter, had been added to his grounds by Charles II., and was first known as the Upper Park. Much farther back it makes a momentary appearance in history as the open ground where Sir Thomas Wyatt's rebels, marching from Kingston to attack Ludgate, encountered the Queen's forces, and were split up into two bands, one of which trudged on to dispersal in the City outskirts. The vogue of the Green Park did not last long; and the improvements carried out here under George III. were cut up by the fêtes at the peace of 1814, when a crowded fair and free passage of all sorts of vehicles ruined the turf, while the riotous mob treated itself to a huge bonfire before a showy building set up beside Constitution Hill as "Temple of Concord," and a Pagoda in St. James's Park was burned down in the display of fireworks. For a generation the Green Park seems to have fallen into neglect.		The British Museum Parliament The Tower of London Madame Tussaud's St. Paul's Cathedral Along The Strand Charing Cross Westminster The West-End Parks and Palaces The East-End The Surrey Side The Suburbs RESTAURANTS Restaurants in London The Corner Houses The Lyons Tea Shops The Marble Arch Barbecues The Non-Chain Budget Restaurants HOTELS RUSSELL SQUARE Bernard Street Bedford Place Bloomsbury and Gower Streets Guilford and Coram Streets Tavistock Place Cartwright Gardens HISTORY Roman Britain After the Romans Saxon and Norman Tudor Charles II George II London circa 1700-1815 GREAT BRITAIN The life of Metropolitan England Britain is a world by itself The Climates of Britain The English Plain Great Britain Strategic Geography Great Britain - Ireland Great Britain - Scotland