St James's
Park is one of the central
London parks, in
Westminster. It lies adjacent to that
St James's Palace and to
Buckingham Palace.
Henry VIII generously demolished the 13th century
leper hospital on the site, having evicted the residents ('fourteen poor leprous maidens'), and made the area a deer park, to go with St James's
Palace, which he was planning at the time.
James I and
VI kept his menagerie of animals (all presents from foreign dignitaries - he also had a suit of
samurai armour!) in the park, including an
elephant that purportedly drank a gallon of wine a day.
Charles I had a
bowling green put in, but this was disused by the time he walked across the park to be executed. His son,
Charles II, at the
Restoration, had the gardens laid out in a formal manner, probably by André Mollet. Charles had seen similar things at
Versailles, and the work in London included a rectangular canal over half a mile long. However, he left the
Rosamund Pond, a famed meeting spot for lovers, untouched. It subsequently became a favoured spot for jilted maidens to commit suicide.
Indeed, the park has a long association with love and sex. It was for a long time a favoured haunt of prostitutes, and had presumably still got this reputation down to the time when
W S Gilbert wrote (in
Iolanthe):
'I heard the minx remark
She'd meet him after dark
Inside St James's Park
And give him one!'
(I will just note that the peers who sing this song have
not heard correctly!)
It was during the reign of
William III and
Mary II that the first of several
tea houses appeared in the park. Around 1700 there was also a
Milk Fair featuring milk served fresh from the various cows whose owners plied their trade at the fair.
Horse Guards Parade was constructed by filling in one end of the long canal at about this time.
In the 1820s the park was completely redesigned by
John Nash, into something like its current form. The starkly artificial canal was reworked into something superficially like a real lake, and the dead straight paths replaced with the winding walks we see today.
The lake is deserving of special mention. At one time there was a
pagoda on a bridge across it, but following
Napoleon's defeat in
1814 (
before the hundred days, history pedants!) it was set on fire by a firework accident and burned down with several fatalities. The bridge across the lake today is a sturdy concrete affair, from which one can see, in one direction
Buckingham Palace, and in the other, the fairy spires of the
Liberal Club. During
World War II, the lake was temporarily drained and the bed used for government staff huts.
The
Guards Memorial, a
war memorial dedicated to the
Grenadier,
Coldstream,
Scots,
Welsh and
Irish guards and designed in 1922 by
Gilbert Ledward, stands at the edge of the park, opposite
Horse Guards.
Many people have asked me to say that the bird life in the park is exceptional, with
pelicans that have been there for centuries, as well as rare ducks and the odd
raptor.
The park is flanked on the north side by
The Mall (named for the game of
Paille Maille, imported by Charles II), on the east by
Horse Guards Approach and on the south by
Birdcage Walk. Buckingham Palace fairly occupies the short western side.
Also a
Tube station beneath
55 Broadway, the headquarters of
London Underground.
District and
Circle Line trains stop there. The station is not in or even next to the park - one has to pass through
Queen Anne's Gate to get to the greenery - but in
Broadway, within sight of
Westminster Abbey.