The park authority, so careless when it is a matter of eating and drinking, is careful to provide more artistic pleasures for the Hyde Park crowds. Bands play there on many summer evenings—the announcements are made in the Press—and now and then the League of Arts arranges an entertainment, when thousands of people flock to see the Morris dancing or some old play performed with a background of green trees.
Kensington Gardens
“Sometimes a child will cross the glade.”
Matthew Arnold.
Henry James once expressed the opinion that the view from the bridge that crosses the Serpentine where Hyde Park joins Kensington Gardens has an “extraordinary nobleness,” and there is something indescribably beautiful and unexpected about it. The grey buildings in the distance look like some palace of the fata morgana over the shimmering water. I do not know if Sir James Barrie is responsible for the feeling that you would not be surprised at anything that might happen in Kensington Gardens. Who would be bold enough to assert that when the last child has left the Peter Pan statue the squirrels do not come and play with their stone brothers? Kensington Gardens are the paradise of the child and the flower lover. There are ugly things in it, of course, like the Albert Memorial, though everyone does not think it ugly: I was once startled at hearing that souvenir of Victorian taste fervently admired by some fellow bus passengers. But the Serpentine, and the Round Pond on a sunny morning when the fleet is engaged in serious manœuvres—and the Broad Walk: Wren’s orangery—the lovely sunk garden with its pleached walk of lime trees with the avenue Queen Caroline planted—and above all, the Flower Walk in the sunlit air after a shower,—if visitors to London have time for nothing else they should carry away a memory of Kensington Gardens.
Green Park and St. James’s
“Satirists may say what they please about the rural enjoyments of a London citizen on Sunday.”—W. Irving.
Walking along Piccadilly from Hyde Park Corner on the “sulky” side, as Mr. Street calls it in his charming Ghosts of Piccadilly, many
PETER PAN STATUE IN KENSINGTON GARDENS