Week of March 21st 2011: St. James Park and Hyde Park (London)

Near the end of my trip, once we returned to London, I noticed two things were happening. I was getting a little burnt out from going to museums and London was having exceptionally nice weather for March. I decided to take advantage and spend a couple of days just walking around the city and seeing the greenery.

For being a fairly large and industrial city, London has a large number of really big and well kept up parks. I had wanted to see all of them, but just in case it wasn’t possible, I asked Kevin for his recommendation. He said his favorite was St. James Park so I decided to check it out first. The park literally looked like it came out of a painting. There were daffodils blooming all over and little children running under the shade of the trees. It was just nice to sit and soak up the scenery. I found a nice try to sit under and wrote the first draft of my post on traveling and then decided to read for a bit. While in the park, I also took the opportunity to take some really pretty pictures of Buckingham Palace which is a few blocks away.

The next day I decided to make my way to Hyde Park. Having only seen it on a map, I assumed it would be like the large American parks (having my only reference of one those be Golden Gate Park…) which have several fields and ponds and things separated by groups of trees and paths. Hyde Park, contrarily, was a big open field with a large lake in the middle. It did have smaller recreational areas and stages, but it just wasn’t as segmented as what I had been imagining. By the time I got to Hyde Park, I’d done quite a bit of walking and just really wanted some water. Due to its sheer size, I had to walk a while before I found any refreshment stands, but it was nice to sit for a while and just read once I had gotten settled. I also had my macarons with me so I was able to enjoy a few of those… I only saw a little part of Hyde Park but it didn’t strike me as particularly impressive. The only thing I wish I would have done is go horseback riding but I’m not exactly sure what you need to reserve in order to do that.

Overall, I’d have to agree with Kevin, St. James Park was the nicest. I hadn’t been expecting that since it’s not very big and it’s in a very busy area but somehow they managed to create a really serene escape from the busy city.