Regent's Park was financed by a builder after the Crown backed out
The Prince Regent dreamed up a pleasure garden in the 1810s, and John Nash got the credit. Yet when the Crown Estate withdrew its funding, property developer James Burton paid for the work himself, and his son Decimus designed many of the grand white terraces, often ignoring Nash's advice.
In the Middle Ages the land belonged to the manor of Tyburn, held by Barking Abbey. Henry VIII seized it during the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s, and it served as Marylebone Park for hunting until 1649, after which it was let as smallholdings for hay and dairy. Today the park covers 410 acres split between Westminster and Camden, with an outer ring road of 4.45 km and an inner circle of 1 km enclosing Queen Mary's Gardens.
Burton bought many terrace leases in 1816 and five large blocks on Regent Street the following year. Decimus shaped Cornwall, York, Chester and Clarence Terraces so independently that an irritated Nash tried, unsuccessfully, to have Chester Terrace torn down and rebuilt. Together the trio's schemes swept from St James's Park to Primrose Hill, one of the first examples of a garden suburb. The public was first admitted in 1835, initially just two days a week.
Not every chapter was happy. On 15 January 1867 the ice on the boating lake gave way beneath more than 200 people and forty died, after which the lake was reduced to four feet deep. During the First World War a vast wooden army postal depot stood on Chester Road. Queen Mary's Gardens opened to the public in the 1930s on a former plant nursery, and one of the original villas was rebuilt as Winfield House, the American ambassador's residence, whose garden is second in size only to Buckingham Palace's among private London gardens.
The park now hosts London Zoo, an open-air theatre and sports from cricket to Australian rules football. By January 2018 some 22,000 cyclists had logged 1.6 million laps of the Outer Circle on Strava.
Source: Regent's Park
