“How many parks are there in London?” he asked himself one day. Hunter Davies, the celebrated biographer of the Beatlesdetermined to explore the unfathomable geography of his adopted city in “London Parks“. He made a list of the spaces of more than eight hectares and came up with 370. Although the number of parks reaches a thousand, and the green areas are probably around 3,000, including community gardens, nature reserves, urban farms and leafy cemeteries that They invite exploration even in the middle of winter.
By their own estimates, the green carpet occupies around 60% of urban space. No large city with millions of inhabitants can compare, hence London was distinguished in 2019 as the world’s first “National Park City” (an idea coined by National Geographic chief explorer Daniel Raven-Ellison).
“The parks are undoubtedly the greatest glory and trademark of London,” attests Hunter Davies, who spent a year of full immersion to write his very personal guide, plus the 60 years he has been walking almost daily through his beloved Hampstead Heaththe incredible 320-hectare oasis north of Camden, also distinguished in 2020 as the first “Park of Silence” in Europe.
“We can remember in passing that there are 230 theaters in London, seven football teams in the Premier and an imposing river, the Thames, which is the heart of its history,” Davies recalls. “But as the philosopher John Rushkin, who has a park in his name on Denmark Hill, said, the measure of any civilization is its cities. And the measure of cities is the quality of its public spaces: its parks and its squares.”
A thousand parks were too many, the best thing was to make a “selection” of 11, like in soccer teams. Starting with the first Royal Park, St.James (courtesy of Henry VIII) and ending with the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park (the “legacy” of Boris Johnson), passing through the “miracle” of Hyde Park in the real estate heart of the city, the immensity of Richmond with its deer, the distance in space and time of Greenwich or the irresistible attraction of Victoria Parkthe first “working class park” in the forgotten east.