Summer in the city: Hyde Park

A A Gill goes on a summer safari through one of the world’s biggest tourist attractions

I’ve been coming to the park since I was a child. I’ve lost boats, failed to fly kites, played cricket, lain in the long grass with girlfriends, walked dogs, pushed prams, taught my children to ride bikes here. If I claim to belong to any piece of country, if I feel a bond with any place, then it’s with this park. This is its story for a day.

At 6.15am, the Household Cavalry are up and at ’em, ready to take the horses for the watering parade. There used to be a Georgian barracks here; its classical pediments are still stuck like a bandage above the ceremonial goods entrance. Knightsbridge barracks is possibly the ugliest building in London, with the most beautiful view. It was designed by Sir Basil Spence, who managed to construct vertical bomb damage out of horizontal bomb damage. The barracks, with its timid brutalism, is the one building visible from everywhere in the park.

The troopers stamp around with that winningly martial mixture of arresting, boyish teasing and determined, robotic purpose. There is an end-of-term, exhausted euphoria about them: they’ve just finished their ceremonial year. The horses are being sent to Norfolk and Windsor for holidays; the relentless clip-clop, polishing and waddling is slowing down.

Cavalry walk with extreme and hilarious difficulty in their great delta-winged boots, into which giggling foreign girls occasionally slip their phone numbers. If you’ve ever wondered what happens to the tons of horse shit produced daily by the Queen’s mounted guard, it’s shovelled into a clever dumbwaiter chute affair and taken away by lorry. Where to, I ask the captain in charge. He looks challenged. “Just away.”

The guard at the goods entrance steps into the carriageway, his assault rifle at the high port: it’s the best way to stop traffic. And the troop walk out, their hooves sounding brittle and beautiful in the damp early morning. We step lightly up the eastern march of the park. The great avenue of London planes flutter and syncopate, camouflaging the misty green where early-morning t’ai chi and pilates exercises make strange hieroglyphs of bodies in the middle distance, looking like figures lost from medieval frescoes of purgatory.

If you look carefully from Park Lane, you can see the remains of the earthworks that were the parliamentary defence of London from royalist attack in the civil war. This was the very edge of the city in the 16th century.

A hundred yards out from the barracks, the officer bellows like a man coming round from anaesthetic, and the troop smartly turn eyes left. They’re passing the small box-hedged memorial to men killed by an Irish republican car bomb. They do this every time. It seems to commemorate not just the dead, but a time of quainter, home-made terrorism. Ceremony and hindsight can make anything heritage.

West Londoners occasionally wake in the early hours imagining they can hear horses’ hooves, like an echo of Kipling in the dawn. Mostly they turn over and go back to sleep to dream of centaurs.

Where the cavalry go is up to the officer in charge. Today, it’s Notting Hill Gate. Through the northern boundary of the park they trot into a little side street, and there, in a cul-de-sac, the men dismount. The officer borrows a tenner from his sergeant and takes orders. Five coffees, three teas. He marches to a workmen’s cafe, where the Middle Eastern owners give him a discount and beam at his boots and buttons.

The troops stand around holding the horses, sucking back-handed cigarettes, and get on with the unending rounds of military teasing. The officer serves them coffee. It’s just like being behind the bike sheds at school with the cool gang. Above us, a man opens his curtains and rubs his eyes and closes them again. “Once, we were parked up,” the captain says, “Robert De Niro came past. Didn’t bat an eye. He was in London, so of course the Household Cavalry were taking tea in a mews in South Kensington at 6.30 in the morning.”

At 7.30am the Serpentine Swimming Club meets. It’s not a nice morning for a dip. Even the geese have all been blown into a dirty corner by the squally weather. The Serpentine swimmers are one of those peculiar English associations that are invariably prefaced with “intrepid” and “eccentric”. They’ve been meeting here since 1864. They’re a good-natured bunch who tip up in clothes bought for frugality and longevity rather than style. They clutch towels that are as thin and balding as a good many of them are.

Standing on the edge of the lake in distressingly skimpy Speedos and rubber caps, they look like shelled turtles. I can’t help casting their biopic as an Ealing comedy. They range from MPs and retired architects to hotel doormen and taxi drivers. Many of them have swum the Channel. They swim here every week including Christmas Day. There’s no mucking about, no splashing or dive bombs or lilos: today they’re racing. A chap with a barrel chest,

a clipboard and a stopwatch starts them in a relaxed, staggered handicap. “Dave, where are you? Dave, get in.” They dive into the turgid, scummy water and flap their arms with a wiry purpose. After a few minutes the water looks like a war film after the torpedo. The swimming club has a small unisex changing room full of old kit and grinning photographs. It’s crowded with the raucous and morbidly pale, knobbly bodies, sawing at themselves with gritty towels.

Outside there’s a little ceremony. The winner is a man called Squirrel. There’s a good-natured cheer; he gets a little silver cup. A lady, presumably Mrs Squirrel, mocks him fondly. “Happy birthday!” someone shouts. Squirrel is 84 today. Swimmers depart to breakfast radiating mad, rude immortality.

The Serpentine was made by damming the Westbourne, one of the lost rivers of London. It was built by Queen Caroline. They say that, but I doubt if she lifted a finger. It is an ornamental water feature that needed an act of parliament and a titanic amount of money, but it set off a trend for grand, natural-looking lakes in grand, natural-looking landscapes all over the parks of England. The other stretch of water here is the Round Pond, where model-yacht clubs sail their grounds for divorce. The geese that have always been here have recently been joined by puffy, hissy flotillas of swans. There used to be only one swan, a psychotic old male who kept the others away. Now he’s gone, all the riffraff have moved in.

For most Londoners, Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens are synonymous. They flow one into the other, connected by the Serpentine. Kensington Gardens was the private back yard of Kensington Palace, and slowly grew into public use. George II was once mugged here. He asked the robber to let him keep the seal from his fob watch. The man agreed on the condition that the king promised not to tell anyone.

He promised, and he never did. Rotten Row, the sandy bridle path along the south of the park, is a mispronunciation of Route du Roi. It was the other King’s Road from the Palace of Kensington to the Palace of Westminster. It was the first London street to get lighting, to make sure the monarch didn’t get robbed again.

Hyde Park was taken by Henry VIII from Westminster Abbey; he used it as a hunting ground. It became common ground on the edge of London, a meeting place for mobs, the illicit and the sexually commercial. The two parks have quite different atmospheres. Kensington Gardens is polite and parochial, a dog-walking, pram-pushing park. Hyde Park is more public and political; it hosted the great reforming marches, student rallies and save-the-world pop concerts.

Here was the reformers’ tree, a post office for political reform and Tyburn. The licence given to the hanged to shout a final plea, prayer or curse to the public became Speakers’ Corner. Every Sunday, comfortingly like every other Sunday, the diktat of stern religion, extreme unelectable politics and bizarre dietary advice is shouted out in single-issues raps.

Pre-Berlin-Wall communists and pre-Darwin Christians offer a sort of puppet show of free speech – a mime with volume. The audience is mostly amused tourists. For all the blood and broken necks that bought it, you sense that this freedom of speech is not the cornerstone of a democracy. The foundation, the load-bearing beam of a free society, is not shouting: it’s being able to make people listen.

In the centre of the park is a police station with an old-fashioned blue light and a red pillar box. The royal parks stand apart from the boroughs and districts that they float in: they have their own laws and customs, and the man in charge of policing them is Superintendent Simon Ovens, whose office is papered with positively enforcing aphorisms. His favourite is “The main thing is to make the main thing the main thing.” “I must say that a dozen times a day,” he tells me.

He’s very proud of the park and the policing of it. There’s always a response car circling; they can be at any point within three or four minutes. There are officers on foot, on bikes and on horses. There are, on average, two reported incidents a day; there is also an astonishing 44% clear-up rate, which makes the park not just the safest area of comparable size in the city but, by miles, the most efficiently and effectively policed.

What I’m surprised by is that this isn’t done with zero-tolerance, obsessive zealotry. “Look,” says the superintendent, “with all the bylaws, it’s probably technically illegal to do everything in the park, but our job is to see that the people who use it get to do what they want without interfering with the rights of others to do what they want. We have a lot of conflicting interests here, lots of different cultures. Middle Eastern families bring picnics; they don’t necessarily get on with the dog-walkers [there are a million visits by accompanied dogs a year], and the most complaints are about cyclists.”

Football games have to go on beside hen parties and capoeira classes; women in burkas have to put up with girls lying in their bras and pants. But there is something about the park that seems to make people decent citizens. “I have events with 60,000 people here. We have to get them in and out safely with a handful of officers. If that was a football crowd, I’d need at least 2,000 policemen.”

The park is innately a well-mannered, liberal, live-and-let-live place. What about sex? He leans back in his chair. “Well, there’s a lot of it. That’s traditionally what a lot of people come to parks for. You’ve been down to the Rose Garden? It’s a gay meeting place and has been for years; it’s near the barracks. It’s not my officers’ job to go and poke around bushes to catch people doing what they’re doing. We’ve all moved on from that.

If they want to discreetly go behind an arbour, no one’s going to come looking for them. If, on the other hand, you’re going to have sex on a bench in front of passers-by, then you’ll get nicked. But gay men are a vulnerable group – robbery, homophobic violence and blackmail. A lot of them are married, so this is clandestine and they have a right to protection. So we have a presence in the garden. Officers in high-vis jackets with torches patrol the central walk. We’re there to protect gay men. They have a right to the park like everyone else.”

There is a lot of sex in the park. It is in the nature of nature to flirt and ogle and for kids to practise with their new hormones. You notice that the couples are either very young or surprisingly middle-aged. There are also a lot of mixed-race couples and a lot of discreet Asians holding hands. All the people who would get a room if they could but can’t. The park exists as a great, damp, free bedsit for those who need a place to get squirmy and intense.

Couples look like mating frogs washed up on river banks, clothes hoicked and snagged on cruxes, fingers inching the attrition of ardour across buckles and buttons and bra clasps; suckered in interminable thoughtless lockjawed snogs. And on benches, the office romances and infidelities, the coy shared sandwiches, fumbled intense kisses, the stroking and clasping and the gazing.

On any summer Friday, the park pullulates with couples dry-humping before going back on commuter trains to their rightful owners in the suburbs. The Rose Garden, which at night slips into the gay rut, is by day at its most beautiful, a frothing flower garden. Tourists sit on the benches; tramps compete with the scent; families stand in front of the perilous piles of petals and grin to have their pictures taken, to be stuck in albums around the globe.

All the formal gardening in Hyde Park is meticulous, endlessly captivating. Hidden in the middle of the park is a compost heap the size of the Dome. Along with the army of gardeners, there are arboriculturists and wildlife wardens looking after 62 genera of trees, 130 species and 120 subspecies. On the Hyde Park side, the prominent species is the London plane. They don’t just give off oxygen: their flaky bark absorbs pollution. Generations of children have known that their round seeds are fairy eggs. In Kensington Gardens, the dominant species are the chestnuts.

There are walks of mulberries; a family of Cypriot women collect unripe almonds on Lovers’ Walk in Hyde Park. Through the high summer, there is a fugitive, sweet smell that’s like moving through the rooms of an invisible bordello – it’s the flowering limes. The park has large areas of set-aside heather, wild barley and meadow grass. One woman regularly leaves death threats for the park manager on his answering machine because the seeds get caught in her dog’s paws.

Over the years, Hyde Park has accumulated knick-knacks, memorials, statues, ornaments, like granny furniture. They grow to be abided and occasionally loved. There’s a Wellington memorial on the southeastern corner made out of boiled cannons, paid for by the women of Britain. It is a colossal rendering of Achilles in his rage; he’s classically naked. He was the first naked man to stand in London. The mothers and the nannies of Kensington were outraged, so a fig leaf was slapped on him like a prurient parking ticket. They might have been more outraged if they realised his fury was due to the death of his boyfriend. Now he glares in his leafy thong at Byron over Park Lane.

There is a stone monolith to the Holocaust in Hyde Park, and a lump of granite given by the grateful people of Norway. There is the original statue that inspired part of the Rhodes memorial in Cape Town, and the sad obelisk to Speke, who killed himself after discovering the source of the Nile. And there’s Albert in his derided gothic-revival space rocket, now gleaming gold, surrounded by more pulchritudinous allegory than even a serious German could bear. The corner groups represent the four continents; the houri from Asia on the elephant has the best pair of stone tits in London.

Outside Kensington Palace, there’s William of Orange – a gift from the Kaiser, and a statue of Queen Victoria, who was born and lived here in relative regal poverty. It’s sculpted by her daughter. And there’s a little terrier with his bottom in the air standing in a drinking fountain, in memory of Esme Percy, an actor who died in 1957 and instantly became so utterly forgotten he might never have existed.

As far as I can discover, he specialised in walk-on aristocrats and once played Ali, the grand eunuch, in the 1935 film Abdul the Damned.

Most magically and memorably, there is Peter Pan, the Frampton statue that is one of the most famous monuments in the world. It is certainly the most poignantly beloved and beautiful in London. It appeared overnight and was commissioned and paid for by Barrie, the author who invented him. He met the Llewellyn Davies children and their mother and their dog in the gardens and they were the inspiration for the greatest fairy story every written.

But Kensington Gardens isn’t just the place where infants lost by forgetful nannies get taken to Neverland: it is Neverland. Every scene in the book belongs here. The weeping beech that Peter sleeps in is still living in the flower walk. The statue is on the shore of the Long Water, where he lands after his voyage in the birds’ nest. Peter stands on a pixilated plinth of fairies and animals. He’s hidden in an alcove of foliage, so you come upon him all of a sudden.

I sat for an hour and watched the parents bring their children, and the odd thing is that although the kids find the little mice and the rabbits in the sculpture with delight, it is the grown-ups who really get knocked back by Peter. Some to tears. This man-child playing his pipes, blowing a tune whose pitch is too high and fragile for us to hear any more, forcefully reminds them that Barrie’s story is not about children but grown-ups. At the heart of the adventure, the romance and the swashbuckling is the saddest truth ever told, that we all grow up and that what we leave behind is more precious than what we gain.

And then there’s Princess Diana. How naturally one follows the other. The votive cult of the dead Diana has added a million visitors to Kensington Gardens. Her pilgrimage path is marked out by ugly goitres in the road like maudlin speed bumps. I’ve wandered the park for years and I still have no idea where they lead.

There is the memorial children’s playground with its pirate ship, a ghostly ironic nod to Pan, and there is the great, grudging, temper-filled fountain that was the lavatorial focus for so much regurgitated bile and sour resentment when it opened. Actually, now, when nobody’s watching, it looks rather chic and elegantly pale. The water rolls and tumbles in a pleasing way and lots of people come to dabble and just stare into the distance in a bashful, shy, enigmatic way.

I stood on the bank and the chap in a bit of a uniform came up and said: “You can’t stand on the memorial. You can sit on it, lie on it or wade in it, but you can’t stand on it.” How do I get to sit on it without standing on it first? “I don’t know,” he said, and shook his head. This was the great central mystery of his calling, which wasn’t primarily as a vestal guard but as a contract cleaner. He works for the private company that maintains the princess’s waterwork. What’s it like? “Hard work, man. She needs scrubbing out every day. She grows mould and slippery.” You can see her being cleaned in the early morning as the guards go for their coffee trot.

The fountain has its own deep aquifer and uses hundreds of gallons of water that are then pumped into the Serpentine. At its conception and construction, the horizontal Diana fountain seemed like a particularly vacuous committee choice. But now, 10 years later, it looks slyly appropriate: elegant, shallow and exceedingly high maintenance, with a deep colonic most mornings, but despite everything rather winning.

Hyde Park is a polyglot pan-national place.

All the tongues and customs of the world come here. A park is an internationally understandable place – streets, shops and coffee bars may seem intimidating to foreigners, but everyone speaks park. In the lunch hour, men unroll their mats and make their prayers facing Whiteleys, next to couples sharing bacon sandwiches. Filipino maids lift their faces to the sun and little gangs of Polish lads go about their laddie business. A big Ghanaian skates backwards, legs crossing and uncrossing down the boulevard, arms flailing like a man falling from a high window.

There is always a sadness to the park, an elusive atmosphere of melancholy punctuated by the squeals of prep-school games lessons and toddlers in hard hats slumped on fat, slow ponies; the parties of butt-cheeky girls with bottles of Pinot Grigio. The park is where people come to bring their sadness and loneliness.

For every pair of young lovers, there is a broken heart on a solitary bench; hunched men with furrowed brows take clouds of depression to walk the aimless paths as medication. The mad and maddened come to mutter and shout at the wood nymphs and zephyrs. In the wild grass in the north of the park, a lost vicar with a suitcase and a spaniel stops and asks if we can remind him of the redeeming truth of existence. He’s quietly desperate, politely overwhelmed by unhappiness.

Hyde Park, without instruction, direction, government or judiciary, has grown to be a model of a just and benign society, where people behave well not because they’re made to, but because they can. Where crowds come and depart freely and in good temper. On a summer Saturday there may be 20,000 people here who will let each other be with grace and politeness. Every race, religion, age and class can play or read or eat in an egalitarian beauty and safety.

You can do things here that you would never dare do anywhere else; it relieves you of embarrassment or shame; it is a small liberal proof that if you trust people, they behave with manners and care. The park is the vindication of a quiet levelling English anarchy. The streams of rush-hour cyclists race each other westwards like flocks of Day-Glo geese; the park grows quiet; the sun balances on top of St Mary Abbots’ steeple on the southern carriageway; seven herons and a fox wait in a flowerbed to be fed by a deranged lady with an unspeakable sack.

Kensington Gardens closes at dusk. Hyde Park stays open till midnight. The darkness creeps through the trees, which become home to foxes, moths and pipistrelle bats, and central European builders looking for a place to sleep. The park is lit by Victorian gaslights; they cast an ethereal pale glow, and through the avenues of planes the harsh neons of the red and white city streets glint and hiss, but here in the pearly blue quietness the park grows bewitchingly enchanted, a hint of a parallel utopia, that other Eden.