B/W print; View of Hyde Park showing Rotten Row and the southern section of the ring, looking west by Topical Press, Jul 1923
Main details
| Reference number | 1999/20202 |
|---|---|
| Description | View of Hyde Park showing Rotten Row and the southern section of the ring, looking west. Both are busy with motor cars and pedestrians. Part of the portico and entablature of a classical building is in the left foreground. |
| Photographer | |
| Dates | Jul 1923 |
| Collection | |
| Object type |
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| Photograph number | U1952 |
| Location | |
| Topics | |
| Completeness | 72% |
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Physical description
Item content Attribute Value Annotation THE SEASON IN TOWN, 1923.
HYDE PARK: ROTTEN ROW AND THE SOUTHERN SECTION OF THE RING, LOOKING WEST.
Photograph (taken July, 1923) by Topical Press. Underground copyright.
HYDE PARK, - Continued.
the office of works, 1874-88) formed the Dell, with its touch of the sub-tropical, and planted flowers (Hyde Park was the first of the royal parks of London to be planted with flowers) and many new trees.
Many years ago a man with a keen eye to business conceived the idea of letting out chairs for hire in the Park, at a penny a head. He obtained official sanction and reaped a very good profit from his venture. There are now something like 25,000 chairs in Hyde Park, let out by arrangement with the Office of Works.
Rotten Row seems to have originated with a carriage road formed by William III. to facilitate his journeyings between Westminster and Kensington Palace, in days when the highway between these places left very much to be desired. The alleged derivation of Rotten Row from ROUTE DU ROI is fanciful - and nonsensical, if for no other reason than French had ceased to be the language of even the aristocracy of England many centuries before the carriage road was formed.
Forty years or so ago cows grazed in Hyde Park, and the jobmasters of the West End were wont to send along for the mulch, which is supposed to have beneficial effects on the hoofs of horses. The Hyde Park sheep come largely from Aberdeen, and the shepherds in charge of them are generally from the same place.
An allusion is made to the Great Exhibition merely to remind one that the term Crystal Palace was first applied to the great glasshouse when it stood in Hyde Park.
Next year (1924) the grass-plots skirting Park Lane will put forth a wondrous display of Spring blooms, the "Evening News" having recently presented 100,000 bulbs to the Office of Works for planting here. It is difficult to keep Carmelite House off the grass; but this intrusion will do something to make up for the disfiguring "Daily Mail" signs set up in various other parts of London.
In common with the other Royal parks, Hyde Park displays at its gates, framed maps from which a good deal of information respecting the names, etc., of various parts of the park may be obtained, an innovation that might be adopted for the parks under the L.C.C.
Frank Buckland, while stationed with the Life Guards at Knightsbridge, used to observe the changing colours of the water of the Serpentine. He relates how in April it appeared to be dark and mud-like in aspect; in June greenish, and in August the colour of the sea in calm. These variations Buckland attributed to the hatching of minute infusoria and the germination of minute vegetable matter - animal and plant life assimilating and converting into their own forms what would otherwise have arisen in the form of gas and miasma and have been greatly injurious to the health of people walking along the banks.
16,000 trees in the park.Design Attribute Value Shot long exterior -
People involved
Role Person(s) involved Photographer Topical Press, Jul 1923Copied by Colin Tait, 1982 -
Associated companies, people and places
Places Location Hyde Park, Westminster, SW7People Attribute Value People Charles West -