HapooLondon parks, for the walk
21 of them so far, each written for somebody standing at the gate with a lead in their hand rather than for a guidebook. These are the same words the app shows when you tap a park on the map.
Alexandra Park
A hill with a palace on top of it, which burned down sixteen days after opening in 1873 and was rebuilt inside two years.
Battersea Park
Riverside and Victorian, and more varied than its size suggests: a boating lake, a bandstand, a Peace Pagoda, and enough tree cover to be bearable in…
Brockwell Park
A hill in Herne Hill with a Georgian house on top of it, opened to the public in 1892.
Clapham Common
Two hundred-odd acres of flat open grass with very little landscaping, which turns out to be exactly what most dogs want.
Clissold Park
Saved from builders in the 1880s by a local campaign and opened to the public in 1889.
Crystal Palace Park
The Crystal Palace itself stood here from 1854, moved out of Hyde Park after the Great Exhibition, until it burned down one night in 1936.
Dulwich Park
Victorian and flat, opened in 1890 on land given by the Dulwich Estate and laid out around a carriage drive that still makes a tidy circuit of about a…
Finsbury Park
One of London's first public parks, opened in 1869, and named after a district a few miles south of it because that is who the land was bought for.
Green Park
The plainest of the Royal Parks, and deliberately so: forty-seven acres of grass and plane trees, with no lake, no fountains and no flower beds anywhere…
Greenwich Park
Steep, which is the thing nobody mentions.
Hackney Marshes
Flat, enormous, and almost entirely given over to football: for most of the last century this held more pitches than anywhere else in Europe, and on a…
Hampstead Heath
Not a park so much as a piece of countryside that London built around rather than over.
Highbury Fields
Islington's largest open space, which says more about Islington than about the fields: twenty-nine acres of plane trees and grass, and the only real green…
Hyde Park
Taken by Henry VIII from Westminster Abbey in 1536 to hunt deer in, and opened to the public a century later by Charles I.
London Fields
Common land since at least the sixteenth century, when it was where drovers rested livestock on the last night before the City.
Peckham Rye
Two things at once: a flat open common, and a park of proper gardens behind it that opened in 1894.
Primrose Hill
Small, steep, and almost entirely about the view from the top, which takes in most of central London and is worth the four minutes it takes to get up…
Regent's Park
Laid out by John Nash from 1811 for a Prince Regent who never got round to building the palace it was designed to surround.
Richmond Park
The largest of the Royal Parks, and the only one with several hundred free-roaming deer in it, which is the one thing to know before a lead comes off.
Victoria Park
East London's oldest public park, opened in 1845 after local people petitioned parliament for somewhere to breathe.
Wimbledon Common
Not landscaped, and never has been. Eleven hundred acres of heath, scrub and woodland saved from development by an Act of Parliament in 1871 and run ever…
Characters turn up at these
Twenty-one of them, at real gates, on their own schedule. Walk there and meet one. The app counts the walk whether or not anybody is about.
