Kensington Gardens

Her favourite part of any scooter journey was whizzing along the Broad Walk of Kensington Gardens, and she was having so much fun, pushing her scooter faster and faster that she didn’t notice that she was being followed.


And who wouldn’t want to zoom along that downhill slope at top speed on a scooter, bike or roller blades?

Kensington Gardens is one of the many Royal Parks around London but this was part of Hyde Park right up until 1689, when the King and Queen, William III and Mary II came into power. The King liked this small part of London because the air was clean, therefore making it a better place to live, because he suffered from asthma. The Royals bought a building called Nottingham House and renamed it Kensington Palace, and it became their main home. The Queen started to create a palace garden in the Dutch style to help her husband feel at home, as he was born in Holland.

Queen Anne, Mary’s sister, was crowned Queen in 1702 and she wanted to make the gardens bigger and so took 30 acres away from Hyde Park. Queen Anne told her designers to make a garden that seemed more English. She also built the Orangery, which was meant to serve as a greenhouse for exotic plants, but was also used for entertainment. Today, it is still a restaurant. The gardens got even bigger when Queen Caroline took yet another 300 acres from Hyde Park in 1728. The new design focused on the palace itself and the Round Pound (see below), where all angles provide different views of the palace.



Back then, the gardens were only open on Saturday and you had to be properly dressed just to enter. Clemmy’s favourite path, the Broad Walk, became a very fashionable place indeed; there would be no scooter rides here. Sadly when the Queen Victoria took up residence in Buckingham Palace, the Gardens became a forgotten place and there was nowhere near enough work carried out on them compared with years gone by.However, it was because of her that we have one of the most eye catching structures in Kensington Gardens, the Albert Memorial, which you can see below. It was built in the memory of Queen Victoria’s husband Prince Albert, who died in 1861 at the age of 42 from typhoid. The structure was dedicated to the Prince, his interests, and all of the achievements of the Victorian times. There are marble figures on each corner of the structure to represent Europe, Asia, Africa and America. For more information on the memorial click here


The Kensington Gardens is a great place to visit. There is so much to see, ranging from the Palace, to swans in the Round Pound, and even a statue of the legendary Robin Hood. For the young ones there is also a park, in memorial to Diana Princess of Wales. And of course you can whizz along the Broad Walk on your scooter. Just remember wear a helmet and check to see if there are any mysterious Slakistanians following you.

And finally, many thanks to www.royalparks.org.uk, who provided much of the information in this blog entry.