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Hyde Park

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Plate A2 of the 1746 Rocque map. Image courtesy of LUNA at the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Plate A2 of the 1746 Rocque map. Image courtesy of LUNA at the Folger Shakespeare Library.
The Hyde Park frequented by modern Londoners and tourists today was created in 1637, well after the drawing of the Agas map and four years after the 1633 fourth edition of Stow’s Survey. To the early modern Londoner, Hyde Park was a private royal hunting ground. The manor of Hyde had belonged to Westminster Abbey until it was acquired by Henry VIII in 1536. In 1625, Charles I built a carriage-racing track in the park. James Shirley’s 1632 play, Hyde Park (published 1637; DEEP 861), takes the park as its subject and main location.
The park was located west of the area covered by the Agas map. The eastern edge of the eighteenth-century park appears on the far western edge of John Rocque’s 1746 An exact survey of the cities of London and Westminster.
For more information, see the essays on Landscape History and History and Architecture at the The Royal Parks website.

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