Inventory Site Record

* on The National Heritage List for England, Parks & Gardens

The marshy site was acquired in 1532 and drained for a deer park by Henry VIII, who built St James's Palace as a hunting lodge. In the C17th St James's Park was remodelled for James I and later for Charles II who opened it to the public. Its formal layout had avenues of trees, lawns and a rectangular canal extending for c.900m. In 1828/9 it was drastically re-landscaped by John Nash, and his undulating landscape essentially remains, the lake the central feature with an island at each end, belts of trees along boundaries, extensive lawns and winding paths. Pulham & Co constructed various works in 1895 and 1899, including rockwork on the lake edge, 'Cormorant & Pelican islands' for the park's birdlife and a small rocky pool along the inner bank of the island. The western end of the park and lake were remodelled in 1901-11 to accommodate the rond-point of the Queen Victoria Memorial Gardens. Between c.1894 and at least 1914 a historic bomb disposal facility was located on Duck Island.

Site location:

Horse Guards Parade/Birdcage Walk/The Mall, St James's

Postcode:

SW1

What 3 Words:

animal.thinks.host

Type of site:

Public Park

Borough:

Westminster

Open to public?

Yes

Opening times:

unrestricted (Royal Parks Allotment open daily to end October, 10am-5pm; 020 7298 2006)

Special conditions:

Facilities:

Playground, toilets / disabled toilets, deck chairs (April-Sept); refreshment points; Inn the Park restaurant, toilets. St James's Park Allotment

Events:

Guided walks, Band concerts lunchtime/early evening end May - end August; pelican feeding daily at 2.30pm.

Public transport:

Tube: St James's Park (District, Circle)

Citymapper    
Google Map    
streetmap.co.uk

Research updated:

06/03/2024

Last minor changes:

06/03/2024

Please check with the site owner or manager for latest news. www.royalparks.org.uk

Site on The National Heritage List for England, Parks & Gardens, for Register Entry see https://www.historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list. The Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England was established in 1984 and was commonly called English Heritage. In April 2015 it split into 2 separate entities, Historic England (HE), which continues to champion and protect the historic environment, and the English Heritage Trust, whose role is to look after the 400+ historic sites and monuments owned by the state. HE manages the National Heritage List for England (NHLE) that includes over 400,000 items ranging from prehistoric monuments to office blocks, battlefields and parks, which benefit from legal protection.

The site of St James's Park was drained by Henry VIII c.1530 when he acquired the land to make it a royal deer park; at that time the royal court was nearby at the Palace of Westminster. Prior to this the area was marshy, with farms, woodland and a leper hospital established here in the C13th from which the park took its name. Henry originally built what became the Palace of St James as a hunting lodge for his new deer park. It remained a deer park until 1603 and was then landscaped by James I, with a large pool at the west known as Rosamond's Pond, which had disappeared by 1770, and small ponds, channels and islands at the east end formed a duck decoy. James I laid out a flower garden near the palace and had a royal menagerie in the park that included an elephant, camels and crocodiles as well as aviaries along what became Birdcage Walk.

The park was then remodelled for Charles II in c.1662 with a formal layout incorporating both The Mall with double lines of trees along the north-west boundary, and a rectangular canal extending for c.900m between what is now Buckingham Palace and Horse Guards Parade, the latter created in the C18th by infilling the canal here. Charles II's designer is still uncertain but may have been the Frenchman Andre Mollet; Charles would have seen the grand gardens of the French royal family and other aristocrats while he was in exile in France. Charles opened the park to the public for the first time, and introduced the French game of Pelle Melle, from which Pall Mall and The Mall were later named. The first pelicans in the park arrived in 1664, a gift to the king by the Russian ambassador. Buckingham House became a royal residence when it was purchased by the crown in 1761.

In the late 1820s, while The Mall survived, becoming a processional route to the new Buckingham Palace, the park itself was drastically remodelled in the naturalistic style then fashionable. The landscape design was by John Nash, with planting advice from William Aiton of Kew, in 1828-29, the project undertaken for the Prince Regent, who later became George IV. It was part of the larger scheme that led to the creation of Regent's Park (q.v.) and Regent's Street. Nash had earlier designed a group of temporary buildings for St James's Park for the Victory Celebrations of 1814. The formal avenues and linear canal became serpentine, and shrubberies replaced formal flower beds. The central feature of St James's Park remains the lake, with sinuous contours and an island at each end.

The eastern Duck Island contains Duck Island Cottage (or Lodge), built in 1840, designed by John Burges Watson. Pulham & Co constructed various works in 1895 and 1899, including rockwork on the lake edge, 'Cormorant & Pelican islands' for the park's birdlife and a small rocky pool along the inner bank of the island. The lake extends from west-south-west to east-north-east, with peripheral paths, and is crossed at mid-point by a bridge of 1956-57 that replaced the earlier suspension bridge of 1857.

St James's Park and Duck Island played an interesting role in the history of early British bomb disposal. In c.1894 an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) facility was established here by Colonel Vivian Dering Majendie, RA (1836-1898) working with chemist Dr August DuPre. Majendie,a veteran of the Crimea and the Indian Mutiny, was Assistant Superintendent of the Royal Laboratory at Woolwich Arsenal in 1870. In July 1871 he was appointed Inspector of Gunpowder Works by the Home Office, and in 1875 became Chief Inspector of Explosives. He had dealt with a wide variety of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and associated investigations, and had developed procedures for Counter-improvised Explosive Devices. Majendie and DuPre first worked together in 1871 when Majendie was investigating two serious explosions in a gun-cotton factory in Stowmarket that killed 24 people, and needed the expertise of a chemist. Dupre was then Consulting Chemist to the Medical Department of the Privy Council, and in 1872 was appointed Chemical Adviser to the Home Office. In the 1880s and '90s there was an upsurge in anarchist and terrorist bombings world-wide, including the Fenian Dynamite Campaign. Having reviewed techniques used by other authorities, particularly the American and the French, Majendie recommended that three similar facilities to those established in strategic locations in Paris should be established in London – the first on Duck Island in St James's Park, due to its proximity to the seat of Government, another in Hyde Park, due to its proximity to Oxford Street and Mayfair, and a third in the moat at the Tower of London, adjacent to the City and financial district. The facility on Duck Island is the only one that definitely existed although that in Hyde Park may have done. The form these took emulated the French model with facilities housed in wooden sheds that could be easily and cheaply repaired, and having an earth mound designed to stop shrapnel. Equipment included a hydraulic press, probably used to open the IEDs semi-remotely, and a contraption for lowering an IED into a mercury bath where the solder that held together some devices would be dissolved. The Duck Island facility operated from November 1894 until at least 1914 when some suffragette devices were moved here for disposal. The IEDs were  initially transported in a hand cart and later in a specialist vehicle provided by the Army. Remains of the wooden shacks were still on Duck Island in the 1980s, by which time they were derelict and hidden among shrubbery, at which point the Royal Engineers were given the task of removing the remnants to Chatham, where they appear to have been lost or scrapped. Among the remnants was a hydraulic press. The Royal Parks cleared Duck Island of other redundant breeding sheds between 1995-97, with the exception of one small bunker which it is understood was used to store anti-aircraft ammunition during WWII.

The western end of the park, and of the lake, was remodelled c.1907 to accommodate the rond-point of the Victoria Memorial. The landscaping of the park today is essentially that of Nash, and its undulating ground allows the unobtrusive presence of its numerous visitors (as imitated in the later C20th at Keukenhof in the Netherlands). There are belts of trees along boundaries, extensive lawns beside the lake, winding paths between entrances, and areas of bedding, with unmatched views east to Whitehall, and west to Buckingham Palace. It has been called London's best landscape garden, and 'the haunt of Civil Servants' (see Hunter Davies). The refreshment pavilion was replaced in 2004 by a new restaurant facility designed by Michael Hopkins architects, with a turf roof to blend into the landscape. Another recent addition to the park is the Royal Parks Allotment, which also functions as an educational project. The National Police Memorial, opened by HM Queen Elizabeth II on 26 April 2005, was the first memorial to be erected in St James's Park for over 100 years. Standing at the junction of Horse Guards Road and The Mall the memorial was designed by Norman Foster architects and commemorates police officers killed in the line of duty. 

Queen Victoria Memorial Gardens by Sir Aston Webb was conceived in 1901 by the Queen Victoria Memorial Committee as part of a 'great architectural and scenic change' near Buckingham Palace, and the gardens were part of Sir Aston Webb's design for the transformation of the Mall. The Gardens, which form a broad semi-circular sweep at the west end of the Mall were the second creation of the Memorial after the unveiling of Brock's white marble memorial group in 1911. The Gardens are enclosed by a low stone balustrade that links the three ornamental exit gates commemorating the Empire; there are two less elaborate subsidiary gateways at the junction of Birdcage Walk and Buckingham Gate. Parts of both Green Park and St James's Park were taken to create the garden space. The gardens have been returfed and replanted, and consist of a system of formal flower beds on lawn. The gates, piers, balustrades and retaining walls are listed. Early designs for a much more ambitious scheme are in the RIBA Drawings Collection.

Sources consulted:

Royal Parks Review (1993) St James's and Green Parks: Regent's Park and Primrose Hill; Braybrooke N, London Green, 1959, 137-194; Cole N, Royal Parks and Gardens of London, 1877, 25-26; Davies H, A Walk Round London's Parks, 1983, 8-16, 18-22; Pevsner N, rev Cherry B, London I, 1985, 642; For further publications, see Desmond R, Bibliography of British Gardens,1984; 180-181; Edward Jones & Christopher Woodward, A Guide to the Architecture of London, London 1983, p.231; Harold Clunn, the Face of London (c1950) p. 215; Ben Weinreb & Christopher Hibbert, 'The London Encyclopaedia' (Macmillan, revised ed. 1993), pp.630-31. See Blog ‘Standing Well Back, IED & EOD Evolutions’: Discovering London’s Bomb Disposal Facility from 1894, posted on 3 April 2018: https://www.standingwellback.com/discovering-londons-bomb-disposal-facility-from-1894/. See also Jennifer Ward 'Origins And Development Of Forensic Medicine And Forensic Science In England, 1823-1946'. PhD thesis The Open University, 1993, Chapter 8, The role of the Home Office Inspector of Explosives.

Grid ref:

TQ290799 (529420,179806)

Size in hectares:

23

Site ownership:

Royal Parks Agency

Site management:

Royal Parks Agency

Date(s):

C17th; 1828; 1901-11

Designer(s):

John Nash; Sir Aston Webb (Queen Victoria Memorial Gardens)

Listed structures:

LBI: Brock's white marble memorial group; gates, piers, balustrades and retaining walls to Queen Victoria Memorial Garden

On National Heritage List for England (NHLE), Parks & Gardens:

Yes

NHLE grade:

Grade I

Registered common or village green on Commons Registration Act 1965:

No

Protected under London Squares Preservation Act 1931:

No

Local Authority Data

The information below is taken from the relevant Local Authority's planning legislation, which was correct at the time of research but may have been amended in the interim. Please check with the Local Authority for latest planning information.

On Local List:

No

In Conservation Area:

Yes

Conservation Area name:

St James's

Tree Preservation Order:

Not known

Nature Conservation Area:

Yes - Metropolitan Importance

Green Belt:

No

Metropolitan Open Land:

No

Special Policy Area:

No

Other LA designation:

None

St James's Park - Photo: Colin Wing
Date taken: 02/10/19 15:23

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