Deal Street

Don’t let Hyde Park’s sylvan surroundings fool you with its sense of intimacy and cosiness; some serious business deals are struck here.

- Hindol Sengupta

Charles Dickens loved “the park, par excellence”. Virginia Woolf, her sister Vanessa Bell and brother Thoby used to publish a little newspaper with all the merry happenings when they lived at 22 Hyde Park Gate, and Michael Holme, that poignant violinist protagonist in Vikram Seth’s haunting love story An Equal Music, lived at Bayswater Road and swam in the Serpentine, its famed lake.

We are talking of course of Hyde Park—350 acres with a long snaking walk around the 40-acre lake called the Serpentine. Here, until the 18th century, deer were hunted by the nobility, and no doubt some merely rich too. After all, the park was created for hunting by Henry VIII in 1536 after he bought the manor of Hyde from the neighbouring Abbey. The Great Fair of 1814—where the Battle of Trafalgar was re-enacted—unfolded in this park, complete with the French fleet sinking dramatically in the pond. The Great Exhibition of 1851 with its giant Crystal Palace took place here. The Irish Republican Army bombed it in 1982, Pope Benedict held his prayer meeting here in 2010 and since 2007, it has hosted a giant Winter Wonderland with the U.K.’s largest outdoor ice-skating rink. It also regularly hosts some of the world’s top musical acts—Bob Dylan stopped by this July.

But Hyde Park has developed another identity—as London has become the capital of global money—over the years. It is home to that unique thing which, having observed it for years, I have termed the Hyde Park Power Walk.

It is a walk that is conducted through the summer by the rich and famous (mostly by the rich), who flock to live around the park.

There are two kinds of clothing to be found on this walk: Western-styled comfort wear or the billowing robes of Arabia that swish in the sunlight as the richest and poshest of all the Gulf states seem to have arrived in central London during Ramzaan season.