The Reformers' Tree to The Serpentine: Where the Plague Refugees Camped

Look around you. These green lawns, the gentle slope down toward the water... it all feels so peaceful now. But in the summer of sixteen sixty-five, this very ground was a place of Desperation.

London · from the walk “The People's Park: Secrets & Untold Stories of Hyde Park”

Open the walk

The Dell, Hyde Park, Serpentine Road, London W2 2UH

Look around you. These green lawns, the gentle slope down toward the water... it all feels so peaceful now. But in the summer of sixteen sixty-five, this very ground was a place of Desperation.

The Great Plague of London, lasting from sixteen sixty-five to sixteen sixty-six, killed an estimated one hundred thousand people... almost a quarter of the city's population... in just eighteen months. And the terrified people who survived had nowhere to go.

Those who could afford it — the doctors, the lawyers, the merchants — fled the city entirely. King Charles the Second and his courtiers abandoned London in July for Hampton Court and then Oxford. Red crosses were painted on infected houses with the words "Lord Have Mercy Upon Us" written above them. Those households were Locked UP, with guards posted outside to prevent escape — effectively condemning entire families to death.

But what about the poor? The ones who couldn't escape to the countryside? Where could They go?

A large number of the poorer inhabitants of London, who could not escape into the country, brought their household goods here to Hyde Park, set up tents, and formed a sort of desperate camp. Picture it... hundreds of makeshift shelters scattered across these open fields, families huddled together, hoping that clean air and distance from the city's narrow streets might save them.

At its peak in September, seven thousand one hundred and sixty-five Londoners died in a Single Week. Back in the city, the bells never stopped tolling.

But even here in Hyde Park, death followed. Despite all their precautions, the plague pursued them, and those who died were buried as quickly as possible upon the spot. A broadside ballad preserved in the British Museum describes the horror of that encampment — the cold nights, the sick dragged to a separate field from which few ever returned.

And here's a detail most people never hear. During that fatal summer, a regiment of the Guards was actually quartered right here in the park, under the command of Monk, Duke of Albemarle, who — unlike the King — refused to quit the doomed city. He was one of just three brave men who held London's government together while everyone else ran.

Now look toward the Serpentine. That lake didn't exist in sixteen sixty-five. It was created decades later, in seventeen thirty, when Queen Caroline ordered the damming of the River Westbourne. Back during the plague, this was just open grassland with a stream running through it — the very stream those desperate campers would have depended on for drinking water.

It must have been with great relief that the poor creatures encamped here learned that, by the end of October, the plague had finally disappeared, and they could return to their homes in London. The grass grew back. The park recovered. And today, three and a half centuries later... you're standing where they stood.

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