London’s parks are a record of who held the ground and who was made to give it up. Hyde Park, St James’s Park, Green Park, Kensington Gardens, Greenwich Park and Richmond Park all began as royal hunting land and passed to the public one concession at a time: Charles I opened the Hyde Park gates in 1637, and in 1758 a Richmond brewer sued for public access and won. Beneath them runs water the city otherwise buried — the Westbourne dammed to make the Serpentine, the Fleet ponded into the Hampstead chains, the Lea dug back out of its culverts at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
They diverge sharply after that. Green Park is forty acres of plane and lime that refuses to plant a flowerbed; Richmond Park is over two thousand acres of bracken, veteran oak and free-roaming deer. Regent’s Park was drawn all at once by John Nash as town planning, Battersea Park was raised out of riverside marsh by Victorian reformers, and Hampstead Heath was never designed at all. Orient yourself by the journey: the central parks are minutes from everything, the outer ones repay the travel in landscape.
At a glance
| # | Place | Score | Reviews | Stands out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hyde Park | ⭐ 9.5 | 142 671 | Editors' pick |
| 2 | St James's Park | ⭐ 9.5 | 63 286 | — |
| 3 | Greenwich Park | ⭐ 9.7 | 50 474 | People's favourite |
| 4 | Regent's Park | ⭐ 9.5 | 49 434 | — |
| 5 | Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park | ⭐ 9.1 | 32 747 | — |
| 6 | Richmond Park | ⭐ 9.7 | 31 302 | — |
| 7 | Kensington Gardens | ⭐ 9.5 | 30 526 | — |
| 8 | Green Park | ⭐ 9.3 | 27 973 | — |
| 9 | Battersea Park | ⭐ 9.5 | 23 476 | — |
| 10 | Hampstead Heath | ⭐ 9.5 | 20 264 | — |
Highlights
-
Editors' pick:
Hyde Park -
People's favourite:
Greenwich Park
Opening hours
Open around the clock: Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
Open late: Hyde Park, St James's Park, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Green Park.
Check the hours before you set out — they shift on holidays and out of season.
Full ranking
1. Hyde Park · ⭐ 9.5
(142671 reviews)
+7 photos
London, United Kingdom
Three hundred and fifty acres of grass, water and plane trees sit in the middle of Westminster, and almost everything London does in public, it has done here first. Kings hunted deer across it. Victorians raised a palace of glass on it. A million people have marched over it. And on an ordinary Tuesday it is simply where the city goes to run, swim, argue and lie flat in the sun.…
«In the centre of London, a block away from the royal residence, a worldwide symbol of free…»
2. St James's Park · ⭐ 9.5
(63286 reviews)
+7 photos
London SW1A 2BJ, United Kingdom
Fifty-seven acres of lake, willow and lawn, wrapped by Buckingham Palace at one end and Horse Guards at the other, make this the smallest of the central Royal Parks and by a wide margin the most photographed. It is also the oldest: Henry VIII bought the marsh here in 1532, and every monarch since has left a mark on it. The single view from the bridge over the lake — the palace…
«A very beautiful park with a pond in the middle, with nice, clean paths. There are lots of…»
3. Greenwich Park · ⭐ 9.7
(50474 reviews)
+7 photos
London SE10 8QY, United Kingdom
This is the oldest enclosed Royal Park, walled in 1433, and the only one that gave its name to a global standard. From the top of its hill you look down a steep grass slope over the Queen's House and Wren's twin domes to the river, Canary Wharf and the City beyond — a view that has been painted since the seventeenth century and is now legally protected. Beneath your feet runs t…
«A very beautiful park. There are both very well-tended areas and spots that are a little w…»
4. Regent's Park · ⭐ 9.5
(49434 reviews)
+7 photos
London, United Kingdom
Almost four hundred acres of lake, rose garden, sports field and ringed terrace, laid out as a single architectural idea by John Nash for the Prince Regent from 1811. It is the only Royal Park that was designed all at once, as a piece of town planning rather than as a former hunting ground gradually opened up, and the cream stucco terraces that frame it are as much a part of th…
«A big, green park; there are pitches for football and cricket, and boat hire (£28 for a fa…»
5. Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park · ⭐ 9.1
(32747 reviews)
+7 photos
London, United Kingdom
Five hundred and sixty acres of riverside meadow, wetland, playground and world-class sporting venue, built from scratch on the industrial floodplain of the Lower Lea Valley for the 2012 Games and then rebuilt again for everyday use. Nothing here is inherited: the ground was contaminated land criss-crossed by pylons and culverted rivers, and the whole landscape — the rivers reo…
«A big, beautiful park…
Wonderfully done after the Olympics…»
6. Richmond Park · ⭐ 9.7
(31302 reviews)
+7 photos
Richmond, United Kingdom
Step through any gate in the long brick wall and the city stops mid-sentence. Ahead lie bracken slopes, hollow oaks older than the British Empire, and herds of red and fallow deer that have grazed this ground without a break since the reign of Charles I. This is the largest of London's Royal Parks — well over 2,000 acres of acid grassland, ancient woodland and open water held i…
«An interesting area. A lot of people from Asia live there, Chinese people. You need a good…»
7. Kensington Gardens · ⭐ 9.5
(30526 reviews)
+7 photos
London, United Kingdom
For most of its life this was private ground: the pleasure garden of a working royal palace, laid out by the greatest designers of the age for a queen who wanted something grander than a lawn. Two hundred and sixty-five acres of avenues, formal water and old trees, it still feels ordered where neighbouring Hyde Park feels informal — a place of long straight walks, a glittering…
«A lovely park, large. Two lakes, a flower garden, little fountains, cosy avenues; you can…»
8. Green Park · ⭐ 9.3
(27973 reviews)
+7 photos
Green Park, London SW1A 1AA, United Kingdom
Every other central London park competes with bedding schemes, boating lakes and bandstands. This one competes with nothing. Roughly forty acres of mature plane and lime trees rising out of open turf, no lake, no playground, almost no buildings — the smallest of the eight Royal Parks is also the most disciplined, a green wedge running between two palaces that turns solid yellow…
«This park is next to Hyde Park, which is a plus. You can easily hire a bicycle and cycle a…»
9. Battersea Park · ⭐ 9.5
(23476 reviews)
+7 photos
Battersea Park Rd, London SW11 4NJ, United Kingdom
Two hundred acres of riverside on the south bank, built on marshland deliberately raised with dock spoil, this was one of the great social experiments of Victorian London: a park created to civilise a notorious stretch of ground where duels were fought and Sunday fairs got out of hand. What grew there is unusually layered — Britain's first public sub-tropical garden, a boating…
«A very large and beautiful park. There are toilets and playgrounds for children. Lots of b…»
10. Hampstead Heath · ⭐ 9.5
(20264 reviews)
+7 photos
London, United Kingdom
No gates, no railings around most of it, no closing time. The Heath sprawls across a sandy ridge in north London where springs break out of the hillside and feed a chain of ponds people still swim in through the winter. It is the least manicured big green space in the capital and the most fiercely defended: a lord of the manor spent forty years trying to build on it, Parliament…
«A wonderful park! Like all of them in London. I admire the centuries-old traditions of the…»
Questions & answers
Which place tops the ranking? Hyde Park — score 9.5/10 (Editors' pick).
How many places are in the list and how were they chosen? The selection includes 10 places chosen by our editors based on rating and reviews.
What is the average rating in the top? 9.5/10 — average score of 10 places in the list.
Which place has the most reviews? Hyde Park — 142671 visitor reviews.
With a small child, take the flat and the surfaced: St James’s Park is compact and fully paved, with a sandpit playground and birds that hold attention better than any attraction, while Battersea Park pairs playgrounds with boats. Runners get most from the Tamsin Trail, which loops the perimeter of Richmond Park without meeting a road, and from the hill repeats on Parliament Hill. For water there is the Serpentine in Hyde Park, the bathing ponds on Hampstead Heath that stay open every month of the year, and the boating lake in Regent’s Park. Quiet comes easiest in Green Park, which has no boats and no playground, and whose canopy keeps it usable in a July heatwave.
Be honest about the edges of this list. Ten parks weighted to the centre and the famous leave out the commons and neighbourhood greens most Londoners actually use. Nothing here tells you which paths take a bicycle, where a dog may run off the lead, how a wheelchair copes with gravel, or what is lit after dark.
See also:
Best flower shops
Sources: Google ratings and reviews, official websites and social media of the places, other open data. Selection and texts by the londoname.com editorial team, August 2026.