{"id":3262,"date":"2010-09-15T09:22:35","date_gmt":"2010-09-15T13:22:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/?p=3262"},"modified":"2010-09-15T09:22:35","modified_gmt":"2010-09-15T13:22:35","slug":"londons-lungs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/2010\/09\/londons-lungs\/","title":{"rendered":"London’s Lungs"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I first heard that the parks in this city were referred to as \u201cLondon\u2019s lungs,\u201d I simply wrote it off (with no basis) to an inflated sense of self-importance.\u00a0 But now that I\u2019ve visited five of the Royal Parks (Regent\u2019s, Hyde, St. James\u2019s, Green, and Kensington Gardens) I truly appreciate that these parks are giant green oases.\u00a0 Out of the five, I only stopped to walk around in St. James\u2019s and Green; the rest I ran in, albeit many times.\u00a0 So there is a caveat that comes with my writings about Regent\u2019s, Hyde, and Kensington Gardens.\u00a0 For a runner, how the workout went is inextricably tied to the perception of where the workout took place.\u00a0 I could be running in the most beautiful place in the world, but if I\u2019m struggling to keep pace and then my knee starts to bother me, my memories of that place are going to be negative.\u00a0 With that in mind, here\u2019s a quick breakdown, plus a note about the running culture I\u2019ve experienced.<\/p>\n

Regent\u2019s Park<\/a>: The park I have spent by far the most time in, and a place that I have fallen in love with.\u00a0 It seems like Regent\u2019s is specifically intended for recreation, as there are massive open grass fields, some of which have rugby goal posts and soccer goals. \u00a0Also, I have definitely seen more runners here than the four other parks.\u00a0 There is an element of the high society sense that is a bit more present at the other parks in the Inner Circle, which contains the Regent\u2019s Park Boating Lake, some restaurants, and private land.\u00a0 If this blog entry were not already far too long, I would talk about how this is a classic metaphor for a center-periphery dispute.<\/p>\n

St. James\u2019s Park<\/a>: Perhaps the polar opposite of Regent\u2019s, but along with Regent\u2019s, one of my two favorite parks, for its stunning combination of history and natural beauty.\u00a0 St. James\u2019s faces Parliament on one side, and Buckingham Palace on the other.\u00a0 Additionally, St. James gained notoriety during the Restoration period as a center of debauchery, as immortalized in this spectacular poem<\/a>. What makes it Regent\u2019s polar opposite is the fact that there is minimal recreation there.\u00a0 Mikey, Luke and I picked up on this fact when we came to throw a rugby ball around and slowly noticed that we were the only people exercising other than people running on the asphalt path.\u00a0 Well, it turns out that we were committing something of a faux pas, as ball sports are banned in the park<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Green Park<\/a>: Beautiful, small, directly connected to St. James\u2019s on the Buckingham Palace side.\u00a0 Not much else to say here, but I did get some great pictures.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Green Park<\/p><\/div>\n

Hyde Park<\/a>: I did one 11 mile run that was split between here and Kensington Gardens.\u00a0 While I was not blown away by Hyde, I wish I had gone there more often (and will try to in our last week here) because of the sheer\u00a0 history: Crystal Palace<\/a>, Speakers\u2019 Corner<\/a>, and countless concerts and sporting events.\u00a0 The impression I got in my time there was that for a park, there sure was a lot of cement.\u00a0 I did enjoy the lake, which I later learned was called The Serpentine and is the formal separation between Hyde and Kensington Gardens.<\/p>\n

Kensington Gardens<\/a>: While I found Kensington largely unremarkable, one thing that I enjoyed that it was very green.\u00a0 Unlike Regent\u2019s, it isn\u2019t chock full with playing fields and running trails, but it\u2019s a place where you can run around in the grass as you like.\u00a0 Or at least I think it was allowed.<\/p>\n

———–<\/p>\n

Long distance running is convenient as your chosen sport when you\u2019re in a new city for the first time, as running through a city is a great way to explore it.\u00a0 Trying to run through and around the massive crowds on the sidewalks on the way to Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens, and Regent\u2019s Park has given me a true appreciation for just how crowded London is.\u00a0 The runner also cannot resist comparing running culture in a new place to that of his home.\u00a0 Many things are different: as usual, you always, always, always keep left.\u00a0 Driving on the roads, walking in the stairwells at Tube stations, and especially when running or cycling on the trails, you keep left.\u00a0 Back in the States, runners crossing paths will sometimes wave or nod at each other, acknowledging their comradeship in pain, boredom, and abs.\u00a0 I have adopted the habit here of waving to every single runner I cross paths with here, simply because none will ever wave back.\u00a0 In fact, many will actually avert their gaze in embarrassment.\u00a0 This fits in pretty well with Kate Fox\u2019s \u201csocial dis-ease.\u201d\u00a0 Another striking difference is that on any given run in London, you are likely to see dozens of burly men running with backpacks on.\u00a0 There\u2019s really no other way to explain that one.\u00a0 Finally, one of my favorite routes thus far in the city involves a part run alongside Regent\u2019s Canal.\u00a0 The Canal is frequented by party boats full of drunken Spanish and Dutch people.\u00a0 While I don\u2019t speak a word of Dutch, and my five years of Spanish classes tend to fail me in real life, the taunts screamed at me from the boats sound distinctly like \u201cRun, Forrest, run\u201d and \u201cNice shorts, loser.\u201d<\/p>\n

On second thought, maybe the running culture isn\u2019t so different here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I first heard that the parks in this city were referred to as \u201cLondon\u2019s lungs,\u201d I simply wrote it off (with no basis) to an inflated sense of self-importance.\u00a0 But now that I\u2019ve visited five of the Royal Parks (Regent\u2019s, Hyde, St. James\u2019s, Green, and Kensington Gardens) I truly appreciate that these parks are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":387,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6697],"tags":[6748,828],"class_list":["post-3262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2010-dennis","tag-cultural-differences","tag-parks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/387"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3262\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}