The Regent's Park

The land beneath your feet was once a wild forest of red and fallow deer, where Henry the Eighth hunted after he seized the manor from the church in the fifteen thirties. Following the English Civil War, Oliver Cromwell sold off the timber here to pay the wages of his soldiers, and thousands of trees were felled to provide wood for the navy. For over a century after that, the area was stripped of its royal status and repurposed as farmland, serving as a quiet patch of dairy fields and hay meadows on the edge of the growing city.