St James's Park

Before this area became a manicured landscape, it was a waterlogged meadow belonging to a hospital for women suffering from leprosy. The facility was dedicated to Saint James the Less, the Bishop of Jerusalem, which is where the park derives its name. By the sixteenth century, King Henry the Eighth claimed the marshland to create a private deer park for his personal hunting grounds, eventually building a hunting lodge nearby that evolved into the official St James's Palace.