IF YOU ARE going to Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre this summer, why not leave the car and go there on foot? If you start from Oxford Circus Underground station, you can gaze at a whole panorama of art, literature and history on the way. If all this does not greatly enhance the show, at least you will be glad to sit down after a decent walk.
The first signpost as you come out of the Tube is at the north end of Regent Street — the needle-like spire of the BBC church, All Souls, Langham Place. In fact, some people think this is the BBC. It is a charming building, with its double ring of pillars under the spire, and was built in 1824 by John Nash, one of the architectural overlords of the area. A gently smiling bust of him stands outside, and the passer-by would be tempted to pat his bald head were it not too high.
A few more steps and you come to the bold prow of Broadcasting House. At the moment the building is entirely under plastic sheeting, but over the façade hangs an enormous, brilliantly coloured installation by Fiona Rae. Make what you will of its riot of whirling shapes. The artist herself says: “Literal explanation is not necessary for clear communication” (a claim some at the BBC itself might be embarrassed to make just at present).
Onwards down Portland Place, a street whose handsome classical lines were laid down a generation before Nash by the other geniuses of this part of London, the Adam brothers, Robert and James. Turn right into New Cavendish Street and the next route marker looms up — the Post Office Tower, or the “great kebab in the sky”, as the food critic Fay Maschler called it, in allusion to all the Greek tavernas in its shadows.
Pass the surrealist world of new glass buildings on your left and the old bohemian district of Fitzrovia on your right, turn left into Cleveland Street and then right into Grafton Way, and you find yourself in one of the grandest and least-known squares of London — Fitzroy Square.
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Nowadays, it is all hospitals, starting with the Yellow Fever Centre and ending with the London Eye Hospital, and is always deserted. It has been pedestrianised without pedestrians, you could say.
Yet two sides of the square consist of magnificent stone houses built in the 18th century by the Adam brothers, while the other sides were added later in Regency brick and stucco. It is also a great literary square. In the same house, No 29, marked by plaques, George Bernard Shaw lived with his mother and wrote his first plays, and Virginia Woolf lived with her brother ten years later. Bloomsbury began here, with its herring-and-tripe dinners, its free talk among men and women and its high artistic dreams.
Exit to the north by either of two short streets, and the gigantic glass bow-window of a new office development, 350 Regent’s Place, confronts you across the Euston Road. Turn left and cross Euston Road by an architectural symbol of the 1920s, the tiled, egg-shaped Underground station of Great Portland Street. On the other side is a fine 18th-century church, Holy Trinity, with an outside pulpit. A wonderful architectural anthology. Then, a few more yards along Euston Road, and finally the park is in sight.
John Nash is coming into his own now, the Adam brothers left behind. Everything ahead was designed by Nash for the Prince Regent. On your left: the bold curve of Park Crescent. On your right: the tiny, gem-like Albany Terrace. Turn right into Park Square East, past the offices of another prince — the Prince’s Trust — and enter the park at St Andrew’s Gate.
Turn sharp left here for a little way among the trees, and you reach the Broad Walk. Along it, between young lime trees and glowing, Italianate flower beds, a surprise awaits you. An open-air photographic exhibition is installed there until August 17. It is called MILK — Moments of Intimacy, Laughter and Kinship — and consists of hundreds of jolly pictures of people from all over the world. There are laughing children, lovers embracing, wrinkled old ladies chuckling together. In the distance, austere but sublime, Nash’s grand stucco terraces surround the park.
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A road crosses the Broad Walk. Turn left along it, and walk through the ornate black-and-gilt gates into the heart of the park inside the Inner Circle. A few yards on, you see the Open Air Theatre, which has staged The Two Gentlemen of Verona, below, this season.
To your left is a final distraction — Queen Mary’s Rose Garden, with hundreds of different roses and all now at their most fragrant. There is also a café here. Do not stay too long among the Orange Sunblazes, the Ingrid Bergmans and the Scent-sations. Your walk could have taken close to to two hours if you lingered, so relax, the show is about to begin.