St James's Park

The memorial, and the bridge

This is the largest change the park has seen in two centuries and it is already consented, so anything describing St James's as a settled landscape is out of date.

The Queen Elizabeth II National Memorial was announced in September 2024; Foster and Partners were named as the winning design team on 24 June 2025; a planning application was published by Westminster City Council on 19 February 2026; the council's planning sub-committee approved it unanimously on 7 April 2026; and final designs were published that month, timed to the centenary of the Queen's birth.

What it involves: a new bridge with cast-glass balustrades, taking its form from Queen Mary's Fringe Tiara, replacing the Blue Bridge and widening the crossing at its centre from about three and a half metres to seven, with a design life of a hundred and twenty years; landscaped spaces on both sides of the lake by Michel Desvigne Paysagiste; a standing statue of Elizabeth II with a companion figure of Prince Philip, by Martin Jennings, at Marlborough Gate; a bust of the Queen in later life by Karen Newman at Birdcage Walk; an abstract sculpture on the Commonwealth by Yinka Shonibare; and a compass by Norman Foster pointing towards Commonwealth nations. The Grade II Marlborough Gate is to be dismantled and re-erected in modified form further south to clear the ground for the main statue.

It was not uncontested. Historic England supported the scheme, as did the Georgian Group, the Royal Parks and the Thorney Island Society; the Westminster Society could not support it, objecting to the cast glass and to how the consultation had been run. Council officers accepted that losing the 1950s bridge and altering Marlborough Gate causes harm, and concluded that the public benefits outweighed it.

On timing and cost, the honest position is that neither is fixed. Two market-engagement notices were published in October 2026, with a supplier event that November, engagement closing at the end of December 2026, formal tenders expected in January 2027 and indicative pre-construction starts in May and August 2027. The two construction packages are estimated at £36.5 to £40.5 million excluding tax, against a project figure reported at £46 million — different things, covering different scopes. No contractor has been appointed, and the culture department has not fixed a completion date.

So the Blue Bridge is worth seeing while it is there. It dates from 1957, replacing an iron suspension bridge of 1857, and it is not a listed structure — Westminster treated it as an undesignated heritage asset, which is part of why its loss was permitted. The two views from it, east along the lake to the roofline of Whitehall and west to Buckingham Palace, are the most photographed thing in the park, and both will change.

Where the park came from

The land was low, marshy water-meadow with woodland and farms, and it held a hospital for women with leprosy — the hospital of St James the Less, recorded on the site from the thirteenth century, which is where the name comes from. Henry VIII bought it, rebuilt the hospital as a palace, which is St James's Palace, and walled the land to the south as a hunting park.

The date is given two ways by two authorities that both deserve weight: Historic England says 1531 and the Royal Parks says 1532, with the London Gardens Trust hedging to about 1530 to 1532. Either way it precedes Hyde Park, which Henry acquired in 1536.

The Royal Parks calls this the oldest royal park in London, and that is worth repeating as the charity's claim rather than as a fact — because the same charity's page for Greenwich Park dates that park's enclosure to 1433, a century earlier, and the two statements cannot both be read literally.

James I drained it further, made Rosamond's Pond, laid out a flower garden, kept a menagerie and a wildfowl collection and built a duck decoy at the eastern end. It was his aviaries, not Charles II's, that gave Birdcage Walk its name — a reign earlier than the usual account has it.

Charles II's canal, and an attribution to drop

From his accession in 1660 Charles II laid the park out in the French manner around a new straight canal, and the only person named as actually making it is Adrian May, a gentleman of the court.

Who designed the scheme is genuinely unsettled. The Royal Parks states flatly that Charles commissioned the French landscaper André Mollet; Historic England hedges to "possibly" Mollet; the London Gardens Trust says the designer is uncertain. What should go is the name most often attached to it: the attribution to André Le Nôtre comes from a Victorian popular history of 1878 and is carried by no modern authority — not Historic England, not the Royal Parks, not the Gardens Trust.

The canal's length is a second trap, and this one is the statutory register's own fault. Historic England gives the canal as about 2.5 kilometres, which is impossible: the park is only about nine hundred metres long end to end. The other figures — the Royal Parks' "almost half a mile", the Gardens Trust's nine hundred metres, the 1878 account's two thousand eight hundred feet — all cluster around eight hundred to nine hundred metres, which is the usable answer.

Nash, and the park that exists

By 1823 the Commissioners of Woods were reporting the park in poor condition. John Nash's remodelling turned the straight canal into the serpentine lake, replaced the avenues with winding paths, added thirty-seven new plantations and built two islands — a small one west and the larger Duck Island east. That is the park a visitor walks through today.

Its date is best given as a range, because the register entry gives three different years in one document: plans approved by the beginning of 1827, the remodelling summarised as 1828, and a third passage saying 1857, which is plainly a slip. About 1827 to 1829 is the defensible span.

Who first opened the park to the public is also disputed between authorities. The Royal Parks and the London Gardens Trust credit Charles II; Historic England's register entry credits Nash, whose proposals it says included opening the park to the public, and describes the Protectorate arrangement as a handful of privileged residents holding keys.

The pelicans

They are the thing people come for, and most of what is written about them is slightly wrong.

They arrived in 1664, a gift from the Russian ambassador to Charles II, and they are Great White pelicans. But the present birds are not descended from that gift: more than fifty pelicans have lived in the park across the centuries, and a permanent population dates only from 1897. They have been replenished by gift and purchase ever since.

As of June 2026 there were six adults — Isla, Tiffany, Gargi, Sun, Moon and Star, the last three recent arrivals. And in mid-May 2026 four chicks hatched, the first in the park's history, raised in a secure area closed to visitors and on the lake by that July, still unnamed because they had to be old enough to be sexed first. No count combining adults and chicks has been published, so the figure of ten that follows from adding them is not one the park has given.

They are fed fish daily, usually at about half past two, with a second morning feed added while the chicks were small. The Royal Parks gives the time but not the place; the birds are usually out on their favourite rocks in the middle of the lake. Visitors are asked to keep their distance, and dogs must be on leads around the lake, which is the one part of the park where that applies.

One claim to avoid: the story that an avian influenza lockdown produced the 2026 breeding success appears only in aggregated content and in neither of the park's own announcements.

Duck Island, and a cottage the Royal Parks misdates

Duck Island, at the eastern end of the lake, is a bird sanctuary and is not open to the public. Beneath it sit the pumps and water-treatment plant for the lake and the fountains, and from November 1894 it housed a Scotland Yard bomb-disposal facility, which is not the sort of thing a park usually admits to.

Duck Island Cottage is the small picturesque building beside it, and its dating needs care. It was built in 1840 and 1841 by John Burges Watson for the Ornithological Society of London, paid for by the Commissioners of Woods and Forests and remaining Crown property — a cottage orné of two single-storey pavilions joined by a colonnade of tree trunks, listed Grade II since February 1970. The Royal Parks' own pages call it a seventeenth-century cottage that belonged to the royal duck keeper, which is wrong on the century and on the occupant, and is probably where that version comes from.

Its occupant now is neither a duck keeper nor the Royal Parks: it has been the offices of the London Historic Parks and Gardens Trust since 1994.

The monuments

The park's registered area reaches further than the grass, which changes what counts as being in it.

The Victoria Memorial does count: Historic England states that the area around it is inside the registered boundary, so it is not merely the palace forecourt. Its central monument is Thomas Brock's, carved between 1906 and 1924, within an overall scheme by Aston Webb, and it was unveiled by George V in 1911.

The Guards Memorial sits on the boundary rather than inside it, its statutory address being Horse Guards Parade: five bronze Guardsmen over life size by Gilbert Ledward, to a design by H. Chalton Bradshaw that won a competition in 1921, unveiled in 1926 and listed Grade I. Its east face fronts the Parade and its back is to the park.

Along The Mall and its edges stand the King George VI memorial of 1955 by William McMillan; the Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother memorial unveiled in February 2009, a bronze by Philip Jackson; the National Police Memorial of 2005 by Norman Foster and Per Arnoldi; the Royal Artillery memorial of 1910 by William Robert Colton, to 1,083 dead of the South African war; the Graspan Royal Marines memorial of 1903, moved to its present position in 1948; the statue of Captain Cook of 1914 by Brock; and the Duke of York column of 1834. Inside the park proper are the Boy statue of 1863, opposite Queen Anne's Gate, and the Tiffany fountain, restored to the lake in 2011 in place of one installed at Pelican Rock in 1966.

Two things nearby are not this park's. The Royal Naval Division memorial by Lutyens stands at the north-west corner of Horse Guards Parade, and Trooping the Colour takes place on the Parade and not in the park at all.

Size, and the two different areas

Two figures circulate and they measure different things. The Royal Parks gives about 23 hectares, 57 acres, which is the park it manages. Historic England's register gives about 32 hectares, which is the registered area and takes in The Mall and the ground around the Victoria Memorial. Quoting either as the park's size without saying which is the usual error.

The lake accounts for about 4.6 hectares, a fifth of the managed park. The site is registered at Grade I, from 1 October 1987. It is not inside a World Heritage Site — the Westminster inscription covers ten hectares and does not include the park.

Visiting

Entry is free and no ticket exists, whatever pages selling St James's Park tickets suggest. The Royal Parks' own wording on hours is carefully hedged and worth repeating as it stands: some pedestrian and vehicle gates open from five in the morning and close at midnight, throughout the year. That is not the same as the park being open from five until midnight, and accounts that flatten it to that are overstating what the charity says.

There are two cafés and smaller kiosks, and deckchairs from March to October in daylight, weather permitting, for a charge. The lavatories take a small payment and are contactless only — cash is no longer accepted. Cycling is allowed only on the roads around the park: The Mall, Horse Guards Road and Birdcage Walk, where pedestrians have priority. Dogs may be off the lead except in the fenced area round the lake.

On stations, the Royal Parks names St James's Park and Green Park. On step-free access, Green Park and Victoria are step-free on the transport authority's own account — Green Park has lifts to the Piccadilly, Victoria and Jubilee platforms with ramps on two of them, and Victoria became the seventy-fifth step-free station in 2018. For St James's Park and Westminster the authority's pages make no step-free claim either way, so anyone who needs it should check the step-free guide rather than a travel page.

One annual closure is specific to this park. On New Year's Eve the surrounding roads shut to through traffic from two in the afternoon, and from five the whole east side of the park closes to the public, including Horse Guards Road and the Parade, because of the infrastructure for the fireworks.