St John’s Wood High Street

This lovely building is typical of the buildings up and down St John’s Wood High Street, some with interesting quirky bits of architecture – little turrets and tiny bay windows. If the builders were building to a price, these little gems would never have been built. That said, it is a rich area in North London, so maybe the pockets were deep enough to not have to think about cost.

Tamara and I were there a few days ago, and then walked down past Regent’s Park to Baker Street. We noticed that Regent’s Park is in fact ‘The Regent’s Park’, but who ever says that?

A prince regent or princess regent is a prince or princess who, due to their position in the line of succession, rules a monarchy as regent in the stead of a monarch. That would be for example as a result of the sovereign being incapacitated by illness or still a child, or being in exile or on a long military campaign abroad.

So who was the Prince Regent after whom the park was named?

It turns out it was George IV, who became Regent in 1811, as a result of the illness of his father, George III. You may have heard about ‘the madness of King George’.

That ‘madness’ has now been almost certainly diagnosed as porphyria, a rare genetic disorder that affects the body’s ability to make haemoglobin.

King George suffered from insomnia, stomach pains, hallucinations, and discoloured urine, all of which are symptomatic of porphyria.

So, incapacitated by a mental illness or porphyria – whichever it was – his son took over and during his regency he had the park remodelled by John Nash..

I think if you asked people today to name famous English garden designers, Nash and Capability Brown would be the ones they knew.