Hyde Park began as property of Westminster Abbey until Henry VIII seized it in 1536 and filled it with deer for royal hunts. Charles I, in a rare gesture of generosity, opened it to the public in 1637, and Londoners have been claiming it as their own ever since.

The park's 350 acres have hosted everything from the 1851 Great Exhibition, which drew six million visitors and essentially invented mass tourism, to the Reform League riots of 1866, when demonstrators tore up hundreds of yards of railings after finding the gates locked against them. That act of defiance led directly to Speakers' Corner, where Sunday soapbox oratory remains one of London's finest free spectacles. At its centre, the Serpentine Lake, commissioned by Queen Caroline in 1730, broke with convention by mimicking a natural shape rather than the rigid rectangles fashionable at the time.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours trace this layered history across the park, from Henry VIII's hunting grounds to the Reformers' Tree mosaic, the Royal Humane Society's drowning-rescue station, and Rotten Row, whose name is a cheerful corruption of Route du Roi.