The Serpentine owes its existence to Queen Caroline, wife of George II, who in 1730 commissioned something radical: a man-made lake that actually looked natural.

At a time when artificial lakes came in rigid rectangles, the Serpentine's sinuous, snake-like shape was a quiet act of rebellion against geometry. It is fed by the River Westbourne, a Thames tributary now buried beneath London as an overflow sewer, with a section of pipe still visible above the platform at Sloane Square station.

The lake prompted the founding of the Royal Humane Society in 1774, after too many non-swimmers wandered in for a dip and needed rescuing. Today, members of Britain's oldest swimming club still plunge into its waters before dawn, and every Christmas Day they race 100 metres in a tradition called the Peter Pan Christmas Day Race, now over a century old.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours trace Queen Caroline's ambitious reshaping of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, connecting the Serpentine to the Long Water, the Royal Humane Society's drowning-prevention origins, and the Norwegian War Memorial's granite boulder nearby.