Hyde Park, London

One of London's grand Royal Parks, Hyde Park spreads across some 142 hectares in the heart of the West End, flowing seamlessly into adjoining Kensington Gardens. Its open meadows, formal avenues and the curving Serpentine lake make it the city's great communal lawn, equally suited to sunbathing, rowing, cycling and simply crossing on foot between Marble Arch and Knightsbridge.

The land was seized by Henry VIII in 1536 from the monks of Westminster Abbey and kept as a royal hunting ground before opening to the public in the early seventeenth century. The Serpentine, created in the 1730s under Queen Caroline, was among the first artificial lakes designed to look natural. In 1851 the park hosted the Great Exhibition inside Joseph Paxton's vast glass-and-iron Crystal Palace.

History and free expression sit side by side. Speakers' Corner, in the north-east near Marble Arch, has hosted soapbox orators and hecklers since the nineteenth century and remains a working symbol of open debate. Elsewhere the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain rings with running water, Rotten Row recalls the era of carriage promenades, and bandstand concerts and major summer festivals fill the calendar. Boats can be hired on the Serpentine in summer, and the Serpentine Galleries at the southern edge mount contemporary art shows in a purpose-built lakeside pavilion each year.

For visitors it is effortlessly central and free, ringed by Underground stations and open from dawn until midnight. Warm months bring boating and lido swimming on the Serpentine, deckchairs on the grass and the buzz of events; winter transforms the eastern edge into a large seasonal fair. Wide, level paths and step-free entrances make almost the entire park easy to traverse, and rental cycles let you cover its full breadth in a single relaxed circuit past lakes, lawns and monuments.