Hyde Park

At 6:30 on a Wednesday morning in late July, the only traffic in Hyde Park was runners and horses. Riders on the bridle path, runners on the loop, soft light coming down through the trees.

A little after eight, I’d be running back along Oxford Street through a crowd coming up out of the Tube. What happened in between is the run I’d tell any runner headed to London to do: get to Hyde Park early, and stay long enough to watch the city go from stillness to speed.

Bloomsbury, 6:08 a.m.

Jill planned two weeks away for us this summer, and the London stretch had us at the Kimpton Fitzroy in Bloomsbury. London gave us perfect weather, and it gave me a run almost every morning. Bloomsbury is a short walk from Marylebone and Soho, and close enough to Hyde Park to run there.

The reward sat on a quiet side street directly behind the hotel: Fortitude Bakehouse. Jill and I went back many times during the stay. It’s the best bakery we’ve ever been to.

That Wednesday I left at 6:08 and ran west along Oxford Street to Marble Arch.

Three laps

The plan wasn’t a commute. It was loops: three laps of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, anticlockwise, past Speakers’ Corner, along the Serpentine, past Kensington Palace and the Round Pond, around the Albert Memorial, and back along Bayswater Road.

At that hour the park belongs to runners and riders. London is one of the world’s great running cities, a marathon city alongside New York, Berlin, Tokyo and Boston, and that history is easy to feel in the parks first thing in the morning.

If you go

• Be in the park by about 6:30. On a weekday you get the quiet first and the city waking up after.
• One lap of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens is about 4 miles. Three laps, plus the run there and back from Bloomsbury, came to 16.3.
• From Bloomsbury or Soho, Oxford Street takes you straight to Marble Arch and Speakers’ Corner.
• Save something for the run back. That’s where the city comes alive.

Oxford Street, 8 a.m.

I came out of the park at Marble Arch just after eight and turned east. The morning changed within a few blocks. Commuters were coming up out of the Tube stations and stepping into the rhythm of the workweek, and you could feel the city coming alive.

That contrast is the reason to go early. There’s something grounding in it: moving with purpose under your own power while the world speeds up around you.

Thank you, Jill, for planning it, and London, for the summer. We’ll be back, for the familiar places and some new ones.

At 6:30 the only traffic had been runners and horses. Now it was everyone else, and I ran east through them, the last two miles home on my own power.