Greenwich Park

Greenwich Park was enclosed in 1433, which makes it the oldest enclosed royal park in London. The Tudors hunted and held jousts here, and legend says that Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn danced around a great oak up on the hilltop. Their daughter, Elizabeth I, is said to have picnicked in its shade. Queen Elizabeth's Oak died in the 1800s, and the park keepers used its hollow trunk as a lock-up for troublemakers. The ivy held it upright for about another century, until it finally fell in 1991. It still lies where it came down. On the slope up to the Observatory, something darker happened. On 15 February 1894 a young French anarchist called Martial Bourdin walked into the park carrying a homemade bomb. It went off in his hands before he reached the top, and he died of his injuries shortly afterwards. Nobody ever found out for certain what he meant to attack, though most people assumed it was the Observatory itself. Joseph Conrad turned the story into his novel The Secret Agent, in which a plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory goes horribly wrong. It has been called the first international terrorist incident in Britain, and it happened on an ordinary February afternoon, on a path in a park.