Last Outings - Primrose Hill & Regents Park

The neighborhood around Euston marks the northern end of central London - as evidenced, at the least, by the fact that the edge of the "congestion zone" (inside which drivers must pay a steep per diem fee for the privilege of sitting behind the wheel of a moving car) parallels the main east-west thoroughfare of Euston Road. North beyond this large invisible border lie the suburbs hardly distinguishable from the city itself, as well as such lesser known treasures as Regents Park (which houses the London Zoo within its expansive grounds) and the picturesque little canal-side neighborhood of Primrose Hill, where Sylvia Plath lived in her last dark days before her suicide in 1963. This corner of the city is named after the hill that dominates its core, a surprisingly steep little knoll whose rounded peak offers a startlingly expansive view of downtown London and - in the warm season - a crowd of onlookers jostling for the best view southward toward the city, where a quick look can pick out the unseemly British Telecom tower in the foreground and the London Eye ferris wheel on the distant horizon.

On the day that I visited, it was sunny and unusually warm, and the larger part of the London populace had emptied out of its stuffy apartments and spilled out in droves into the various parks. Even with thousands of picnickers, joggers, and rarely-indulged sun worshippers, the territory of Regents Park and Primrose Hill combined can accommodate them all and still leave room to find a quiet corner or a uninhabited patch of tall grass into which entire families could disappear and hardly be seen from the nearby paths.

I took a long loop northward through Regents Park, across the street toward the hill, up to the peak and around the crest, then back through the quaint neighborhood of boutiques and cafes serving afternoon tea. South again through the park, where the late spring flowers are blooming in neat, organized rows of pinks and purples and blues. Quick duck into Starbucks to indulge my favorite vice (a cold frappacino on a hot day), then back home to get some packing done.