★★★★★ 5.0
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Primrose Hill
Every few minutes, someone climbs to this exact spot where three innocent men once swayed from nooses, their bodies silhouetted against the London skyline. You're standing 63 meters above sea level on what was briefly known as Greenberry Hill, named after the surnames of Robert Green, Henry Berry, and Lawrence Hill - Catholic laborers hanged here in 1679 for a murder they didn't commit. The victim was Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, found impaled on his own sword in a ditch right here in October 1678, his death sparking one of England's most notorious witch hunts. But this hill has witnessed far grander gatherings... In 1864, one hundred THOUSAND people marched through London's streets to reach this very slope, creating what newspapers called the largest cultural celebration in the city's history. They came to plant Shakespeare's Tree - that oak you see there - turning Primrose Hill into a Victorian music festival for the Bard's 300th birthday. Beneath your feet runs London's first railway tunnel, carved through the hill in 1838, while above you stretches one of the city's six protected viewpoints. The William Blake inscription at the summit captures the mystical pull of this place: "I have conversed with the spiritual sun. I saw him on Primrose Hill." From royal hunting ground to execution site to people's gathering place, this hill has collected centuries of London's most dramatic moments in its gentle slopes.
Did You Know?
- Primrose Hill was once part of the dense Forest of Middlesex, a royal hunting ground for wild ox, boars, and deer, later appropriated by King Henry VIII as his personal chase—imagine children today spotting foxes where once wolves and wild game roamed.
- The hill’s name comes from the abundance of primrose flowers that covered its slopes in Elizabethan times, and it was officially opened to the public in 1842 after becoming Crown property, making it one of London’s earliest secured public green spaces for recreation and leisure.
- On June 21, 1792, Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg), a Welsh antiquarian and poet, founded the modern Gorsedd—a ceremonial gathering of Welsh bards—on Primrose Hill, marking it as a site of cultural significance beyond London, with a legacy still celebrated in Welsh culture today.