Key

This steel key, engraved ‘W IV R Hyde Park Pleasure Gardens’ and numbered 92, was issued during the reign of William IV. It opened one of the privately licensed gates leading from the back gardens of Mayfair houses into the Hyde Park Pleasure Garden - a fenced-off, semi-private area on the eastern edge of the park. Private gates could only be created with explicit royal permission. No further entrances were authorised after 1804, though numbered, non-transferable keys to the surviving gates continued to be issued into the early 19th century.

The key was held by Lord Granville Charles Henry Somerset (1792–1848), a long-serving Tory MP and senior government official. A younger son of the 6th Duke of Beaufort, Somerset spent three decades in Parliament and held posts under Lord Liverpool, the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel. He was a prominent opponent of the 1832 Reform Bill, resisting changes to the political system, before later aligning with Peel’s more modernising Conservatism. His possession of a Pleasure Garden key places him firmly within the political and aristocratic elite who retained direct, regulated access to this reserved section of Hyde Park.

The Pleasure Garden itself no longer survives as a distinct space, but surviving keys such as this one offer a glimpse into the layers of privilege that once shaped access to the royal park.