Key

This steel key, engraved ‘V R H P Pleasure Gardens No 89’ on one side and ‘A Colvile Esqr 32 Curzon Street Not Transferable’ on the other, opened one of the privately authorised gates leading into the Hyde Park Pleasure Garden. From the 1790s a limited number of householders were granted royal permission to cut their own entrances through the park wall; no new gates were allowed after 1804, but keys to the existing ones continued to be issued through the mid-19th century. Each key was individually numbered and strictly non-transferable, reflecting how tightly this privilege was controlled.

The key belonged to Andrew Wedderburn Colvile (1779–1856), a London merchant and long-serving director of the Hudson’s Bay Company. He oversaw a corporation whose commercial monopoly across Rupert’s Land has since been widely critiqued for advancing British colonial control and extracting profits from Indigenous land and labour.This small object marks Colvile’s access to an exclusive corner of Hyde Park and also reflects the concentrated imperial power that underpinned such privileges.