Key

This steel key, engraved ‘V R H P Pleasure Gardens’ and numbered 106, once opened a privately licensed gate from Mayfair into the Hyde Park Pleasure Garden - a fenced-off section on the park’s eastern edge reserved for a handful of local households. These gates could only be created with explicit royal permission, and although no new entrances were authorised after 1804, the Office of Works continued to issue numbered, non-transferable keys to the existing gates well into the mid-19th century.

Inscribed to ‘Lord Trimleston’ of 34 Upper Grovesnor Street, the key refers to a member of the Barnewall family, Irish Catholic peers who held the title Baron Trimlestown. Under Queen Victoria this could mean John Thomas, 15th Baron Trimlestown (1773–1839) or his brother Thomas, 16th Baron Trimlestown (1796–1879). Both men lived largely between Ireland and London. Their possession of a Pleasure Garden key places them among the privileged few who retained direct, regulated access to this reserved area of Hyde Park at a time when the old system of private gates was already fading from use.