Key

This steel key, engraved ‘V R No 185 HP Pleasure Gardens’ on one side and ‘P. J. Miles Esq Not Transferable’ on the other, opened one of the privately authorised gates leading into the Hyde Park Pleasure Garden. After 1804 no further private entrances were permitted, but the Office of Works continued to issue numbered, non-transferable keys for the surviving gates during the early Victorian period.

The key was most likely issued to Philip John Miles (1773–1845), Bristol banker, landowner, slave owner and MP, or to his son Philip William Skinner Miles (1816–1881), also an MP who called himself ' P. J. Miles'. Both belonged to a prominent West Country banking dynasty whose wealth was closely connected to Britain’s imperial economy. The Miles family held financial interests and mortgages over plantations in Jamaica and Trinidad, and received substantial compensation under the 1830s scheme that paid slaveholders for the loss of enslaved labour following abolition. Their accumulated wealth supported extensive property in both Bristol and London and enabled participation in elite privileges such as private access to Hyde Park.