Hyde Park, Kensington, Chelsea and Notting Hill Travel Guide

HYDE PARK , together with its westerly extension, Kensington Gardens, covers a distance of two miles from Speakers' Corner in the northeast to Kensington Palace in the southwest. At the end of your journey, you've made it to one of London's most exclusive districts, the Royal Borough of KENSINGTON and CHELSEA . Other districts go in and out of fashion, but this area has been in vogue ever since royalty moved into Kensington Palace in the late seventeenth century.

Aside from the shops around Harrods in Knightsbridge, however, the popular tourist attractions lie in South Kensington , where three of London's top museums - the Victoria and Albert, Natural History and Science museums - stand on land bought with the proceeds of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Chelsea's character is slightly more bohemian. In the 1960s, the King's Road carved out its reputation as London's catwalk, while in the late 1970s it was the epicentre of the punk explosion. Nothing so risqué goes on in Chelsea now, though its residents like to think of themselves as rather more artistic and intellectual than the purely moneyed types of Kensington.

Once slummy, now swanky, Bayswater and NOTTING HILL , to the north of Hyde Park, were the bad boys of the borough for many years, dens of vice and crime comparable to Soho. Despite gentrification over the last twenty-five years, they remain the borough's most cosmopolitan districts, with a strong Arab presence and vestiges of the black community who initiated and still run the city's (and Europe's) largest street carnival , which takes place every August Bank Holiday.