5The Regent's Park has a history stretching back through seven centuries, well before the designer and architectural genius John Nash and his patron the Prince Regent laid it out at the beginning of the nineteenth century as the first of the improvements they had planned for London. Rabbitts recounts the story of the park from its origins as a tiny part of the Middlesex Forest to its role as Henry VIII's hunting ground at the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries, to its subsequent development in the nineteenth century as London's new West End. This comprehensive history of one of the United Kingdom's most popular outdoor spaces also takes into account the wider history of Britain and its public parks.