There’s a Hyde Park in New York and Hyde Park pub in Sheffield and both of them, as well as a number of other Hyde Parks dotted around the world, are said to owe their names, directly or indirectly to the famous park in London. In the case of the pub in Dronfield, near Sheffield it is said that the original owner was staying in London, near Hyde Park, when he first got wind of the news that his premises had been granted a licence. The name itself would appear to derive from the Old English “hid” or “hide” meaning an area of land (generally somewhere in the order of 60 – 120 acres). The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that originally this was “the amount (of land) considered adequate for the support of one free family and its dependants”, adding, “at an early date (it was) defined as being as much land as could be tilled with one plough in a year”.
Plymouth’s Hyde Park Hotel, at one end of Hyde Park Road, was once a prominent corner location, in the early part of the twentieth century however a road was driven around its western side and it has been on an island site ever since.
