Three measured running routes in London

Three routes, three different runs

Only one of the three leaves you somewhere else. Hyde Park with Kensington Gardens is 6.76 km, paved, and closes back on its start. The Thames Path at the South Bank is 3.76 km, paved, and runs point to point. The Tamsin Trail in Richmond Park is 11.57 km, mixed surface, and closes back on its start. The Tamsin Trail on its own is longer than the other two put together, 11.57 km against 10.52 km, and that is the first thing to settle if you have one free morning and not three.

Read those numbers narrowly.

Each distance is measured along one specific recorded shape, not the park or the path in general, so your watch will disagree by a little. The corner count is the output of a geometry rule, described further down, and not a judgement about how twisty the route feels. The estimated time is a calculation from the route data. No recorded run went into it.

Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens

6.76 km, paved, thirteen corners. It returns to where it started. Thirteen corners across 6.76 km averages one every 520 m, while the South Bank averages one every 418 m and the Tamsin Trail one every 609 m, so this route sits in the middle of the three for corner spacing. That is still a change of direction every few minutes, so read this route before you run it.

In daylight the two parks read as one open space. They are separately gated. Wikipedia's Hyde Park entry, checked on 2 August 2026, gives Hyde Park as 142 hectares (351 acres) and Kensington Gardens as 111 hectares (274 acres), separate since 1728 along a line running approximately between Alexandra Gate and Victoria Gate via West Carriage Drive and the Serpentine Bridge.

The earlier closing governs any route that crosses the dividing line. That same entry states that Hyde Park remains open from 5 a.m. until midnight, while Kensington Gardens closes at dusk. The Royal Parks page for Hyde Park and its page for Kensington Gardens, both checked on 3 August 2026, list the pedestrian gates as 5am to midnight and 6am to 9pm, and those posted times move through the year. In the dark months, run the Kensington Gardens portion first, or start from the Hyde Park end and turn back at the bridge.

• Check the gate, not the park. The two halves keep different hours.
• A loop that closes on itself lets you leave a bag or a friend at one point and pass it again, which a point to point route does not.
• For an interval session, put the hard efforts on the long legs and recover through the turns.

The Thames Path at the South Bank

3.76 km, paved, nine corners. It does not come back to the start. Point to point is the useful shape on a trip, since you can start where you are staying and end somewhere else.

The catch? Decide the way home before you leave, not after you finish. Out and back makes it about 7.5 km.

Naming the bank matters here. The National Trails Thames Path page, checked on 2 August 2026, gives the full trail as 185 miles (298 km) from the source of the Thames in the Cotswolds to Woolwich. Wikipedia's Thames Path entry notes that downstream of Teddington Lock it is actually two paths, one on either side of the tideway. So the published route says South Bank, and not Thames Path alone.

Nine corners, and they are not spread evenly, so the 418 m average hides the shape of the route. In the turn data published with the route, six of the nine come in three pairs, each pair between 46 m and 49 m apart, which at 6:00 per km is under twenty seconds between one instruction and the next. The rest is long uninterrupted river frontage, broken by three places where the line jogs off its heading and takes it up again within about 50 m.

Knowing there are three of them is most of what you need.

Richmond Park and the Tamsin Trail

11.57 km, mixed surface, nineteen corners. It closes back on its start, and it is the longest route in the curated set, which spans from Seoul's Gyeongui Line Forest Park at 1,956 m up to this one at 11,569 m. Treat it as a session, not a jog: at 6:00 per km it is over an hour of continuous running, and because it is a loop the far side sits about 5.8 km of running from wherever you started.

Wikipedia's Richmond Park entry, checked on 2 August 2026, gives the Tamsin Trail as a 7.2 mile (11.6 km) circuit of the park's perimeter and records most of the park as a National Nature Reserve and a Site of Special Scientific Interest. The same entry states that the pedestrian gates are open 24 hours a day except during the deer culls in February and November, when they are closed between 8:00 pm and 7:30 am. For a dark morning run in either of those months, that gate window is the first thing to check. The Royal Parks page for Richmond Park, checked on 3 August 2026, lists pedestrian gates as 24/7 and vehicle gates as 7am to 8:45pm, so arriving on foot and arriving by car are two different questions.

The published 11.57 km and the quoted 11.6 km are close, and they are not the same measurement.

One is a specific recorded line, the other a description of the circuit. Which gate you enter by, and which side of each junction you take, moves the number by more than the gap between those two figures.

Surfaces, and what mixed means underfoot

Two values, paved and mixed. That is the whole vocabulary the route data carries. Hyde Park with Kensington Gardens is paved, the South Bank route is paved, the Tamsin Trail is mixed.

• Paved takes a road shoe. Whatever you race in is fine.
• On a mixed route, assume at least one stretch where a smooth road outsole is the wrong tool, and pick for the worst part, not the average.
• Mixed surface plus long distance is what punishes an unfamiliar shoe, so do not debut anything new on an 11.57 km loop far from the gate you came in by.

Corners, and what you hear at each one

The corner counts are computed, not written.

Turn instructions for each curated route are derived from that route's own shape by Runflake's own turn detector before the route is published, not typed in by hand and not imported from a navigation provider. So a count can look surprising: it reflects the recorded line, not how the run feels.

1. A bend has to be sharp enoughThe direction of travel must change by at least 55 degrees, measured 35 m before and 35 m after the point.
2. And it has to still be sharp when you zoom outThe same 55 degrees must hold when the bend is re-measured over a wider 56 m window, which throws out a kink that only exists in a short piece of the line.
3. Then it gets a nameTurns fall into six kinds. Between 55 and 75 degrees it is bear left or bear right. Between 75 and 160 degrees it is turn left or turn right. Above 160 degrees it is a U-turn.

Each corner is announced at most twice. Once at the route's pre-announce distance, which is 120 m on every curated route and is clamped to a range of 40 m to 300 m, and once again 25 m before the corner itself. The second call is skipped when the first one already landed closer than 50 m, so you are not told the same thing twice inside a few strides.

Spoken distances are rounded down first, to the nearest 50 m in metric, or the nearest 10 m below 100 m, and to the nearest 50 ft in imperial. The effect is that you hear "In 100 meters, turn right." and never an odd number like "In 117 meters". There is more on why spoken numbers get rounded at all in what running apps say out loud.

One limit matters for the two loops here. Run a course backwards and turn cues switch off entirely. They are not mirrored, and the app says so out loud: "You are running this course in reverse, so turn cues are off." A bear left that should have been a bear right is worse than no instruction.

So the choice is silence.

If you prefer a loop anticlockwise, plan on reading the map. Leaving the route does not produce a new one either: the app reports how far off you are, keeps recording, and says guidance resumes when you are back on the route. Turn cues on curated city routes covers the rest of that behaviour.

Where the route data comes from

Every shape here comes from OpenStreetMap. They are credited to OpenStreetMap contributors under the ODbL licence, and the OpenStreetMap copyright page sets the terms: you are free to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the data as long as you credit OpenStreetMap and its contributors, and if you alter or build upon the data you may distribute the result only under the same licence.

A published route is only as current as the mapping behind it. When a path is remapped, or closed and mapped around building works, the shape changes, and the distance and corner count change with it. That also explains the small gaps between a published figure and an official one: a measurement along a simplified recorded line is not the same object as a park authority's description of a circuit.

That 55 degree threshold has the same kind of consequence. A long sweeping bend never becomes an instruction, however much of the route it occupies, because the direction never changes enough at any one point.

A low corner count is not a promise that a route is easy to follow, only that it holds few sharp changes of direction.

Choosing between them by distance and by time

Pick by the time you have. Then check the shape. The published estimates are 21 minutes for the South Bank, 37 minutes for Hyde Park with Kensington Gardens, and 73 minutes for the Tamsin Trail. Those come from the route data and not from anybody's run, so do the arithmetic at your own pace.

Two other things decide it. Whether you need to end where you began, since only the South Bank route leaves you somewhere else. And the gates, because a dark early start at Hyde Park or Richmond Park is a scheduling question before it is a training one. The route data holds no opening hours at all, so that check belongs to the park's own pages.

For a method and not a named route, picking a running route in a new city covers the general version of the same problem. A distance you can verify, a shape you can leave early, and a surface you have the right shoes for.