Band of the Life Guards playing on the new platform in Hyde Park, 1869. Among the customary pleasant sights and sounds of the London season is the occasional performance of lively music by the band of one of the regiments of Life Guards, about four oclock in the afternoon, on the platform lately erected for that purpose, near Albert Gate...a polite throng of ladies and gentlemen walk or wait to watch this animated scene, the tall and graceful figures of an ornamental soldiery, clad in their splendid uniforms of scarlet, which blaze in the summer sunshine, pour from the deep throats of all their brazen weapons a storm of melodious noise. The grass and the trees are still green at midsummer, and not so sooty as they will soon become when the favourites of fortune and fashion will have fled to some foreign clime. Let us enjoy lifes pleasures, in innocence and moderation, while they are to be got here gratis; and such is the case at present, for which be thanks to the Woods and Forests, or the Horse Guards, or the Ranger, or the Royal Duke as Commander-in-Chief - to some one or to all of those official authorities - with the Guards music in Hyde Park. From "Illustrated London News", 1869.