№ 06City · London, England
Postman's Park
A pocket park in the City hiding a Victorian memorial to ordinary people who died saving strangers.
Photographs Jim Osley (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Irid Escent (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Two minutes from St Paul's, squeezed between office blocks, sits a small garden with a wooden loggia along one wall. Under it: the Watts Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice, unveiled in 1900 — rows of hand-lettered ceramic tablets, each one recording an ordinary person who died saving somebody else. A maid, a labourer, a twelve-year-old.
The painter G. F. Watts spent years campaigning for a memorial to everyday heroism instead of generals and kings; this quiet wall is the result, and tablets have occasionally been added as recently as 2009. City workers eat lunch beneath it, mostly without ever reading a word.
The knowledge
- Getting there
- Between King Edward Street and Aldersgate Street, EC1 — two minutes from St Paul's tube, beside the old General Post Office that gave the park its name.
- Best time
- A weekday lunchtime, for the full contrast: suits, sandwiches, and sixty quiet acts of heroism.
- Local tip
- Read the tablet for Alice Ayres, then watch the film Closer — the park is a plot point.
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