i am sparticus: London Tourism Day Two

London Tourism Day Two

Yesterday I headed to the West side of Central London and starting from Hyde Park wandered down towards Whitehall. If you like parks, memorials and the Royalty then this is exactly the journey for you. For the record, I like open spaces and think the Queen's alright.

The Serpentine is so named after the man who built it, Roger Serpentine. Sometimes facts are just dull.

The first thing you notice about Hyde Park is that it's got Diana's name written all over it. Literally, you walk in and there are big ungainly metal signs on the pavement pointing out directions to take on the Diana, Princess of Wales memorial tour, there are signs pointing to the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain and signs to Kensington Palace, one time home to Diana, Princess of Wales. There are probably little displays highlighting how wonderful Diana, Princess of Wales really was but I think I ignored them in favour of not becoming even more cynical. I wonder if in a few hundred years time people will come back through the various London parks and ask questions like "Who is that in memorial to?" and they'll say "Oh, that's in memorial to Wellington, his military cunning and leadership defeated a general bent on conquering all of Europe" or "Well that's for Florence Nightingale, who went and looked after hundreds of soldiers when no-one else would" and then they'll get to the first Diana related memorial product and ask the same question and they'll stay that it's to Diana and tell of all the important and valuable stuff she did and then they'll get to the next memorial and ask the same question and they'll give the same response. And so forth for the rest of the park.

Speaking of Diana Memorials, the actual Diana Memorial Fountain is a pretty clever affair in real life. Okay, so it's a bit dull being effectively a concrete circle set into a sloping bit of grass with water being pumped around it, but the way the water flows around it and changes speed and ferocity is quite pretty. I imagine it'd make a good, if somewhat disrespectful, log flume. The question that really bothered me while I was there though was that if I was to set two sticks off against each other at either side of the top, how long would it be before I got thrown out?

In between Hyde Park and Green Park (the park that contains Buckingham Palace) there's a five lane roundabout, and in the middle of that there is a small plot of land which contains pretty much every statue and memorial that no-one else wants. Or something like that. It seems that at some point during the redesigning of London's traffic system a lot of memorials that stood at the entrances to different parks had to be moved and a lot of them seemed to end up in this no-man's land. There's the Wellington Arch which had atop a statue of Wellington and inside London's smallest police station¹ until it was moved whereupon Wellington was removed and so were the police. There's the memorial to the artillery units in the Two World Wars, which is a very impressive memorial indeed and quite sobering when you realise just how many people died in just one section of the army. There's also a memorial to the Australians who fought in both World Wars and is by all account how a memorial should be made these days, very grand and very representative of exactly who fought and when and why. Apparently it's normally obscured by water running over the face of it to symbolise the wear of time or something, mercifully the pumps seemed to be broken though and it could be viewed properly. Then there's my favourite monument, a statue of Wellington on horse back looking very determinedly at something in the distance. Unfortunately it's been placed in a rather perverse location, which gives Wellington the distinct impression that he's about to declare war on an oak.

I then realised I had spent far too much time thinking of witty comments to say about statues and was therefore running late for my appoint with the bank. So I pretty much ignored Buckingham Palace, most of Whitehall and Big Ben (aside from taking the obvious photos) and got the underground home.

¹ The first is not inside Marble Arch, as is sometimes thought but rather in Trafalgar Square. Marble Arch is probably the third smallest.