What links Barack Obama, Jude Law and Eric Clapton to Postman’s Park !? Let me explain…..
Postman’s Park in the City of London gets its name from the former Post Office buildings around here and in fact up until 1937 the nearby Tube Station at St Paul’s used to be named “Post Office Station” !
However before it was this pretty park it was a burial ground (you can see tombstones around the edge). Which tells us something about the frankly bonkers population growth in 19th century London. The 1801 census population figure for London was around 1 million, but the industrial revolution bloated London to over 6 million by 1901…..and there was a severe shortage of burial space. Corpses often simply stacked on top of each other or chopped up to squeeze in and just covered with soil. Imagine the smell in summer ! When it rained an arm might float past….. All of which led to the removal of burials from here to the outskirts of town and the conversion to a park by 1880.
However the local church, St Botolph’s, was short of cash to maintain the park. Enter George Frederick Watts with his pet project which turned out to be a great way to raise awareness and hence cash:
The Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice with its 54 memorial tablets was finally completed and unveiled 30th July 1900 (and you can see a little effigy of Watts himself in the wooden carving in the middle.)
Postman’s Park was used as a key plot element in “Closer” a 2004 film where the character played by Natalie Portman fakes her identity using a name off one of the tablets.
The character chosen was Alice Ayres whose death in April 1885 and is like some sort of grand Dickensian story itself.
Alice was woken by the noise of an explosion downstairs and had the presence of mind to grab the three tiny children from the nursery, fling a feather bed mattress out of the top floor window to the crowded street below. Carefully throwing each child to safety, she then was overcome by the smoke and fell, fracturing her spine on the shopfront below.
This moment of pure melodrama inspired a Princess Diana-level outpouring of grief across London. Hundreds attended the funeral of a woman they had never met, 20 girls from the local school dressed in pure white lined up to sing a hymn, dozens of wreaths were thrown into the grave and people had to be turned away from her memorial service at Southwark Cathedral. An ordinary nursemaid who became famous because of her selfless actions. You can still see her very expensive monument in Isleworth Cemetery paid for by mass public donations and even Ayres St in the Borough was named after her in 1930s.
All of which explains why GF Watts used her as an example when he sent his proposal to the Times in 1887 and in the film “Alice Ayres” has a relationship with….Jude Law !
So the Obama connection ?
Well, G F Watts was a Symbolist painter :- he once said he painted “Ideas not things” and one of his most successful paintings was “Hope”; the figure is still hopeful of making music with the one string left on her instrument.
It became a true symbol of the idea of Hope for many people and there were countless cheap reproductions. In fact the painting itself was well known worldwide: US President Teddy Roosevelt had one in his house, and 1960s civil rights preacher Martin Luther King used the painting itself as a theme for a sermon.
As did the controversial pastor who first inspired Barack Obama in which he said “To take the one string you have left and to have the audacity to hope” And what did Obama call his autobiography… ? “The Audacity of Hope”. So Obama was directly inspired by the work of the very man who was responsible for creating this memorial.
So finally the Eric Clapton connection (bit tenuous !)
The actual tiles on the memorial were made by the incredibly successful potter William de Morgan who had his pottery in Fitzroy Square, north London.
He was obviously one of those annoyingly talented people because having rediscovered the lost pottery technique called “lustreware”, and become so successful that he could name his own price for his pottery, he only went and wrote a novel (“Joseph Vance”) which was so super-successful that he hung up his wheel and became a Victorian novelist.
But before that he blew up his north London flat with pottery experiments and had to move to Chelsea in 1872, where he became known as the Chelsea Potter. On the King’s Road in Chelsea is the pub named after him.
Guess who used to drink in the Chelsea Potter in the 60s ? Correct. Eric Clapton. He lived across the road above what is now a pizza restaurant in a flat where he climbed out the back window to avoid a drugs bust…..
So there you have it Postman’s Park, Jude Law, Barack Obama and Eric Clapton – who knew ?!
(Well. Me. Obviously)
See you soon for another Parks & Recreation in London blog – this time its Burgess Park.
I know, I know: Shock, horror – SOUTH London !
Guided Tours of London; email: londontownwithmrbrown@outlook.com
