Trafalgar Square

[poliphilo]

Trafalgar Square is lot nicer since they pedestrianized the north side. And thanks to Mayor Livingstone’s ban on peanut vendors there are fewer pigeons than there used to be. It’s not a favourite space of mine. None of the architecture is quite grand and/or interesting enough. The dome of the National Gallery is a silly little pepper pot which fails to dominate as it should.

All the statues are of nineteenth century military heroes- mostly long-forgotten ones. Sic transit. There’s one empty plinth and we’ve got an ongoing national debate about who should be stuck on top of it. I’d vote for leaving it empty. We’ve lost the knack of creating convincing public sculpture. We know too much about human nature to have heroes in the old sense. What we have in their place are celebrities- who are part wet dream, part ducks in a shooting gallery.

We had afternoon tea in the crypt of St Martin in the Fields- the church at the north-east corner of the square. They do a mean gooseberry and rhubarb crumble. And the floor is paved with 18th century gravestones.

Comments

[archyena.livejournal.com]

Or rather, it could be like Cato the Elder where people constantly ask who has no monument but unlike the much maligned Thatcher marble, why the person has one.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yesterday in the V & A museum I was looking at 18th and 19th century statues of long-forgotten people. They hoped for immortality but it's the sculptor who's remembered.