Hyde Park is sort of like the Central Park of London. It’s not an exact analog because London is filled with parks but it’s pretty good. This is a place where folks from all walks of life congregate to walk around, gawk at the various monuments, do some roller-skating or maybe play some cricket (here in the US, there’d be a lot of Frisbee but I didn’t see much of that at all so I guess it’s not a British thing), wade around in the nasty looking Serpentine Pond, and so on. It’s very, very large; bigger than Monaco according to Wikipedia, but for those of you (like me) who have no idea how big the Principality of Monaco is because your only knowledge of the place comes from watching James Bond, allow me to help a little bit more:
- 253 acres is 2.53 times the size of the Hundred Acre Wood of Winnie the Pooh fame.
- One square mile is 640 acres. Therefore, 253 acres is… 253/640ths of a square mile. However much that is. Do I look like I have a calculator?
- An acre is about 3/4ths of a football field. The American kind. Don’t get lippy with me! I’m the one who went to England, not you! So, um… multiply 253 by 4/3rds and you have that many football fields.
I’m sure that was as helpful for you as it was for me, meaning probably not all that helpful. Sorry. In any case, there is a lot of stuff in Hyde Park and I want to start getting to it.
Hyde Park, Southwest Entrance
To the left you can see the southwest entrance to Hyde Park. There’s all kinds of etchings up at the top, but this seems to be the only monument I took a picture of where I didn’t zoom in on it. Yes, there are gates; they close the park at midnight every night, I guess to keep the bums out. I didn’t see very many bums at all in London, especially not compared to Seattle, but I imagine that if I were a vagrant this is the place I would try to hang out at.
This is technically called the Apsley Gates. Part of me wants to just continue to call it the southwest gate but this is England we are talking about and high-falutin’ is the way they play.
The Queen Mum Gate
I captioned this the Queen Mum gate but I guess technically it’s called the Queen Elizabeth gate. What-EVER. The Queen Mum was Queen Elizabeth II’s mom, and apparently they got along really, really well. Much better than Queen Elizabeth I got along with her mom, anyway. I take that back. Maybe they would have gotten along just fine but QEI’s mom had an unfortunate incident with an executioner’s sword, you see.
Anyway, despite the name these gates *were* in fact opened for Queen Elizabeth II’s mom in 1993. For something built in the latter half of the 20th century, I have to say that they’re very ornate. Which is not a bad thing, don’t get me wrong. I’m just used to seeing a big old “modern” slab of concrete dropped in front of something and called a new historical monument. As you can see, the English had other ideas.
One last comment about the QE Gate: according to the Interwebs, the coloring you see is from heat or “natural oxides” (which I think is a fancy way of saying “rust”), not actual paint. Therefore it could well keep its cool colorings for centuries. Or dissolve in a heap in 50 years. I am not a scientist.
Waterloo Memorial
This is right up the road from the Queen Mum’s Gates of Shininess, the Duke of Wellington Monument. The Duke of Wellington is the guy who finally defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, which in addition to being the stupidest name for a battlefield ever was a turning point in modern European history. Anyway, to commemorate the Duke, the English decided to put up a statue of a Greek hero of the Trojan War who was dipped into a magical river to make him invulnerable but was held by his heel, and was later killed by a lucky shot to the same place. Did the people who commissioned this sculpture even think about what message this would send to future generations? “Hey, good thing Napoleon didn’t shoot the Duke in the back of the leg or else we’d all be speaking French right now!” I think that era should consider itself thankful that nobody reads the Illiad anymore.
Close-up of the Wellington Monument
Okay, so I am being a bit of an American ass. Truth is, this is aWesome with a capital W. The actual statue is a’ight but the inscription below it is… well, I can only capitalize the W so much to get my point across. I guess on one level it’s just writing. It’s writing that was made nearly 200 years ago. When some guy hammered these letters in with a chisel, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were still alive. The modern Democratic Party in the USA wouldn’t be formed for several more years and the Republicans were just a twinkle in somebody’s eye. For the record, yes I do get all nostalgic like this when looking at murals. There’s a small monument to the casualties of World War I who attended the University of Washington in Seattle that sits on a traffic island at one of the entrances to the school. That evoked similar feelings when I went up to it several years ago. Fortunately, there is no street nearby to evoke the “HEY FAT-ASS GET OUT OF THE ROAD” feelings others had when I did this.
Lady Di! Lady Di! Renoir!
Hey, no offense to Lady Di. She was a fine lady and all, I’m sure, and she had an interesting life story. Not nearly as interesting as the 1980s made it out to be but hey, better than my crappy life. That being said, is anybody going to care about this woman in 30 years? I think her best chance might be the movie Amelie; if it gets watched by future cinemaphiles, perhaps they’ll remember her the way we remember the song As Time Goes By because of Casablanca. Assuming movies haven’t been replaced by holo-hoovies or what have you, that is. Or that our bear overlords have not decided to take over.
Sometimes trees need to be loved too.
I’m going to go ahead and close this post with this picture. One of the problems with going back and talking about stuff you took pics of several months ago is that sometimes you completely forget the context. In this case, I am sure that there is a rational and chaste reason for this picture to be in here but I will be damned if I can see anything beyond forest porn. The Druids were a brave and interesting people.
Well, that’s the beginning. I took a very, very large amount of these pics and will be going back in a month to take some more. I hope you like them. And if you are a spambot, I hope you like fjord enema pancreas smaxa.
