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Not every statue in London. The ones worth crossing the road for: Roman wall, medieval ruins, and the monuments that earn a detour.
G.F. Watts's wall of ceramic tablets to ordinary Londoners who died saving others, under a loggia in Postman's Park.
MemorialsFree
George Frederic Watts, the most famous painter in Victorian England, proposed in 1887 that the Queen's jubilee be marked not with a statue of her but with a record of everyday heroism, and when nobody took him up on it he built it himself, in 1900, at the age of eighty-three, in this small park beside the General Post Office. Ernest George designed the fifty-foot loggia and William De Morgan made the first tablets in glazed ceramic: Alice Ayres, a maid who dropped three children to safety from a burning house and fell herself; Sarah Smith, a pantomime artiste who died of her burns trying to save a colleague; a boy of eight who drowned pulling a friend from the Thames. Watts died in 1904 with thirteen in place, his widow Mary carried on to fifty-three, and there the wall stopped, until Leigh Pitt, who drowned saving a boy from a canal at Thamesmead in 2007, was given the fifty-fourth in 2009. Sixty-six spaces stay empty. The tablets are quoted in Patrick Marber's play Closer, which sent a generation looking for the park.
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.