Wellington Arch

5 min read

Wellington Arch is one of those London monuments whose name tells only a fraction of its story. It was not built as a memorial to the Duke of Wellington, it no longer stands in its original position, and the enormous sculpture on top has nothing directly to do with Wellington at all. Even its relatively austere appearance is accidental: much of the decoration its architect intended was never built.

The arch began life in the 1820s as part of a grand redesign of Hyde Park Corner. London was expanding westwards and the junction had effectively become a ceremonial entrance to the capital. George IV was simultaneously transforming Buckingham House into Buckingham Palace, and the government commissioned the young architect Decimus Burton to redesign the entrances to Hyde Park and Green Park.

Burton designed the long classical screen that still forms the entrance to Hyde Park, and opposite it an arch leading towards Constitution Hill and Buckingham Palace. The government decided that this second gateway should be particularly impressive because it effectively formed an outer entrance to the palace. Burton responded with a triumphal arch in Portland stone, using the architecture of ancient Rome to give a decidedly modern London the grandeur of an imperial capital.

Look closely and the architecture is much more sophisticated than its apparently simple form suggests. Pairs of enormous fluted Corinthian columns stand forward from the walls, supporting an entablature that runs uninterrupted across the central opening. An ancient Roman builder could not actually have constructed such a wide stone span in this way: Burton concealed cast-iron beams inside it. The arch is therefore less of a literal recreation of classical architecture than a nineteenth-century interpretation of it, combining Roman proportions with the technology of the Industrial Revolution.

It was also supposed to be considerably more elaborate. Burton designed carved trophies of weapons and armour for the large panels between the columns, rich garlands for the frieze and, most dramatically, a gilded four-horse chariot on the roof. But the cost of the arch was already exceeding its estimate, while the redevelopment of Buckingham Palace was consuming enormous sums of money. The Treasury refused to pay for most of the sculpture. The blank expanses of stone visible today are therefore not entirely an exercise in restrained neoclassicism: in places they are simply unfinished.

Wellington entered the story only afterwards. By the 1830s he was Britain's supreme living military hero, celebrated above all for the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. A committee raising money for a national monument to him decided that an enormous equestrian statue should be placed on Burton's arch, conveniently within sight of Wellington's London home at Apsley House.

The resulting statue, by Matthew Cotes Wyatt, produced one of Victorian Britain's great arguments about public art. It was the largest equestrian statue yet created and was wildly out of proportion with the architecture beneath it. Critics regarded the idea of turning a triumphal arch into a gigantic statue pedestal as artistically absurd; the dispute reached Parliament and the government tried to prevent the installation. When the bronze Wellington finally appeared above the arch in 1846, supposedly on a trial basis, it was greeted with widespread ridicule.

Wellington himself made clear that taking down his statue would appear to be a mark of royal disapproval and indicated that he would resign his public offices, including his position as commander-in-chief. Few politicians were willing to pick a fight with the victor of Waterloo over a piece of sculpture. The government backed down, and the giant duke remained above the arch for nearly four decades.

Traffic eventually achieved what Victorian art critics could not. Hyde Park Corner had become increasingly congested, and in the early 1880s the government decided to create a new road between Piccadilly and Grosvenor Place. The arch stood in the way. Beginning in 1883 it was dismantled and reconstructed a short distance to the south-east, using its original Portland-stone facing, in the position where it stands today facing down Constitution Hill.

The move provided an opportunity to remove Wellington at last. His colossal statue was sent to Aldershot, the military town in Hampshire, where it remains. A much better-proportioned equestrian Wellington by Joseph Boehm was subsequently erected near Apsley House in 1888. London therefore still has a Wellington statue beside Wellington Arch - just not the Wellington statue that made it Wellington Arch in the first place.

For several decades the roof was empty. Then another quadriga (an ancient chariot or car pulled by four horses) appeared, unexpectedly fulfilling something close to Burton's original intention. Adrian Jones, a former army veterinary officer and sculptor with an exceptional knowledge of horses, had exhibited a four-horse chariot at the Royal Academy in 1891. The future Edward VII thought it would work well on the arch. Funding took years to secure, but a donation from the banker Sir Herbert Stern eventually allowed Jones to produce the monumental bronze sculpture installed in 1912.

Jones called it Peace descending on the Quadriga of War. Four horses pull a chariot driven by a small boy while an enormous winged figure of Peace descends behind him carrying a laurel wreath. It is not an established scene from classical mythology but an allegory apparently devised by Jones himself. There is a pleasing circularity to its presence: more than eighty years after the Treasury cancelled Burton's proposed quadriga, the arch finally acquired one.

The building has had an unexpectedly practical life too. Its huge stone piers contain rooms spread over several storeys. A park keeper lived in one side after the nineteenth-century reconstruction while the other housed a police station, reputedly London's smallest permanently manned police station, which survived until the late 1950s. When Hyde Park Corner was transformed into its present roundabout and underpass in 1960-62, part of the southern pier was hollowed out to become an emergency ventilation shaft for the road tunnel below.

That reconstruction also explains why the arch can feel strangely stranded today. It was designed as part of a sequence of gates, roads and parks, and after its first move became an important ceremonial entrance to Constitution Hill. The twentieth-century road system turned it into an island surrounded by traffic. The Household Cavalry still passes beneath it on its route between Hyde Park Barracks and Whitehall, briefly restoring the monument to something like its intended role as a ceremonial gateway.

The Wellington Arch is therefore less a monument to a single person than an unusually visible record of London continually rebuilding itself. Georgian ambitions to create an imperial capital, Victorian hero worship, arguments over public art, Edwardian pageantry and twentieth-century traffic engineering have all altered it. The arch standing at Hyde Park Corner today is not really the work of one moment at all: it is the accumulated result of nearly two centuries of London changing its mind.