Outdoors & Nature

Ideal for a sunny day. And for a cold rainy day: "There's no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing".

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Postman's Park

A small garden on the churchyards of three City churches, named for the postmen who ate their lunch in it, with Watts's memorial to ordinary heroes along one wall.

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The park opened in 1880 on the burial ground of St Botolph's Aldersgate and grew over the next twenty years across the churchyards of two more churches, so many bodies in so little ground that the garden sits several feet above the streets round it. The General Post Office's headquarters stood next door, and the sorters and postmen who took their breaks here gave it the name. Along the north wall, under a wooden loggia, is the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice that the painter G.F. Watts proposed for Victoria's jubilee and finally built in 1900: ceramic tablets to ordinary people who died saving others, a pantomime girl who went back into a burning theatre, a boy who drowned rescuing a friend, a railway labourer, a doctor. Fifty-four are there of the hundred and twenty he planned, and the newest, for a man who died in 2007, was the first in seventy-eight years. Patrick Marber's play Closer was written around it.

Where
King Edward Street, EC1A 7BT
Nearest station
St. Paul's · 3 min walk

8am to 7pm, or dusk if earlier

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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.

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