Michael Henderson suggests

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And another thing

Nothing to beat a garden full of wildfowl and historical memories

Paul Johnson

Wednesday, 24th October 2007

Paul Johnson on his favourite spot in London.

It is true that, in late Victorian times, Kensington Gardens underwent a sentimental transformation when it was taken over by nursery maids and their charges in immense baby-carriages. Here, Sir James Barrie set up his literary kingdom of perpetual infants and ageless grown-ups, of fairies and gnomes and goblins, of stately nannies and grenadier guardsmen escorts, and of old-fashioned policemen, ready to come to the rescue of well-behaved upper-middle-class children. It was the age of the summer parasol, much starched linen, waxed moustaches, eye-glasses for gentlemen, lorgnettes for ladies, hoops and bonnets and sailor suits for children, plenty of pipe-clay for the military, so that beneath the pungent scents of trodden leaves and wet gravel, of crushed flower-blossom and scythed grass, one caught whiffs of Blanco and brass, antimacassar hair-oil, eau de cologne and Palmolive soap. By the side of the Long Water is Sir George Frampton’s Peter Pan statue, which some people love and others loathe, but which everyone wants to see, so that I am constantly asked by foreigners and provincials to direct them to it. And at the intersection of some of Queen Caroline’s avenues there is an immense mass of bronze by G.F. Watts called Physical Energy. Watts was a very odd artist, sometimes superlative, sometimes bathetic and often just dull. This is one of his most enigmatic efforts, and what it is doing there is unclear. Still, it does convey some of the intellectual nuances of the late 19th century and so has its role in the park’s history. Personally I like to peer beneath the Victorian image to Caroline’s own age, with the thump-thump of Handel resounding from William Kent’s bandstand, the jangle of harness as clumsy old gilded coaches bumped up the Broad Walk to the palace gates, and the cry of the peacock from the sunken garden. What would the old Queen have said of Watts’s statue? I suspect: ‘Vell, Sir Robert Walpole, ’ee is not going to pay for zat!’

She died in 1737, still speaking broken English. Things were still wild enough in the park, especially after dark fell, and footpads emerged from the shadows. George II was once robbed of his watch and purse while out for a stroll, and that was in daylight. Provision was made for 300 lanterns to be lit to guide people home. Meanwhile I sit by the border of the Round Pond and think of them, and of yet earlier times when monks owned meadows here and kept cows to supply Londoners with milk, and prayed for their immortal souls.