PARK LANE

 

       

     93-99 Park Lane

     Just a few residential houses remain, the most striking being a row of bow-fronted homes with Chinese balconies constructed in 1828. Benjamin Disraeli lived at number 93 from his marriage in 1839 until the death of his wife in 1872.

     Despite the traffic noise, it still costs a fortune to live on Park Lane, some of the kudos doubtless thanks to its position on the Monopoly board. So you need a run-around to get from A to B ….

        ….. like a Lamborghini, or a McLaren, or a Ferrari ….

     …… or a Rolls Royce with a parking ticket, tee hee.

Marble Arch

    The once-imposing Marble Arch was dwarfed in the winter of 2021-22 by a new tourist attraction, the much-maligned Marble Arch Mound. 

    It was supposed to cost £5 to climb the Mound, or take the lift. But at the time of writing you could book slots online for free. There’s not much to see, even the 350-acre Hyde Park is obscured by trees.

    Marble Arch was once an entrance to Buckingham Palace but moved to the northern end of Park Lane in 1851 as a grand entrance to Hyde Park. Then, in the 1960’s, Park-Lane’s road-widening left it cast adrift on a huge traffic island. 

     Close to Marble Arch (where Oxford Street meets the Edgware Road) is the spot where stood the famous Tyburn Gallows. The gallows were installed in 1196 and more than 50,000 people were hung there - highwayman John Austin was the last, in 1783.  

    The executions attracted huge crowds – tickets could be bought. And everyone condemned to die could make a final speech, mostly protesting their innocence. They were brought to Tyburn from Newgate Prison in the east along what is now Oxford Street, hence the expression 'going west'.

     Eventually the authorities decided the hangings were too rowdy and transferred them to Newgate Prison. But the tradition for protest and pleasure in Hyde Park continues to this day.

    There has been a right to speak freely at Speakers’ Corner since 1872. Strictly speaking everyone can say what they want as long as it doesn’t break the law or incite violence. In practice the police will only intervene if a complaint is made. Crowd participation is encouraged. Some speakers have been accused of planting their own hecklers.

     In the past Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and George Orwell have all got on their soapboxes here. As a young man, Lenin addressed the crowds in an Irish accent, having been taught English by a Dubliner.

     It’s quieter these days. But, on any Sunday afternoon there’s still plenty of entertainment – and an good opportunity for some portrait photography ….

Animals at War monument

     Altogether an estimated eight million horses and one million dogs died in WWI. All manner of other creatures served, including glow worms as night lights in the trenches and slugs for detecting mustard gas.

 Dorchester Hotel

Elizabeth Taylor had five honeymoons in the Dorchester.

Still Water

 

 Statue of Achilles, Hyde Park

    Maybe I should also have snapped a rear view for 'the best arse in London' according to Laurence Olivier. 

Hyde Park Corner

      There are also three war memorials on the Hyde Park Corner traffic island. Unveiled in 1925, the Royal Artillery memorial was controversial as it included a statue of a dead soldier, the first statue in UK to so.

     At Hyde Park Corner, I also caught the end of an Extinction Rebellion march …. all very peaceful ….

     Nobu, Old Park Lane

Les Ambassadeurs Club, Hamilton Place

   And so to lunch, where else but? ….

Hard Rock Café, 150 Old Park Lane

     I hadn’t been here for ages. Keng-Gah always said it was too noisy – but for me not her. She had directional hearing aids and could lip read. In the Hard Rock Café it was me with the hearing problem. The music isn’t as loud as it used to be, maybe a change due to covid?

This was the world’s first Hard Rock Café (est 1971) and their first acquisition was an Eric Clapton guitar. It still has pride of place above the bar. (The drums belonged to Led Zep’s John Bonham) …

    

Rose and Crown, Old Park Lane

October 30, 2021

     A year ago today I had a day out at the Old Kent Road; so it began.

Wednesday, November 3

     But The Mound is now worth visiting for the ‘Lightfield’ installations of the Anthony James Studio ….

    If you peer into the Triacontahedrons you see wondrously complex patterns stretching off into infinity. My two-dimensional photos don’t do them justice.

    As any fool knows, a triacontahedron is the most common thirty-faced polyhedron, a convex polyhedron with 30 rhombic faces. It has 60 edges and 32 vertices of two types. The ratio of the long diagonal to the short diagonal of each face is exactly equal to the golden ratio, φ, so that the acute angles on each face measure 2 tan⁻¹(1/φ) = tan⁻¹(2), or approximately 63.43°. A rhombus so obtained is called a golden rhombus. Being the dual of an Archimedean solid, the rhombic triacontahedron is face transitive, meaning the symmetry group of the solid acts transitively. on the set of faces. This means that for any two faces, A and B, there is a rotation or reflection of the solid that leaves it occupying the same region of space while moving face A to face B. The rhombic triacontahedron is somewhat special in being one of the nine edge-transitive convex polyhedra, the others being the five Platonic solids, the cuboctahedron, the icosidodecahedron, and the rhombic dodecahedron. The rhombic triacontahedron is also interesting in that its vertices include the arrangement of four Platonic solids. It contains ten tetrahedra, five cubes, an icosahedron and a dodecahedron.

Postscript: To no fanfare whatsoever, the Mound was dismantled some time ago. But I recently (December 2022) spotted one of the Triacontahedrons in Berkeley Square (see Mayfair East).