Postman's Park and the Watts Memorial: the ordinary heroes of the City of London

North of St Paul's Cathedral, wedged between King Edward Street and Aldersgate Street, there is a garden that many tourists walk right past. It is called Postman's Park, and the name comes from the nearby central post office whose employees came here to have lunch. The park occupies the former churchyard of St Botolph's Aldersgate: this is why the ground is slightly raised above the street, and along the edges you can still see old headstones propped against the walls. But the reason to stop is another: a long wooden loggia that runs along one side of the garden.

The memorial

It is the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice, the idea of the painter and sculptor George Frederic Watts. He had proposed it in 1887 for Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, without success; it was the vicar Henry Gamble who, in 1898, revived the project, and the memorial was inaugurated in 1900, still unfinished. On Watts's death in 1904, it was his wife Mary Watts who carried it forward. The structure is a canopy about fifteen metres long, designed by the architect Ernest George, which shelters a wall lined with ceramic tiles.

Each tile recounts, in a few lines, the death of an ordinary person who lost their life to save another. The space was designed for one hundred and twenty tablets, made at first by the ceramicist William De Morgan and then, after he withdrew in 1906, by Royal Doulton. The work stopped in 1931 with fifty-three tiles; the fifty-fourth was added in 2009. The stories span a period running from 1863 to 2007.

Stories of ordinary heroes

It is the details that make them unforgettable. Alice Ayres, a bricklayer's daughter, saved three children from a burning house in 1885. Mary Rogers, a stewardess, gave up her own lifebelt and went down with the steamship Stella in 1899. Thomas Griffin, a labourer, died from his burns because he went back to look for his workmate after a boiler explosion in Battersea. Henry James Bristow, eight years old, tore the flaming clothes off his sister. Samuel Rabbeth, a doctor, died after sucking out the tracheal tube of a patient with diphtheria. The last tablet commemorates Leigh Pitt, aged thirty, who in 2007 saved a child from drowning at Thamesmead without managing to save himself: the first addition after seventy-eight years. This was exactly what Watts wanted, to give a name and a dignity to people whom official history would have forgotten. Above the memorial is his phrase: "The Utmost for the Highest".

Getting there

It can be seen in a few minutes, but it is worth reading the tiles one by one: the dry, formal language of the late nineteenth century makes the facts even starker. The park is a green space of the City, open as a public garden during daylight hours; admission is free. The nearest metro station is St Paul's (Central line), a couple of minutes' walk away; a little further off are Barbican and Farringdon, handy if you are arriving on the Circle, Hammersmith & City or Metropolitan lines.

When to go

It is best to come on a weekday at lunchtime, when the garden returns to its original function and fills up with office workers and their sandwiches, or early in the morning, when the light cuts low beneath the loggia. In either case, just metres from the crowds at St Paul's, you find yourself before a small monument to human decency that almost no one stops to look at.

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