Hyde Park Corner is a place in London, at the south-east corner of Hyde Park. It is a major intersection where Park Lane, Knightsbridge, Piccadilly, Grosvenor Place and Constitution Hill converge. The closest tube station is Hyde Park Corner.
In the centre of the roundabout stands Constitution Arch (or Wellington Arch), designed by Decimus Burton as a memorial to the Duke of Wellington and originally providing a grand entrance to London. It was built as a northern gate to the grounds of Buckingham Palace. Originally the arch was topped with an equestrian statue of the Duke by Matthew Cotes Wyatt, but it was replaced with the current work, The Angel of Peace descending on the Quadriga of Victory (1912) by Adrian Jones.
Other monuments at Hyde Park Corner include Jones's Monument to the Cavalry of the Empire (off the west side of Park Lane), Alexander Munro's Boy and Dolphin statue (in a rose garden parallel to Rotten Row, going west from Hyde Park Corner), the Wellington Monument (off the west side of Park Lane) and a statue of Byron (on a traffic island opposite the Wellington Monument).
In the post-war years Park Lane was widened and the area around the arch became a large traffic island, mostly laid to grass. The traffic island area includes a smaller equestrian statue of Wellington, the Machine Gun Corps Memorial, the Royal Artillery Memorial, the Australian War Memorial and the New Zealand War Memorial. An underpass beneath the junction allows traffic to flow freely between Knightsbridge and Piccadilly. The Queen Elizabeth Gate and the Hyde Park Corner Screen are on the boundary of Hyde Park at Hyde Park Corner. To the north of the roundabout is Apsley House, the home of the first Duke of Wellington. "Hyde Park Corner" was also used as a code to announce to the Government the death of King George VI in 1952.
The 1935 film Hyde Park Corner takes its name from the area, where it is set.
Read more about Hyde Park Corner: Memorials At Hyde Park Corner
Famous quotes containing the words park and/or corner:
“Mrs. Mirvan says we are not to walk in [St. James’s] Park again next Sunday ... because there is better company in Kensington Gardens; but really, if you had seen how every body was dressed, you would not think that possible.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“At this very moment,... the most frightful horrors are taking place in every corner of the world. People are being crushed, slashed, disembowelled, mangled; their dead bodies rot and their eyes decay with the rest. Screams of pain and fear go pulsing through the air at the rate of eleven hundred feet per second. After travelling for three seconds they are perfectly inaudible. These are distressing facts; but do we enjoy life any the less because of them? Most certainly we do not.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)