Postman's Park

The lowdown

Postman's Park is small enough to walk past without noticing, a pocket of green behind St Paul's that got its name from the postal workers who once ate their lunch here. Most people come for a quiet bench. What stops them in their tracks is the wall.

Under a long wooden canopy sits the Watts Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice, the idea of the Victorian painter George Frederic Watts. It is a run of hand-painted ceramic tiles, each one remembering an ordinary person who died saving someone else. A boy drowned saving his brother. A woman who went back into a burning building. The plain, understated wording is what gets you.

It is free, it is barely two minutes from the cathedral crowds, and almost nobody on the tourist trail finds it. Read a few of the tiles and the City rush outside goes very quiet for a while. It is the kind of place you bring people to and then watch them fall silent.