Postman's Park
the most moving corner of the city
A tiny, tucked-away City garden with the most quietly moving thing in London: a wall of ceramic tiles remembering ordinary people who died saving others.
Free to visit · City of London · St Paul's · EC1A 7BT
Opening: Daily · roughly 8am to dusk
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.
Getting there: Three minutes from St Paul's, tucked between King Edward Street and Aldersgate Street behind the old post office buildings.
Best time to go: A weekday lunchtime if you want it alive with office workers, or a weekend morning if you want to read the memorial in near silence.
Insider tip: Take your lunch and read the memorial tiles slowly, one by one, rather than at a glance. The understatement is the whole power of it. It also turns up in the film Closer, if the wall looks oddly familiar when you get there.
Official site: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk
Free things to do in London · London Free Guide