The Rough Guide to London (Travel Guide eBook) by Rough Guides

Author:Rough Guides
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, England
Publisher: Apa Publications
Published: 2023-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Pet Cemetery

To the east of the Italian Gardens, by Victoria Gate, lies the odd little Pet Cemetery, begun in the 1880s when Mr and Mrs J. Lewis Barnes buried their Maltese terrier, Cherry, here. When the Duke of Cambridge buried his wife’s pet hound at the same spot after it had been run over on Bayswater Road, it became the place to bury your pooch; three hundred other cats and dogs followed, until the last burial in 1967. The cemetery – “perhaps the most horrible spectacle in Britain”, according to George Orwell – is no longer open to the public, except on special guided tours (http://royalparks.org.uk), though you can peep over the wall.

Serpentine Galleries

Tues–Sun 10am–6pm; Pavilion mid-June to mid-Oct • Free • 020 7402 6075, http://serpentinegalleries.org • !Knightsbridge or Lancaster Gate

Alongside the southern section of West Carriage Drive stands the Serpentine South Gallery, built as a tearoom in 1908 because the park authorities thought “poorer visitors” might otherwise cause trouble if left without refreshments. An art gallery since the 1960s, it has a reputation for lively, and often controversial, contemporary art exhibitions, and contains an excellent bookshop. Each year, the gallery also commissions a leading architect to indulge their experimental impulses and design an innovative temporary pavilion for its summer-only teahouse extension.

A second exhibition building, the Serpentine North Gallery, is 300m up West Carriage Drive on the northern side of the Serpentine. It’s housed in a former munitions depot, built in 1805 so that the military could arm themselves in the event of a “foreign invasion or popular uprising”. The original building was designed in the style of a Palladian villa, but its restoration included an ultramodern extension by Zaha Hadid, with an undulating roof, site of The Magazine restaurant (Tues–Sun 9am–6pm). The gallery is exclusively for temporary exhibitions, usually of modern avant-garde art, often installation pieces.

Albert Memorial

1hr 30min guided tours available, see website for details • Charge • http://royalparks.org.uk • !South Kensington

Completed in 1876 by George Gilbert Scott, the Albert Memorial, on the south side of Kensington Gardens, is as much a hymn to the glorious achievements of Britain as to its subject, Queen Victoria’s husband (who died of typhoid in 1861, aged 42), who sits under its central canopy, gilded from head to toe and clutching a catalogue for the 1851 Great Exhibition. The pomp of the monument is overwhelming: the spire, inlaid with semiprecious stones and marbles, rises to 180ft; a marble frieze around the pediment is cluttered with 169 life-sized figures (all men) in high relief, depicting poets, musicians, painters, architects and sculptors from ancient Egypt onwards; the pillars are topped with bronzes of Astronomy, Chemistry, Geology and Geometry; mosaics show Poetry, Painting, Architecture and Sculpture; four outlying marble groups represent the four continents; and other statuary pays homage to Agriculture, Commerce and other aspects of imperial economics. Albert would not have been amused: “I can say, with perfect absence of humbug, that I would rather not be made the prominent feature of such a monument

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