A Lorenzo Quinn on Every Corner?

For a little over a month this new sculpture has been standing on a traffic island in Park Lane, London.

 

It is by Lorenzo Quinn and entitled "Vroom, Vroom". The vintage Fiat 500 is being pushed along by a 4 meter high aluminium child's hand. If like me you like this work, there are plenty more Quinn sculptures to enjoy in the area. "Volare" stands in Cadogan Place, "Finding Love" is at One Hyde Park and "The Force of Nature II" is in Berkeley Square. There are also exhibitions of his work at the Halcyon Gallery in Bruton and New Bond Street.

There is a "Halcyon Gallery Sculpture Trail" that guides you around these and other new works.

For the trail and images of the other sculptures, click here.

Hyde Park London - Birthplace of Modern Cinema?

The Royal Parks say on their website that “The world's first moving pictures were filmed near Apsley Gate, Hyde Park Corner, London,  one morning in January 1889 by a British inventor, William Friese-Greene.”

Friese-Greene did indeed use his invention, a camera that could take a jumpy 10 frames per second in the South East corner of the park in 1889. He even wrote to Edison when he was granted a patent on his camera, to say “beat you to it” so to speak. But Friese Greene wasn’t great at follow through, instead of working to perfect his system he simultaneously began work on a two completely different systems one in colour and even more astonishingly one in 3D.

The film he used in Hyde Park could only be developed onto paper so it is difficult to see how he could have ever projected the images he took, though some claim that he did. Perhaps it is fair to say that his system proved to be an evolutionary dead end and did not really contribute to the development of cinema but we can still recognise him as the man who took the very first moving images.

Pet Cemetery in Hyde Park

The little pet cemetery at Victoria Gate in Hyde Park, London, didn’t so much officially open in 1880 but rather it evolved from then, following one particular burial. 

Prince George, the Duke of Cambridge, was at the time not only Commander in Chief of the British Army  but also the Ranger of Hyde Park.

Prince George was a colourful Royal who had an invalid marriage with an actress, Louisa Fairbrother. When his wife (Mrs Fitzgeorge, as she was now known) lost her favourite dog,  George used his position and instructed  the gate-keeper a Mr.Windbridge, to give the dog a decent burial in the garden of his lodge. (The dog was also called Prince!) The idea caught on in society circles and within 25 years, Mr.Windbridge's  garden had been almost completely filled with the graves of over 300 various upper class pets, dogs, cats, birds, and even a monkey.

A lack of space and changing tastes during  the First World War made the cemetery less fashionable. Only a tiny handful of burials have taken place there since 1915 the last being a regimental mascot in 1967.

The cemetery can only properly be viewed by appointment now but it is still possible to glimpse the little headstones and their inscriptions through the railings.