Postman's Park and the Watts Memorial

Tucked behind St Paul's Cathedral, through a gate most people never notice, is a small park with a wooden shelter running along one wall. Under that shelter are fifty-four ceramic tiles. Each one tells the story of an ordinary person who died saving a stranger.

Read a few. "Solomon Galaman, aged eleven, died of injuries September sixth eighteen-oh-one, after saving his little brother from being run over in Commercial Street." Or: "Alice Ayres, daughter of a bricklayer's labourer, who by intrepid conduct saved three children from a burning house in Union Street, Borough, at the cost of her own young life, April twenty-fourth eighteen eighty-five." Or this one: "Thomas Simpson, died of exhaustion after saving many lives from the breaking ice at Highgate Ponds, January twenty-fifth eighteen eighty-five."

The painter George Frederic Watts proposed this memorial in eighteen eighty-seven for Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. He wanted a monument not to generals or kings but to the everyday heroism of ordinary people. The wall was unveiled unfinished in nineteen hundred, with space for a hundred and twenty tiles. But the project ran out of money and enthusiasm. Only fifty-three tiles were completed before work stopped in nineteen thirty-one.

For seventy-eight years, not a single new tile was added. Then in two thousand and nine, one more appeared: Leigh Pitt, who drowned in a Thamesmead canal on the seventh of June two thousand and seven, saving a nine-year-old boy. It was the first addition in nearly eight decades. The wall still has space for more. Whether anyone fills them is another question.