Postman's Park - Postman's Park After The Death of Mary Watts

Postman's Park After The Death of Mary Watts

Mary Watts died in 1938, and was buried alongside George Frederic Watts near the Watts Mortuary Chapel, which she had herself designed and built in Compton in 1901. Following her death, and with both George and Mary Watts increasingly out of fashion, the memorial was abandoned half-finished, with only 52 of the intended 120 spaces filled. In the years following Mary Watts's death there were occasional proposals to add new names to complete the memorial, but the Watts Gallery was hostile to the plans, considering the monument in its unfinished state to be a symbol of the Watts's values and beliefs, and that its status as a historic record of its time is what makes it of value in the present day.

The nave of Christ Church Greyfriars was destroyed by bombing on 29 December 1940. By then the decline in the population of the City of London had reduced the congregation to less than 80, and the parishes of St Leonard, Foster Lane and Christ Church Greyfriars were merged with nearby St Sepulchre-without-Newgate. Although parts of the ruins were cleared during a widening of King Edward Street after the Second World War, the remains of the nave of Christ Church Greyfriars became a public memorial in 1989; the tower is now office space.

St Botolph's Aldersgate remains open as a functioning church. Unusually for an English church, because of its location in a now mainly commercial area with few local residents, services are held on Tuesdays instead of the more traditional Sundays. On 4 January 1950, St Botolph's Aldersgate and the surviving ruins of Christ Church Greyfriars were both designated Grade I listed buildings.

In 1934, a statue of Sir Robert Peel erected in Cheapside in 1855 was declared an obstruction to traffic and removed. A proposal that it be installed in front of the Bank of England fell through, and in 1952 it was erected in Postman's Park. In 1971 the Metropolitan Police requested that the statue be moved to the new Peel Centre police training complex, and the Corporation of London agreed. In place of Peel's statue, a large bronze sculpture of the Minotaur by Michael Ayrton was unveiled in 1973. Dominating the small park, in 1997 the Minotaur sculpture was moved to a new position on the raised walkway above London Wall.

On 5 June 1972, the western entrance of Postman's Park and the elaborate Gothic drinking fountain attached to the railings were Grade II listed, protecting them from further development. At this time, the Memorial to Heroic Self Sacrifice itself was also Grade II listed; although considered of little architectural merit, the register notes that it is "listed as a curiosity".

Postman's Park came to increased public notice in 2004 with the release of the BAFTA- and Golden Globe-winning film Closer, which stars Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts, Jude Law and Clive Owen, and is based on the 1997 play Closer by Patrick Marber. A key plot element in the film revolves around Postman's Park, in which it is revealed that the character Alice Ayres (played by Portman in the film) has in fact fabricated her identity based on Ayres's tablet on the Memorial to Heroic Self Sacrifice, which she had read at the time of her first meeting with Dan Woolf (Jude Law) at the start of the film.