‘The statue’ by Ernest Griset, drawn from life in 1866, V&A

We think our public parks are suffering from neglect but even after years of austerity and poor maintenance they haven’t quite fallen into the same state of decay as the well-known public space being described here in a book named Gaslight and Daylight, published in 1859 by George Augustus Sala, a friend of  Charles Dickens and a contributor to his magazines.

George Augustus Sala

“There was no grass, but there was a feculent, colourless vegetation like mildewed thatch upon a half-burnt cottage. There were no gravel-walks, but there were sinuous gravelly channels and patches, as if the cankerous earth had the mange. There were rank weeds heavy with soot. There were blighted shrubs like beggars’ staves or paralytic hop-poles…on their withered branches, strange fruits- battered hats of antediluvian shape, and oxidised saucepan lids… The surrounding railings, rusty, bent, and twisted as they were, were few and far between. The poor of the neighbourhood tore them out by night, to make pokers. In the centre, gloomy, grimy, rusty, was the Statue – more hideous (if such a thing may be) than the George the Fourth enormity in Trafalgar Square – more awful than the statue of the Commendatore in Don Giovanni.”

That’s a bit of a difference from this painting of the same place just a  few decades earlier! You might be surprised to find out where it was.

George I in Leicester Square detail from an undated & anonymous British School painting in the National Trust Collection

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