'You're telling me that's beautiful?' a voice asks, echoing around a gallery built into a triumphal arch. 'You're having a laugh.' He's not talking about Wellington Arch itself. This sits at the middle of a strange memorial roundabout just next to Hyde Park Corner, an accretive and sometimes bizarre landscape of legislated memory. Dedicated to the victory over Napoleon's Prance, the arch features, inter alia, an equestrian statue of Wellington himself in full regalia and headgear, two recent memorials to the Antipodean presence in the imperial armies, both in an uneasy combination of 'accessibility' and abstraction, and two memorials to specific groups of combatants in the First World War, one the gross kitsch of Francis Derwent Wood's Grecian spearman-cum-machinegunner, the other the utterly convincing violence of CS Jagger's terrifying monument to the Royal Artillery.
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