Hyde Park Corner

Immediately to the north of the junction is Burton's Ionic Screen gateway entrance to Hyde Park, and Apsley House, the 18th century townhouse of the 1st Duke of Wellington, hero of Waterloo.

During the second half of the 1820s, the Commissioners of Woods and Forests and King George IV resolved that Hyde Park, and the area around it, must be renovated to the extent of the splendour of rival European capital cities, and that the essence of the new arrangement would be a triumphal approach to Buckingham Palace, which had been recently completed.

[1] The committee of the project, led by the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, and advised by Charles Arbuthnot, President of the Board of Commissioners of Woods and Forests, selected Decimus Burton as the project's architect: in 1828, when giving evidence to a Parliamentary Select Committee on the Government's spending on public works, Arbuthnot explained that he had nominated Burton 'having seen in the Regent's Park, and elsewhere, works which pleased my eye, from their architectural beauty and correctness'.

[3] There were no authoritative precedents for such buildings, which required windows and chimney stacks, in the classical style, and, in the words of Guy Williams, 'Burton's reticent treatment of the supernumerary features' and of the cast iron gates and railings, was 'greatly admired'.

[6] Burton created a new design, 'to pander to the majestic ego',[6] which was much larger and modelled on a fragment found in the Ancient Roman Forum, which was accepted on 14 January 1826, and subsequently built as the present Wellington Arch.

[6] The arch at Constitution Hill was left devoid of decorative sculpture as a result of the moratorium in 1828 on public building work, and, instead, despite the absolute objection of Burton, was mounted with an ungainly equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington by Matthew Cotes Wyatt, the son of the then recently deceased James Wyatt, who had been selected by statue's commissioner, and one of its few subsequent advocates, Sir Frederick Trench.

[7] A writer in The Builder asked Lord Canning, the First Commissioner of Woods and Forests, to ban the project: "We have learnt, and can state positively, that Mr. Burton has the strongest objection possible against placing the group in question on the archway... and that he is taking no part whatever in the alteration proposed to be made in the upper part of the structure to prepare it to receive the pedestal... Mr. Burton, through the mildness which characterizes him, has not expressed this opinion so loudly and so publicly as he ought to have done.... an opinion prevails very generally, that he is a party to the proceedings, and this has induced many to be silent who would otherwise have spoken...".

The face of London might have been very different now - freer, perhaps, of the 'monstrous carbuncles' so disliked by the present Prince of Wales - if the attacked party [Decimus Burton] had been a little more pugnacious, and so better equipped to stand his ground".

[8] The campaign led by Fearon was successful: Wyatt's incongruous statue was removed to Aldershot, and its place on Burton's arch, which was moved to Constitution Hill in 1883,[2] was occupied by a Quadriga by Captain Adrian Jones.

[8] The boundary of Buckingham Palace Garden was moved south, and a new road named Duke of Wellington Place was created; this separated the space containing the Arch from the rest of the Green Park.

As a result, the area around the Arch became a large traffic island, mostly laid to grass, and accessible only by pedestrian underpassess, and formally ceased to be part of the Green Park.