Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice

The Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice is a public monument in Postman's Park in the City of London, commemorating ordinary people who died saving the lives of others and who might otherwise have been forgotten.

[2] The scheme was not accepted at that time, and in 1898 Watts was approached by Henry Gamble, vicar of St Botolph's Aldersgate church.

[14] It provided a detailed account of the fifty-four incidents commemorated on the Memorial when a visitor scanned its plaque with a handheld device.

[21] A single tablet made by Fred Passenger in the original De Morgan style, honouring schoolboy Herbert Maconoghu, was added in April 1931 to fill the gap in the centre row left by the removal of the original, incorrect tablet to the victims of the East Ham Sewage Works incident.

[21] In 2009 a 54th tablet was added, in the style of the Royal Doulton tiles, to commemorate print technician Leigh Pitt, the first addition to the wall for 78 years.

[12][22][a] Monument (1980-81), a multimedia installation by the artist Susan Hiller, consists of enlarged photographic replicas of 41 tablets arranged into a new formation, and points towards the neglect and overlooked status of the Memorial at the time.

Viewers are invited to sit on a park bench with their back to the photographs and listen on headphones to a soundtrack of the artist speaking on notions of death, memory and heroism.

i The last tablet to be added from the list of names proposed by George Frederic Watts before his death[20] j Commissioned by Mary Watts from Fred Passenger, a former employee of De Morgan who had set up his own ceramics business using De Morgan designs, to fill the gap in the third row left by the removal of the original tablet to the victims of the East Ham Sewage Works accident.

[11] k Leigh Pitt, a print technician from Surrey, had died on 7 June 2007 rescuing nine-year-old Harley Bagnall-Taylor, who was drowning in a canal in Thamesmead.