I’ve always associated Hyde Park with art due to the excellent Serpentine Gallery. But if there is a single art work that captures the park for me it’s this one, by the French Painter Andre Derain. What a surprise! Grey skies and umbrellas are replaced with the vivid, even shocking colours of Fauvism. And yet, it captures the emotional warmth I feel for this place.
Such colour meant Derain and his fellow painters were famously branded ‘wild animals’… no wild animals here, only horses and a white, almost flat dog in the foreground – my favourite detail.
There are plenty of benches in Hyde Park, but now we move to one in Soho Square. This time Kirsty MacColl’s lyrics reflect the more typical wet weather and winter days of my London memories. Also typical, her funny /sad style, so quintessentially hers. Sitting alone on a London bench as her lover fails to turn up: ‘My feet froze in the winter chill / I knew I’d probably get ill’
After her tragic early death, fans placed a bench in Soho Square in her honour and inscribed it with lines from the song:
