Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park and Kew: Albert, Peter Pan and the Palm House

The Albert Memorial at the edge of Kensington Gardens was commissioned by Queen Victoria after Prince Albert died in 1861: George Gilbert Scott's canopy, 176 feet high and paid for by public subscription, opened in July 1872, and the statue of Albert was ceremonially 'seated' in it in 1876. Further in, by the Long Water, is the bronze Peter Pan of 1912, commissioned by J. M. Barrie himself and put at the spot where Peter lands in The Little White Bird after flying out of his nursery — Barrie lived just across the road on Bayswater Road. At the Marble Arch end of Hyde Park is Speakers' Corner, where anyone can turn up unannounced and talk about almost anything, at the risk of being heckled by the regulars; Marx, Lenin and Orwell all went. Upriver is Kew, founded in 1759 and now a World Heritage Site with the largest and most diverse botanical collections in the world, where the architect Decimus Burton and the ironmaker Richard Turner built the Palm House between 1844 and 1848 — the first large-scale structural use of wrought iron.