The pictures show a rough, angular knoll of turf heaped on a noisy roundabout at the junction of Park Lane and Oxford Street. This is ‘Marble Arch mound’ created by Westminster Council to revive interest in a chaotic motorised intersection at the northeast corner of Hyde Park. Now, after two days of unhappy punters trudging up the thing, the artificial hill has been closed until next month.
The senior tenant of the roundabout is the white triumphal arch designed by John Nash in 1827 but the newly arrived mound seems to want visitors to ignore its august neighbour. The website gives no details about Nash’s structure which originally stood outside Buckingham Palace and was moved to its current home in 1851.
It’s unclear what artistic field the mound belongs to. Is it a piece of sculpture or a work of architecture? It may be a playful essay in conceptualism or a feat of landscape gardening in the brutalist tradition.
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