Postman's Park

This guide to Postman's Park in London traces the Watts Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice, fifty-four ceramic tiles that painter George Frederic Watts proposed in 1887 to honour ordinary people who died saving strangers. It settles on one tile, for Alice Ayres, a twenty-six-year-old domestic servant who woke to a fire in a Union Street house in April 1885 and began passing her young nieces to safety from an upper window. The wall runs along the park's east side, in the shade of the old church tower, an easy stop while walking between St Paul's and the Barbican.