Marble Arch once guarded Buckingham Palace and later hid a tiny police station
London's Marble Arch was built as the grand gateway to Buckingham Palace. Queen Victoria's growing household needed the space, so in the late 1840s the whole structure was dismantled and rebuilt at a corner of Hyde Park. For over a century its attic quietly housed three rooms of working police station.
John Nash designed the arch in 1827, modelling its three openings on Rome's Arch of Constantine and the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel in Paris, and facing it with Carrara marble. The sculptor John Flaxman died before he could begin, so the carving was split among three other artists, and Francis Chantrey was asked for a bronze of George IV on horseback to crown the top. Then the spendthrift king died in 1830 and work stopped, because William IV balked at the soaring bills.
Edward Blore resumed in 1832 and finished in 1833, but he slashed the planned upper storey and dropped its sculptures, including the royal statue. The leftovers found other homes: pieces of a Waterloo frieze and panels honouring Nelson went into Buckingham Palace, other carvings to the National Gallery, and in 1843 the bronze George IV ended up on a plinth in Trafalgar Square. Meanwhile London's smoke quickly greyed the marble; one magazine in 1847 mocked it as resembling a giant sugar ornament in a sweet shop window.
Victoria moved into the palace in 1837 and soon found it cramped. Enclosing its courtyard with a new east wing meant the arch had to go. At the suggestion of Decimus Burton, once Nash's pupil, Thomas Cubitt took it down in 1847 and reassembled it at Cumberland Gate, finishing in March 1851. Its police rooms operated from 1851 until at least 1968, when John Betjeman toured them for television; in the early 1860s its staff included Samuel Parkes, decorated with Britain's highest gallantry medal for his part in the doomed Crimean cavalry charge of 1854.
The arch stands 14 metres tall. Traffic planners in 1908 shifted the park boundary rather than the monument, stranding it on an island of roads. Westminster City Council now looks after it, and it lends its name to the surrounding district and an Underground station.
Source: Marble Arch
