Arch On The March

By Rob Last edited 229 months ago
Arch On The March
marblearch.jpg

So they're thinking about moving Marble Arch again.

The idea is to shift the arch to Hyde Park, near Speakers' Corner in order to make it more accessible to tourists as part of the 100 Open Spaces project.

As the BBC notes, at the moment the Arch can only be reached by subway (or, as The Times puts it, "a warren of dingy subways often inhabited by beggars"), and Londonist has often witnessed tourists with a deathwish trying attempt to traverse that Oxford Street, Park Lane, Bayswater Road, Edgware Road hotstpot.

The problem with solving the access problem is that the Arch falls under a multitude of jurisdictions (bureaucratic nightmare befalls London landmark? surely not), so in the meantime TfL are planning to install a few pedestrian crossings to save people the bother of descending into the 'beggar-infested subways'.

Then it's on to working out how to move a 180-year-old monument 100 yards down the road without breaking it. May we suggest they do it on a bed of air like those football pitches in Japan?

You can read more about Marble Arch here and here.

Londonist's favourite Marble Arch fact: there's a couple of tiny pied-à-terres in there for policemen to kip in.

Last Updated 28 February 2005