Poets’ Fountain

The Poets’ Fountain once stood on a traffic island at the meeting of Hamilton Place and Park Lane in central London. Installed in 1875, it was a public fountain topped by a gilded statue of Fame blowing a trumpet. Below were seated bronze muses and standing marble poets, each angled to face a different landmark. Shakespeare looked towards Hyde Park, Chaucer towards Piccadilly, and Milton down Park Lane. The fountain was the gift of Maria Mangini Brown, an Italian-born Londoner who left over £250,000 when she died in 1871. The competition to design the monument was won by Thomas Thornycroft, who worked with his wife Mary and son Hamo. Hamo carved the bronze muse of Tragedy and the final Fame, which he regarded as his best public work. The bronze figures represented Comedy, Tragedy and History, while the marbles showed Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton. After bomb damage in the Blitz, the structure was removed in 1948 and most parts were lost. A single survivor, the gilded Fame, now stands in the gardens at Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire. Known there as the Angel of Fame, it was regilded in 2002 and remains the only piece of the original fountain still on view. The hall’s grounds display this last remnant of a once-grand London monument, quietly marking the vanished work of three generations of the Thornycroft family.