Duke of York Column & Carlton House Terrace

Why is it significant?

Stand at the top of the wide stone steps and tip your head right back. A granite column shoots up above you, and on top of it, so high he is almost a silhouette, stands a bronze man in robes.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stand at the top of the wide stone steps and tip your head right back. A granite column shoots up above you, and on top of it, so high he is almost a silhouette, stands a bronze man in robes. That is Prince Frederick, Duke of York, second son of George III... and yes, the Grand Old Duke of York of the nursery rhyme, the one who marched his ten thousand men up to the top of the hill and marched them down again.

The column went up in the early 1830s, and the money came from a rather unusual place: every soldier in the British Army gave up a day's pay. Frederick had been their commander-in-chief, and a genuinely good one, a reformer who cared about training and barracks. But he also died with enormous debts, and Londoners joked that the statue had been put so high to keep him out of reach of his creditors.

Now turn around and look at the two long cream terraces on either side. John Nash began them in the late 1820s on the site of Carlton House, the dazzling palace of the Prince Regent, the future George IV. He poured a fortune into it for decades, lost interest once he became king, and had it pulled down in 1826. Some of its columns were reused in the portico of the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square.

Now look along the railings at the top of the steps for a tree with a tiny gravestone at its foot. There, behind a little fence, is the strangest grave in this part of London. A small stone says, in German, Giro, a faithful companion, February 1934. Giro was the terrier of Leopold von Hoesch, the German ambassador, whose embassy occupied houses on this very terrace. The story goes that the dog chewed through an electric cable in the garden.

One more door, just behind the western terrace. At number 4 Carlton Gardens, a plaque recalls that General de Gaulle led the Free French from this house during the Second World War, and it repeats his appeal that France had lost a battle but not the war. Royal London has always made room for exiles. Now go down the steps to the broad red avenue below, turn left, and walk towards the great curved arch at its end.