Crowns, Pelicans and Bearskins: Royal London from The Mall to St James's

A loop through the stage set of the British monarchy: Admiralty Arch, Horse Guards, the pelicans of St James's Park, Buckingham Palace, Green Park and the old court of St James's, ending in the clubs of Pall Mall

London · 11 stops · 26 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Duke of York Column & Carlton House Terrace

   Waterloo Place, London SW1Y 5AJ, United Kingdom

   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.

2. 2. Admiralty Arch: The Gateway of Processions

   Admiralty Arch, The Mall, London SW1A 2WH, United Kingdom

   In front of you the Mall squeezes itself through a huge curved building of white Portland stone, pierced by three tall arches. Watch the traffic: cars and bikes slip through the side arches, but the great central gate stays shut. It opens only for the monarch, on days of coronations, state visits and royal funerals.

   Admiralty Arch was commissioned by King Edward VII in memory of his mother, Queen Victoria, and designed by Aston Webb. Edward never saw it finished: he died in 1910 and the arch was completed in 1912. Read the Latin along the top. It says, more or less, that in the tenth year of King Edward the Seventh, the most grateful citizens dedicated it to Queen Victoria. The name comes from the Admiralty next door: the building was put up partly to house its offices.

   Turn round and look down the Mall. It runs dead straight for about a kilometre to the golden figure in front of Buckingham Palace. Aston Webb designed the whole sequence as a single piece of theatre: this arch, the widened avenue, the Victoria Memorial, and even the new front of the palace. In May 2023 the coronation procession of King Charles III rolled out through these arches on its way to Westminster Abbey.

   Now walk into the northern arch, the one on the Trafalgar Square side, and look at the inner wall at about the height of a rider's knee. Sticking out of the stone is a small human nose. Legend says it is Napoleon's nose, or that it was put there so mounted soldiers of the Household Cavalry could rub it for luck as they rode through. The truth is more fun: it was attached in 1997 by an artist, Rick Buckley, who secretly fixed plaster noses to buildings all over London.

   So this one arch joins two Londons: behind you Trafalgar Square, the busy city of buses and Nelson on his column; ahead of you the ceremonial city of flags and guards. Walk back along the Mall a little way, and turn left onto the wide gravel square guarded by horsemen.

3. 3. Horse Guards Parade: Trooping the Colour

   Horse Guards Parade, London SW1A 2AX, United Kingdom

   You are standing at the edge of a vast square of pale gravel, big enough to drill a whole regiment, and across it rises a long stone building with a little clock tower and an arch through to Whitehall. This is Horse Guards Parade, and on most days it is surprisingly empty... a royal stage waiting for its play.

   Five hundred years ago this was the tiltyard of Whitehall Palace, where Henry VIII watched knights in armour charge each other with lances. The palace itself burned down in 1698, and the elegant building you see replaced an older guardhouse in the 1750s, designed by William Kent and finished after his death. It was, for a long time, the headquarters of the British Army.

   Every June the square fills for Trooping the Colour, the parade for the monarch's official birthday. More than a thousand soldiers in scarlet and bearskins, hundreds of horses, massed bands... and in the middle a single regimental flag, the colour, carried slowly along the ranks, a ritual born on battlefields where soldiers had to recognise their flag in the smoke. Queen Elizabeth the Second took the salute on horseback for many years, and for eighteen of them she rode side-saddle on a black mare called Burmese. In 2023 King Charles the Third rode at the parade too, the first monarch to do so on horseback since 1986.

   Look up at the clock on the tower. Legend says a small black mark on the clock face beside the figure two records the hour of a death: King Charles the First was beheaded across the road, outside the Banqueting House, on the 30th of January 1649. Historians shrug... but the guards like the story.

   The mounted sentries in their boxes belong to the Household Cavalry, the Life Guards in red and the Blues and Royals in blue, and their museum inside the building lets you watch the horses in their stables through a glass wall. In 2012 this solemn square even hosted Olympic beach volleyball. Now cross Horse Guards Road into St James's Park and follow the lake to the bridge in the middle.

4. 4. St James's Park: The Pelicans of the Blue Bridge

   Blue Bridge, St James's Park, London SW1A 2BJ, United Kingdom

   Stop in the middle of the bridge and turn slowly on the spot. To the west, framed by willows, the pale front of Buckingham Palace. To the east, across the water, a skyline of turrets and domes that looks more like a fairy tale than a government district. It is one of the best free views in the whole city, and Londoners queue for photos here on a summer evening.

   St James's Park is the oldest of the royal parks. Henry VIII took this soggy meadow in the 1530s to stock with deer, next to his new palace of St James's. James the First kept a royal menagerie here, with camels, crocodiles and an elephant, which, the story goes, was given a gallon of wine a day. Then Charles the Second came home from exile in France in 1660 and redesigned it in the French manner, with a long straight canal, and opened it to the public.

   Now look for the large white birds on the rocks at the water's edge. In 1664 the Russian ambassador presented a pair of pelicans to Charles the Second, and there have been pelicans in the park ever since. They are not shy. They stroll across the paths, sit on the benches next to tourists, and in 2006 one was filmed swallowing a live pigeon whole, to the horror of the people eating their sandwiches nearby.

   At the eastern end of the lake hides Duck Island. Charles the Second invented a title, the Governor of Duck Island, and gave it, with a salary, to the French writer Saint-Evremond, an exile like himself.

   This park also saw one of the saddest walks in English history. On a freezing morning in January 1649, Charles the First was marched across it under guard, from St James's Palace to his execution in Whitehall. He wore two shirts, so that he would not shiver and let the crowd think he was afraid. Leave the bridge on the north side, turn left along the Mall, and stop beside the cream house behind the garden wall.

5. 5. Clarence House & The Mall

   Clarence House, The Mall, London SW1A 1BA, United Kingdom

   Walk along the Mall until you see, behind a high wall and a screen of trees, a cream stucco house that looks almost modest for its address. The flag on its roof and the sentries in bearskins at the side gate give the game away. This is Clarence House.

   John Nash built it in the 1820s for Prince William, Duke of Clarence, the third son of George III, who found his rooms in St James's Palace far too cramped. In 1830, rather unexpectedly, he became King William the Fourth... and he simply stayed here. He never took to Buckingham Palace at all. When the old Houses of Parliament burned down in 1834, he even offered the palace to Parliament as a new home. Parliament politely declined.

   In 1949 a young married couple moved in: Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh. Their daughter Princess Anne was born here in August 1950. Two years later Elizabeth became Queen and moved down the road, and her mother took over the house. The Queen Mother lived here for almost fifty years, and on her birthday each August she would come out to the gate to wave at the crowds and collect armfuls of flowers.

   Since 2003 Clarence House has been the London home of Charles, first as Prince of Wales and now as King, while Buckingham Palace goes through a long, slow renovation of its wiring, pipes and roofs. So the real home of the monarch is this quiet house, not the famous palace at the end of the road.

   Now look down at your feet. The Mall was laid out in the 1660s as an alley for pall-mall, a game a bit like croquet that Charles the Second loved, and the name stuck. Its reddish surface, they say, was meant to look like a giant red carpet leading to the palace. Follow that carpet to its end, where a golden angel stands on a mountain of white marble.

6. 6. Buckingham Palace & the Victoria Memorial

   Queen Victoria Memorial, The Mall, London SW1A 1AA, United Kingdom

   You are at the foot of a mountain of white marble, crowned by a gilded winged Victory, and behind the black and gold railings stretches the grey stone front of Buckingham Palace with its famous balcony in the centre. Check the flagpole on the roof: if the Royal Standard is flying, the King is at home. If it is the Union Flag, he is not.

   It was not born a palace. It began in 1703 as Buckingham House, the town house of the Duke of Buckingham. George the Third bought it in 1761 as a private family home for Queen Charlotte, and George the Fourth asked John Nash to turn it into a palace. But the first monarch to actually live here was Queen Victoria, who moved in in 1837, just weeks after coming to the throne, and found chimneys that smoked and drains that smelled.

   Here is the surprise: the front you are looking at is the youngest part of the building. In 1913 Aston Webb refaced it in Portland stone, and the work was done in about three months, while the royal family was away. Behind it are some 775 rooms. Victoria also started the tradition of the balcony: she stepped out onto it during the Great Exhibition of 1851, and royal families have been waving from it ever since.

   In the forecourt the Changing of the Guard takes place, the new guard of Foot Guards in scarlet tunics and bearskins taking over from the old, while a military band plays. The bands have been known to slip in pop songs and film themes among the marches.

   Now look up at the memorial. It was unveiled in 1911 by George the Fifth, and standing beside him was his cousin, the German Kaiser Wilhelm the Second, Queen Victoria's eldest grandson. Three years later their two countries were at war. Queen Victoria sits facing the Mall, looking towards the city she ruled for sixty-three years. Turn to your right, towards the gilded gates on the edge of the trees, and step into Green Park.

7. 7. Green Park: The Park Without Flower Beds

   The Green Park, London SW1A 1BW, United Kingdom

   Step through the Canada Gate, with the gilded coats of arms of the Canadian provinces on its piers, and the noise of the traffic seems to soften. Ahead lie open lawns, tall London plane trees and, in summer, striped deckchairs. Now try something. Look around for a flower bed. You will not find a single one.

   Londoners have two stories to explain it. In the first, Catherine of Braganza, the Portuguese wife of Charles the Second, learned that her husband had been picking flowers here for another woman... and ordered every flower in the park dug up. In the second, darker one, this ground was once a burial place for the lepers of the old hospital of St James, and nobody wanted to plant flowers above them. Both are legends. And in spring, to be fair, a carpet of daffodils pushes up through the grass anyway.

   Charles the Second enclosed the park in the 1660s, and the road on its southern edge is Constitution Hill. The story goes that it was named after the King's daily constitutional walks. It was a dangerous road for royals: in 1840 a young man called Edward Oxford fired two pistols at Queen Victoria's carriage there, the first of several attempts on her life.

   In 1749 George the Second staged a gigantic fireworks display in this park to celebrate the end of a war, and commissioned Handel to write the music. Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks was a triumph. The fireworks less so: part of the huge wooden pavilion built for the show caught fire.

   Look to the eastern edge of the park, at the elegant stone palace with statues on its roof. That is Spencer House, built in the 1750s and 60s for the first Earl Spencer, an ancestor of Diana, Princess of Wales, and one of the finest private palaces of eighteenth-century London. Walk towards it along the Queen's Walk, then leave the park and make for the top of St James's Street.

8. 8. St James's Street: Hatters, Wine Merchants and Clubs

   St James's Street, London SW1A 1EF, United Kingdom

   Walk slowly down the slope of St James's Street towards the red brick gatehouse at the bottom, and keep an eye on the shopfronts. On your left, near the foot of the street, you will find a dark old shop window full of hats, and next to it a wine merchant's with bare wooden floors that tilt like a ship's deck. These two shops are older than the United States.

   The hatter is James Lock and Co., founded in 1676 and at number 6 since the 1760s. They made hats for Admiral Nelson, including one with a built-in shade for his damaged eye, and for the Duke of Wellington. And in 1849 a customer called Edward Coke ordered a hard, low-crowned hat to protect his gamekeepers' heads from branches and poachers. The world calls it the bowler. In this shop it is still called the Coke.

   Next door, at number 3, Berry Bros. and Rudd have been selling wine since 1698. They began as a grocer's shop, and a giant set of scales for weighing coffee hangs inside. In the eighteenth century fashionable customers started weighing themselves on it, and the shop kept the ledgers. Lord Byron's weight is in them, and so is the Prince Regent's.

   Beside the wine shop a narrow timber passage leads into Pickering Place, one of the smallest squares in London. A plaque there recalls that the Republic of Texas kept its legation in this courtyard in the 1840s, before Texas joined the United States. Legend says the last duel in London was fought in this tiny yard.

   Look back up the street and you are looking at clubland. White's, the oldest gentlemen's club in London, began as a chocolate house in 1693, and its betting book recorded wagers on almost anything, from elections to the weather. For three centuries, this street decided who was in and who was out. Now walk to the bottom of the street and face the Tudor gatehouse with the clock.

9. 9. St James's Palace: The Court of St James's

   St James's Palace, Marlborough Road, London SW1A 1BS, United Kingdom

   In front of you rises a red brick gatehouse with two octagonal towers, battlements, a big clock face and a soldier in a bearskin standing guard. It looks almost like a toy fort... but legally it is the most senior royal palace in the kingdom.

   Henry the Eighth built St James's Palace in the 1530s, at the same time as he was marrying Anne Boleyn. The site had been a hospital for women with leprosy, dedicated to Saint James the Less, which is where the whole district takes its name. Henry wanted a hunting lodge and a private retreat away from the crowds of Whitehall, and the park you crossed earlier was his deer park.

   The palace has seen a great deal of royal life and death. Mary the First died here in 1558. Charles the First spent his last night here before he walked to the scaffold in 1649. And in 1840 Queen Victoria married Prince Albert in the Chapel Royal inside, wearing white satin and lace, and helped make the white wedding dress a fashion.

   Here is the paradox. Since 1837 the monarchs have lived down the road at Buckingham Palace, yet officially the court has never moved. Foreign ambassadors to Britain are still accredited to the Court of St James's, not to Buckingham Palace. And when a monarch dies, the Accession Council meets in this palace. On the 10th of September 2022, Charles the Third was proclaimed King from the balcony over Friary Court, the courtyard just round the corner to your left, with trumpeters in gold coats.

   Members of the royal family still have offices and apartments inside, and Clarence House, which you saw from the Mall, is joined to it at the back. Now turn left and walk east along Pall Mall, with the palace walls on your right, until you reach a broad red brick mansion behind its gates.

10. 10. Marlborough House & the Queen's Chapel

    Marlborough House, Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5HX, United Kingdom

    Through the gates on Pall Mall, behind a forecourt, sits a broad red brick mansion with stone corners, calmer and plainer than its royal neighbours. It was built in the 1710s for one of the most powerful women in English history, and for a quarrel.

    Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, was the closest friend of Queen Anne. In their letters they used pet names, Mrs Morley for the Queen and Mrs Freeman for Sarah, so that they could write as equals. Sarah had Christopher Wren design this house, then fell out with him and finished it herself. Then she fell out with the Queen too, spectacularly, and lost her place at court. She was not a woman who lost arguments gracefully.

    A century later the house came back to the Crown, and it became a home for queens and heirs. Edward the Seventh lived here as Prince of Wales and filled it with a fast, fashionable crowd known as the Marlborough House set. His widow Queen Alexandra lived here, and Queen Mary, grandmother of Elizabeth the Second, died here in 1953. Since 1965 it has housed the Commonwealth Secretariat.

    Now glance down Marlborough Road, the little street between this house and St James's Palace. On one side, set into the wall, is an art nouveau bronze fountain to Queen Alexandra by Alfred Gilbert, the sculptor of the figure on the fountain at Piccadilly Circus. On the other side stands a plain classical chapel, the Queen's Chapel, designed by Inigo Jones in the 1620s for a Spanish princess Prince Charles was meant to marry. The match collapsed, and the chapel was finished instead for his French Catholic queen, Henrietta Maria.

    Walk on east along Pall Mall. Number 79, on your right, stands where Nell Gwyn lived, the orange seller turned actress who became the mistress of Charles the Second. The story goes that she refused to take her house on a lease and demanded the freehold, and got it. Keep going to the grand grey palazzo near the end of the street.

11. 11. The Reform Club & Pall Mall Clubland

    Reform Club, 104 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5EW, United Kingdom

    Stop outside the stately grey palazzo at number 104, which looks as if it had been lifted out of Renaissance Rome and set down on Pall Mall. That is no accident: Charles Barry, the architect of the Houses of Parliament, modelled it on the Palazzo Farnese. This is the Reform Club.

    Inside these walls, on the 2nd of October 1872, a very precise English gentleman called Phileas Fogg bet his fellow members twenty thousand pounds that he could travel around the world in eighty days... and come back to this very room. He is fictional, of course, the hero of Jules Verne's novel of 1873. But real people raced his ghost: in 1889 the American journalist Nellie Bly did the trip in seventy-two days.

    The club itself was founded in 1836 by supporters of the Great Reform Act, which had shaken up a corrupt voting system. Its kitchen was famous too. The chef Alexis Soyer designed it with gas ovens and clever gadgets, and he went on to set up soup kitchens during the Irish famine.

    Look along the street. Pall Mall is the heart of clubland. Next door is the Travellers Club, which once required its members to have travelled at least five hundred miles from London. On the corner, the Athenaeum, with a gilded Athena over its door, where bishops, scientists and writers have dined for two centuries. And in 1807, Pall Mall became the first street in the world to be lit by gas, in a demonstration that drew astonished crowds.

    Walk a few steps east to Waterloo Place and look south: there is the Duke of York on his column, where you began. In one short loop you have walked through five centuries of the British monarchy: Henry the Eighth's palace, Charles the Second's park and pelicans, Victoria's balcony, and a living King in a cream house on the Mall. Kings and queens have come and gone, but the stage set is still here... and every June, the whole show begins again.