Summer in the City: Royal Sunset

Reports of the death of Summer in the City appear to have been greatly exaggerated. For one thing, I have finally got hold of a copy of the song that gives this series its name (it's just as great as I remembered); for another, last Saturday was such a beautiful day that I had no choice but to head back into London.

Because London's crammed full of statues, you might well have difficulty recognising the subject of this photo. You may be surprised to know that it's actually part of the Victoria Memorial, directly in front of Buckingham Palace. On one level, this memorial is something of a monstrosity – in common with a lot of Victorian stuff, it's overblown, rather gaudier than the stereotypical British reservedness would suggest, and far bigger than it needs to be. (Nowhere near the Albert Memorial in those terms, of course, but then very little is.) It's also got a very nautical theme, which probably made sense back when Britain was a formidable naval power, but now just seems a bit confusing.

That said, I do rather like it. If you're putting up a statue in the first place – something that, by definition, says "check us out, we're awesome" – then you're probably not the type of person who worries about looking silly. That kind of arrogance, the ability to effectively scrawl a message across a public street with several tons of stone and then throw in a fountain for good measure, is refreshingly direct. It reminds me of the good parts of the British Empire: at the same time that my ancestors were merrily pillaging other people's countries (through the cunning use of flags), they were also undertaking massive feats of engineering, thinking nothing of driving a railway hundreds of miles across barren wastelands or dropping a bridge anywhere they pleased, because they could.

It's a good thing that the sun did eventually set on the British Empire, but you could be forgiven for looking at what was left and feeling just a little wistful. The statue in the photo, of a noble figure gazing out into the distance, with a lion for some reason, seems completely disconnected from reality. But that's the point. The Victorians ploughed ahead into the future, but left behind them a country that was trying to stand proud and noble in a time that it no longer owned.

There's something very sad about these monuments, but it also leaves you with, as Douglas Adams said, a profound sense of something or other. I think that's really worth quite a lot.