On a wet and blustery day last week I walked to Marylebone for lunch with a friend.
After a highly enjoyable lunch at Orrery, although it was still drizzling and very windy, I braced myself to walk home; a healthy three hour round trip. Almost immediately I saw a park I’d never noticed before: Paddington Street Gardens. It wasn’t the weather to linger and explore but I could not miss this fine mausoleum.
The Fitzpatrick Mausoleum was built by Richard FitzPatrick, younger son of the 1st Baron Gowran, when his wife died aged thirty in 1759. It’s an elegant neo-classical edifice built in smooth Portland stone and deserves its Grade II listed status. The park is on the site of a former cemetery but the mausoleum was allowed to remain.
His father was also Richard FitzPatrick until he was elevated to the (Irish) peerage as the 1st Baron Gowran in 1715. He earned his title the hard way in the Royal Navy, fighting the French and then the Spanish with some daring exploits that might have come from a Patrick O’Brian novel.
… he was advanced on 11 January 1690 to the command of HMS St Albans, a fourth rate, with which on 18 July he captured off Rame Head a French frigate of 36 guns, after a fight of four hours, in which the enemy lost forty men killed and wounded, the casualties on board St Albans being only four; and the French ship was so shattered that she had to be towed into Plymouth. In February 1690–1, he drove on shore two French frigates and helped to cut out fourteen merchantmen from a convoy of twenty-two. (Wikipedia)
Back to Paddington Street Gardens where I failed to notice this small statue.
Cute? You bet. He is polishing one of his shoes. Kitsch? Maybe. Another park I have never visited is MacArthur, named after the American WW II general, in Los Angeles but Richard Harris did in 1968.
I walk through this park almost weekly admiring the trees and presumably gaining much strengthening of my mental health from the leaves falling on my head. But I have never noticed or investigated this monument before. So thank you Christopher. Meanwhile the much smaller public area directly opposite Orrery is where Garrison Keillor had the idea for a memorable short story.