Postman's Park, London

In central London, Postman's Park offers a public garden near St Paul's Cathedral. Its defining feature is the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice, a loggia and long wall carrying ceramic tablets to people who died while saving others. The memorial opened here in 1900, created by George Frederic Watts for lives that might otherwise have faded from memory.

Read the tablets along the wall: their subject is not famous power, but everyday courage. The park itself opened on 28 October 1880, formed from the former burial ground of St Botolph's Aldersgate and later enlarged with neighbouring burial grounds and cleared housing land. The ground rose above surrounding streets because London burial plots were so scarce that bodies were sometimes covered with fresh earth where they lay.

After Watts died in 1904, his wife Mary continued the project, arranging 35 further tablets over the following four years and commissioning a small monument to him. A new tablet was added in June 2009, the first in 78 years. This quiet garden therefore holds a remarkably direct record of people remembered for what they did for strangers.