Peter Pan

Today I finally found the statue of Peter Pan in Hyde Park. Actually, it's in Kensington Gardens, but it's all really one big park. It's quite a pretty statue (see below), although J.M. Barrie wasn't exactly satisfied with it.


This is just another photo of Kensington Gardens/Hyde Park, mostly because I think it's pretty. You can also see, here, why it reminds me of the forest between the worlds in the Chronicles of Narnia (if you don't know what I'm talking about then you can read the first bit of the Magician's Nephew).


This is Peter Pan himself, in the flesh... er, bronze. Barrie wrote his first Peter Pan story (The Little White Bird) in 1902, largely thanks to his interaction with the Llewellyn Davies family (as anyone who's seen Finding Neverland would know).

He began thinking of a statue to put up in Kensington Gardens in 1906, primarily because that was where he met the family, and where the inspiration for Peter Pan was born. He took some pictures of the then 6-year-old Michael Llewellyn Davies dressed in a Peter Pan outfit, intending the little boy to be the model for the statue.

But when he finally commissioned the statue in 1912, Sir George Frampton, the sculptor, ended up using a different model. Barrie said, "It doesn't show the Devil in Peter" and I quite agree. Despite Barrie's dissatisfaction with the result, the statue became the iconic image of Peter Pan, with several recreations of it in different cities.

J.M. Barrie didn't have an unveiling of it and he didn't present it to the city. He just had the thing put up secretly in the middle of the night, as a surprise for all of the visiting children in the morning. He ran an announcement in the Times, saying

"There is a surprise in store for the children who go to Kensington Gardens to feed the ducks in the Serpentine this morning. Down by the little bay on the south-western side of the tail of the Serpentine they will find a May-day gift by Mr J.M. Barrie, a figure of Peter Pan blowing his pipe on the stump of a tree, with fairies and mice and squirrels all around. It is the work of Sir George Frampton, and the bronze figure of the boy who would never grow up is delightfully conceived."

The statue was put up on May 1, 1912. He actually erected the statue on the part of the serpentine where he had met the Llewellyn Davies family, and people still come to the park just to see it. Although the statue did not turn out quite as Barrie imagined, it has made millions of children, both young and old, happy over the years, and I'm sure he would have been thoroughly satisfied with that result.

The statue shows Peter blowing his pipe, surrounded by fairies and woodland animals.


I thought the doves were pretty.