Glittering Queen's head on Park Lane - trashy kitsch or a sparkling tribute?

There's a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II on Park Lane. You can hardly miss it - at least at night.

Matt Marga's tribute to the monarch, One Million Queen.
To be fair, it looks a lot better on a sunny day.

As darkness falls, this literally flashy piece of public art catches the harsh LED headlights of the expensive cars which throng Park Lane. It shimmers all silvery like a Christmas tree decoration picked up in Poundland.

The piece in question turns out to be a tribute to the serving monarch on her 92nd birthday last year. The title is "One Million Queen" ("1MQ")  and it was made by Italian artist Matt Marga.  It's a massive object,  a portrait head made out 999,999 crystals sandwiched between sheets of glass, 3 metres wide and over 5 metres tall.

It must've cost a bomb to make this. Apparently it includes 53 real diamonds, to represent the Commonwealth states. And yet it looks a bit cheap. It's  a massive blow-up of that familiar profile of the queen seen on every UK postage stamp or coin of the realm. Then rendered in glittery stuff. That's it.

On a dull morning it looked as though the glitter had been mixed with a couple of pints of Thames mud before being squeezed between the four thick sheets of glass. No doubt it looks much more impressive when the sun's shining.

Rather like Damien Hirst's "For the Love of God" - a diamond-studded skull - you wonder whether there's some irony in the project.  Is it meant to be a comment on wealth and inequality? Or is it really just a straightforward tribute? If so you wonder how it was received by the object of this expensive adoration.

We're expected to believe that the reigning monarch is very careful with her cash, the Queen of Thrift and Austerity in person. Could this piece possibly be just a wee bit too tacky? Then again, is it perhaps showing us the reality - a display of absurd wealth, just like the actual crown jewels?

The location is perfect: it's very close to some of the most expensive hotels in the world, whch any day of the year will be filled with millionaires and billionaires and their families. It's also less than a mile from the Queen's London residence (another big display of dull excess, Buckingham Palace).

This famous avenue of glitzy hotels and luxury car showrooms has been the location for quite a lot of extravagant public art over the past few years, under a Westminster Council scheme to cheer up the sad central reservation. This new one replaces a more striking piece, sculptor Bushra Fakhoury's Dunamis, a 9 metre-tall sculpture of a man with a conical hat holding an elephant above his head by its trunk.

Much of the other stuff on this road seemed a bit too flashy, a bit over the top (see the entry on London's outdoor sculpture here) - but perhaps fittingly so for a road where people gawp at sports cars costing as much as a small house in Battersea.

And, as always, few yards away, in the subways to the underground car-parks, and even more up around the fountains at Marble Arch, hundreds of homeless people congregate, huddled against the icy spring winds.

Clapham, now! Too much ordure, too many toff-fests

Oh no, hang on this must be a mistake. It can't be what it seems to be.

Something came through the front door last week.

My street is an an odd street. Have you read "Capital" by John Lanchester? If you have you might latch on to this strangeness.

This street has some of the more expensive property in this very expensive bit of south London. The SW4 bit, formerly known as "Cxxxxxm".

Like many of these "most exclusive and luxurious" areas, it is basically a bit of Victorian speculative jerry-building over a few muddy acres of the Battersea and north Surrey marshlands, the Wandle basin and its surrounding dung-fields.

Lots of collapsing old buildings, lots of mud, dirt, dog muck, dumped infested mattresses, festering bomb-craters, used condoms, burned out Rage Rovers, you name it.

A valley of used disposable nappies, and a plateau paved with well-filled dogshit bags.

A pizza box filled with yuppie vomit. I named it.

Lots of three or four storey houses, each one costing £2 to £3million, and that's before the lads have scooped out another house underneath, a basement paradise with bubbling water-features and extra garage space or whatever it is they do down there, in the deep mud.

Something came thru my front door. It wasn't a plump buff package of dog shit this time.

No, nor even human shit. I know that's what you wanted it to be, but you lose this time.

Well, around here you wonder. These streets are paved with filthy lucre. Last week I narrowly missed seeing a young lady poohing behind a parked BMW suv. Her drunken, well-dressed friend was on watch-out and when I appeared around the corner, she signalled for me not to proceed, but to cross the road.  Good advice.

Next morning I passed said BMW and said pooh - large, humanoid, stinking - was still in situ.

This is Cxxxxxm. Now.

You'll do it next time, and I know your name. And your address, by the way. But I haven't got a dog.

ANYWAY…..It was something worse!

It was an invitation, like I said, an invitation to a party.

A "street party".

Only £15 a ticket! Well it included some lunch, soft drinks, a dog show and so on...

So, as I was saying. This road or street has certain aspirations, it seems, certain pretensions shall we say. It thinks it is, it believes itself to be ….to be a bit better than the  rest, or so it thinks.

You might not be surprised to learn that this street party was sponsored by an Estate Agent and was held to celebrate a royal birthday.

Now, I'm a strict roundhead, I have no interest whatsoever in the Windsor family, who have always struck me as just as dull as my own family and almost as sad. If those with a different view want to celebrate this birthday, then fine, that's up to them. But this is the third royal-themed street party in this street in the past decade, for Thunderclap's sake!

I mean, why this street? I've never seen any of the royals around here, why do we keep on kow-towing to the old dears? (Mind you the old ones are preferable to their children and grandchildren, don't you agree? OK, maybe not.)

Later this year there's another anniversary which might be a more interesting excuse for a party. Of course it will be too cold and dark for a street party by then, but maybe a genteel house party.

In December it will be the 100th anniversary of the death of the great Japanese writer, Natsume Soseki.

He lived in this street for his last few miserable months in London, early in the 20th century. He put up with the prejudice and stupidity of the local Brits, and he put up with cold, the wind, the rain, the ugliness, the filthy food, the hideous manners of the locals, just because he adored English literature and  history, and had a sort of reverence for a London of the imagination.

His subsequent writing added to that image of London …. but also set him on the path to becoming one of the most famous Japanese novelists of his time, maybe Japan's first real modern novelist. And it seems his unhappy few months Clapham was a catalyst for all this.

Thank god this street has something in its past, to make up for the embarrassment of the here and now. A house wrapped in pink, for heaven's sake. Well, maybe it's a good joke…yes, let's take the positive view.