Statue of Thomas Cubitt

You are standing near a bronze sculpture that depicts the man responsible for the very ground beneath your feet. Thomas Cubitt, a master builder of the nineteenth century, stands on a raised platform checking his materials, a brick measure held firmly in his hand. This statue occupies the intersection of Denbigh Street and Saint George's Drive, a location chosen because it sits in close proximity to where Cubitt once operated his expansive construction workshops. Before he transformed this landscape, the area was known as The Five Fields, a marshy, flood-prone expanse that remained largely undeveloped until the mid-nineteenth century. Cubitt saw the potential of this boggy terrain and famously solved the problem of its instability by using thousands of tons of earth excavated during the construction of Saint Katherine's Dock in East London to raise the ground level. His intervention turned a swamp into the elegant, grid-patterned neighborhood of white stucco terraces you see today.