51°30′10″N 0°9′4.5″W / 51.50278°N 0.151250°W / 51.50278; -0.151250

Hyde Park Corner is between Knightsbridge, Belgravia and Mayfair in London, England. It primarily refers to a major road junction at the southeastern corner of Hyde Park, that was originally planned by architect Decimus Burton. The junction includes a broad green-space roundabout in its centre, which is now the setting for Burton's triumphal Wellington Arch.

Six streets converge at the junction: Park Lane (from the north), Piccadilly (northeast), Constitution Hill (southeast), Grosvenor Place (south), Grosvenor Crescent (southwest) and Knightsbridge (west). Hyde Park Corner tube station served by the Piccadilly line has many accessways around the junction as do its notable monuments. Immediately to the north of the junction is Burton's Ionic Screen gateway entrance to Hyde Park, and Apsley House museum, the 18th century townhouse of the 1st Duke of Wellington, general at Waterloo.

During the second half of the 1820s, the Commissioners of Woods and Forests and King George IV resolved that Hyde Park, and the area around it, must be renovated to the extent of the splendour of rival European capital cities, and that the essence of the new arrangement would be a triumphal approach to Buckingham Palace, which had been recently completed. The committee of the project, led by the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, and advised by Charles Arbuthnot, President of the Board of Commissioners of Woods and Forests, selected Decimus Burton as the project's architect: in 1828, when giving evidence to a Parliamentary Select Committee on the Government's spending on public works, Arbuthnot explained that he had nominated Burton 'having seen in the Regent's Park, and elsewhere, works which pleased my eye, from their architectural beauty and correctness'. Burton intended to create an urban space dedicated to the celebration of the House of Hanover, national pride, and the nation's heroes.

The renovation of Hyde Park, Green Park, and St James's Park, began, in 1825, with the demarcation of new drives and pathways, subsequent to which Burton designed new lodges and gates, viz. Cumberland Gate, Stanhope Gate, Grosvenor Gate, the Hyde Park Gate/Screen at Hyde Park Corner, and, later, the Prince of Wales's Gate, Knightsbridge, in the classical style. There were no authoritative precedents for such buildings, which required windows and chimney stacks, in the classical style, and, in the words of Guy Williams, 'Burton's reticent treatment of the supernumerary features' and of the cast iron gates and railings, was 'greatly admired'.

At Hyde Park Corner, the King required that 'some great ceremonial outwork that would be worthy of the new palace that lay to its rear', and accepted Burton's consequent proposal for a sequence comprising a gateway and a classical screen, and a triumphal arch, which would enable those approaching Buckingham Palace from the north to ride or drive first through the screen and then through the arch, before turning left to descend Constitution Hill and enter the forecourt of Buckingham Palace through John Nash's Marble Arch. The screen became the Romanesque Revival Hyde Park Gate/Screen at Hyde Park Corner, which delighted the King and his Committee, and which architectural historian Guy Williams describes as 'one of the most pleasing architectural works that have survived from the neo-classical age'. The triumphal arch became the Wellington Arch on Constitution Hill facing Green Park, which has been described as 'one of London's best loved landmarks'. Burton's original design for the triumphal arch, which was modelled on the Arch of Titus at Rome, on which the central and side blocks of the Screen had been modelled, was more technically perfect, and coherent with the Screen, than that of the arch that was built: this original design, however, was rejected by the Committee—who had envisaged a design based on the Arch of Constantine (on which Nash's Marble Arch had been modelled)—because it was not sufficiently ostentatious. Burton created a new design, 'to pander to the majestic ego', which was much larger and modelled on a fragment found in the Ancient Roman Forum, which was accepted on 14 January 1826, and subsequently built as the present Wellington Arch.

The arch at Constitution Hill was left devoid of decorative sculpture as a result of the moratorium in 1828 on public building work, and, instead, despite the absolute objection of Burton, was mounted with an ungainly equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington by Matthew Cotes Wyatt, the son of the then recently deceased James Wyatt, who had been selected by statue's commissioner, and one of its few subsequent advocates, Sir Frederick Trench. Matthew Cotes Wyatt was not competent: Guy Williams contends that he was 'not noticeably talented', and the Dictionary of National Biography that 'thanks to royal and other influential patronage, Wyatt enjoyed a reputation and practice to which his mediocre abilities hardly entitled him'.

Trench, and his patron John Manners, 5th Duke of Rutland, had told the public subscribers to the statue that the statue would be placed on top of Burton's triumphal arch at Hyde Park Corner: Burton expressed his opposition to this proposal 'as plainly and as vehemently as his nature allowed' consistently over successive years, because the ungainly statue would 'disfigure' his arch, for which it was much too large, and the surrounding neighbourhood, because it would have to be placed, contrary to all classical precedent, across, instead of parallel with, the roadway under the arch. Burton had envisaged that his arch would be topped with only a small quadriga whose horses would have been parallel with the road under the arch. Burton's objections were extensively endorsed by most of the aristocratic residents of London.