Diana memorial flooded

Only a day after it was opened by the Queen, the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain came to grief yesterday.

High winds brought down a deluge of leaves, blocking grilles in American designer Kathryn Gustafson's 'reflecting pool' and causing a flood on the grass 50ft wide and a foot deep.

Royal parks spokesman Theo Moore ruefully admitted: 'We didn't expect autumn to arrive on the seventh of July.'

With the weather causing chaos across the South East, visitors braved 70mph gusts to try to enjoy the tumbling waters pumped through the £3.5million oval monument in Hyde Park.

They saw workmen battling to stop it looking too much like the storm drain which some critics already said it resembled.

The edges of the 6ft to 18ft-wide channels which bring the water to the pool also became coated with twigs and other debris. 'Wrong kind of leaves, I suppose,' smiled Steve Phillips, 53, before taking off socks and shoes to go for a paddle. 'I am amused, even if the Queen might not be.'

Countryman Clive Hawkins, from Yeovil, Somerset, reckoned the flood was no surprise. 'It is exactly like the drainage ditches on the side of fields,' he said. 'This is what happens when they flood.'

Watching from outside a hastilyerected security zone of steel barriers and striped tape, Mr Moore said it would all have been different if it had been autumn.

By then, he said, extra grilles would have been fitted to catch the leaves. But they were still waiting to be attached, while a meter to measure water levels and cut off the pump if necessary had not yet been installed.