I love viewing street photos. These are great! Thanks for posting them. Street photography is what I enjoy most. Charles Hess used to post his street photos and I was drawn to them. I've never turned back! They always carry a human interest story - as do your's.
LATIN.
Even after all that time, the Roman invasion of Britain affected our perception of what a monvment ought to be.
In Latin the letters U and V are the same, and are the 20th letter in the Roman alphabet. They are both a vowel and a consonant, so that the Romans would have spelt Venus as VENVS, the first V being pronounced vee as a consonant, and the second V being pronounced uh as a vowel.
So to make the monvments svfficiently grand, they vsed Latin like inscriptions.
Strange, I was out shopping with mine, and only had time for a quick snap shot from the hip as we dashed past on the way to something ... can't remember if we bought anything, it's the thrill of the hunt