London: Memorials

Much of London's public art takes the form of memorials of various kinds, including war memorials. Some others might have a more tenuous connection to wars in Britain's past, but still others memorialize people known for their peacemaking instead.

Here is a selection of the memorials that I don't classify as war memorials per se, but which have a memorial, in addition to an artistic, purpose. The public art for art's sake is reviewed on this page. Larger versions of these pictures, plus those from the public art page, plus more, can be found in this Flickr set.

On the left below is the impressive sculpture on top of the Wellington Arch (made somewhat more impressive with the half moon in the clear London sky) which was erected to commemorate Britain's victories in the Napoleonic wars of the early 1800's. Another hero from this period, Admiral Horatio Nelson, is commemorated atop this column in Trafalgar Square. (You can't see the Admiral in this photo, but the lion below is doubtless a symbolic incarnation.) Fitting, since Nelson was mortally wounded at the Battle of Trafalgar, which was an important victory in British history.

Two heroes from more recent conflicts are show here. On the left is Winston Churchill, prime minister during most of World War II, and voted "Greatest Briton" in a BBC poll taken in 2002. He received many other accolades in his long life, which saw him come and go in British political influence several times. One of these was being made an honorary citizen of the U.S., a somewhat ironic honor since his mother was actually an American. He formed a close relationship with Franklin Roosevelt, U.S. President during the war, and so I thought it fitting to put photos of their memorials together here. On the ground in London, though, they are not together—Churchill is in Parliament Square, across the street from the Houses of Parliament, and FDR is in Grosvenor Square, near the American embassy. Legend has it that Churchill's statue has a small electric current running through it to keep the pigeons off, because of a comment he once made about statues of famous people. I don't know if that's true, but when I was in Parliament Square, I never saw a pigeon on his statue! Of course, that might be because of the heavy traffic zooming close by on Whitehall.

Parliament Square sports several fine sculptures of political figures, and you can see some others in this Flickr set. Here is another example, a statue of Nelson Mandela, with a tower of Westminster Abbey watching over his shoulder:

There are politician memorials elsewhere, too, like this one of William Gladstone. He has perhaps an even nicer location, in front of one of London's loveliest churches, St. Clement Danes:

One figure from British history who is memorialized, perhaps out of proportion to his accomplishments, gets this royal treatment because of who he was married to. I mean none other than Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, beloved husband of Queen Victoria, who died young and was mourned for the rest of his wife's long, long life. The most noticeable, in fact unavoidable, memorial to Albert is this memorial in Hyde Park.

As Anna Quindlen describes it in Imagined London:

"...the Albert Memorial, which all by itself must explode forever the notion of the English as an emotionally distant race. Down the Broad Walk or across the Flower Walk in Kensington Garden, and suddenly, there it is, like a great bejeweled costume brooch in a case of enameled Asprey cufflinks.

It is a poem or a short story, or perhaps a comic book all by itself, and a shock to the system: statues and carvings representing the continents and commerce, engineering, agriculture, and manufacturing, yards of gilded fencing, and at the center a vast altarpiece of elaborate mosaics, atop it, not a tabernacle, but 'Albert,' as it says on the base, as though there had been no other before or since....as good an evocation of deranged adoration as exists outside the leap of a widow onto a ceremonial pyre."

It's a crazy structure, but nonetheless an extremely photogenic one, especially on the lovely days when most of these shots were taken. The one taken on a cloudy, rainy day is on the left below, a closeup of the old boy's golden likeness.

Victoria's got a memorial of her own, right in front of Buckingham Palace. That's it, full of, appropriately enough, Victorian excess, on the left below. On the right is a more modest statue of the Queen, near Kensington Palace.

Another much beloved royal, of a more recent era, was Princess Diana. She has a memorial, too, this lovely fountain in Hyde Park, not far from Albert's. Personally, I rather prefer its design to his.

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