Too many memorials: Britain's ever-growing number of World War II memorials are marked more by vanity and kitsch than dignity and restraint—unlike the monuments built after the Great War

Apollo, June, 2005 by Gavin Stamp

It is now sixty years since the end of World War II, yet as memories fade and the number of those who can remember the conflict decreases, more and more war memorials are being commissioned. Recently, memorials to the dead of the Commonwealth, of Australia and to non-human casualties have all been erected and, later this year, memorials to the Battle of Britain and to serving women of World War II are to be unveiled. A visitor to Blair's Britain might suppose that, far from believing in 'forward, not back', it is instead wallowing in past glories. But the real problem with these memorials is not that they are an expression of a national self-justifying obsession with the defeat of Nazi Germany as the country's last great moment in history, but rather that most of them are so embarrassing, so aesthetically mediocre.

In terms of art, the catastrophe of the Great War took place at just the right time. The Edwardian classical revival had reached a peak of sophistication so that architects could produce austerely monumental structures whose forms resonated with the European tradition and so had meaning. Above all there was Edwin Lutyens, who, by his 'Elemental Mode', seen in the Cenotaph in Whitehall and in the many cemeteries and memorials created by the Imperial (now Commonwealth) War Graves Commission, set a high standard in dignity and meaningful restraint without resorting to crude religious or patriotic symbolism and imagery. His Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval in France is surely the greatest as well as the most moving expression of twentieth-century British architecture. Today, however, that tradition, if not dead, is certainly misunderstood, as architects have not been trained in a visual language within which they can work with sculptors. Despite the fine examples all around, attempts at designing even a decent pedestal can be painfully crude--the recent statues of Mountbatten and Bomber Harris are more worthy of Tirana or Pyongyang than London--while the lettering is often as stiff and conventional as the standard, awful work of modern monumental masons.

The best of the recent monuments is the set of gate-less 'Memorial Gates' erected in Constitution Hill to the memory of five million volunteers from the Indian sub-continent, Africa and the Caribbean who fought for Britain in two world wars. The first design, by Liam O'Connor, was, however, a crude, stiff essay in the Xerox-Palladian Prince of Wales school of classicism and what has been built was greatly improved by the indirect advice of the architect John Simpson, who, intelligently, looked to the best precedents; that is, to the 1920s memorials of Lutyens and Herbert Baker. This shows in the finely modelled pylons; the flanking little Indian temple, or chattri, is more fussy, however, and not as good an essay in the style as Baker's memorial at Neuve Chapelle to the poor Indians who died in the filth of the Western Front.

There is, of course, no reason why memorials should be in the classical manner. Surely it is possible to design a modern, abstract memorial of suitable dignity and poignancy? This was certainly achieved in Maya Lin's Vietnam sunken, folded wall of names in Washington, DC, a concept echoed in the new Australian War Memorial at Hyde Park Corner (Fig. 3). This is an irregular wall curving around the bottom end of the traffic island and, discordantly, is in dark grey granite rather than the Portland stone used for the neighbouring Wellington Arch and the Artillery Memorial, and which, for no obvious reason, has water dribbling down one end of it. The design seems arbitrary and contrived; sloping granite blocks line the inside of the curve and are reminiscent of that distressing sight of old tombstones uprooted and stacked around a churchyard wall to facilitate the motor-mower. The best aspect of it is the clever lettering, with the big names of battles made legible by widening the smaller inscriptions of place names where necessary.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

This memorial also manifests another unhappy modern trait: vanity. The Cenotaph is, very properly, unsigned; it speaks for itself. But this memorial is flanked by ugly plinths recording the names of its creators--Tonkin Zulaikha Greer, architects, and Janet Laurence, artist--as well as the circumstances of its dedication in 2003. But would the dead, will posterity, care that it was dedicated in the presence of two unpleasant warmongering prime ministers (Howard and Blair) in addition to the Queen? Even worse, in this respect, is the new Animals in War memorial in the centre of Park Lane, for here half the back of its curving stone wall is covered with large inscriptions recording the names not only of David Backhouse, the designer and sculptor, and the carvers, Richard Holliday and Harry Gray, but also a long list of trustees and donors. As for the animals, who 'had no choice', they are represented by free-standing bronze figures of mules, a horse and a dog wandering though a gap in the wall and by a giant carved frieze reminiscent of a plate in an illustrated edition of The Jungle Book that depicts a camel, elephant, bullocks and other creatures. The sentiment behind this memorial may be admirable, but the result is pure kitsch.