After Elizabeth II died on 8 September 2022, it became of paramount national importance that a suitable memorial was constructed in memory of her and her unparalleled reign. Since it was announced that some of the leading architects in the country would be in competition to come up with something that would act as a fitting testament to her, there has been fevered speculation as to which design would be triumphant. Something suitably stately and reverential, perhaps, to remember the late Queen as a public figure? Or perhaps something brilliantly daring and unusual, which would have the artistic establishment in raptures at its encapsulation of the country’s greatest ever monarch?
After all, if a terrible idea has come this far, what is to stop it going all the way?
Alas. The shortlist has now been announced, and it’s thin gruel indeed. Some of the best-known architectural firms in Britain are vying with one another to commemorate the Queen, including Foster + Partners and Wilkinson Eyre. And yet what they have come up with is a dismaying mixture of schmaltz, poorly conceived grandiosity and – in the especially unfortunate case of the Thomas Heatherwick-masterminded design – a bewildering drawing supposedly based on lily pads dubbed the ‘Bridge of Togetherness’, that looks as if it’s something that Disneyland might have rejected on the grounds of excessive kitsch.
Whether it’s the pointlessly gigantic statue of the Queen on horseback that Foster’s crew are extolling or the wishy-washy water feature that J & L Gibbons have put their name to, these are a deeply unimpressive and indeed depressing assortment of designs. The worst part is that one of them will probably be chosen, and even the suggestion that all the statues are merely ‘for illustrative purposes’ is not an especially reassuring one. After all, if a terrible idea has come this far, what is to stop it going all the way?
The worst part, by miles, is the nonsense that the various projects’ copywriters have come up with. We learn that the Heatherwick horror is ‘rooted in the idea of togetherness…a physical expression of what the Queen stood for above all else, which is unity’. The grand idea is that ‘at its heart will be a new gathering place in the centre of St. James’s Park, experienced as part of a memorial walk, honouring her 70-year reign, with the path expressed as 70 lily pads, each like stepping stones, bearing reflections from voices across the Commonwealth and Realms’. Of course.
Once you’ve digested this rot, it’s onto Foster + Partners, where ‘the journey through a tranquil family of royal gardens is inspired by John Nash’s original romantic landscape, unified by a natural stone tessellated path from the United Kingdom and Commonwealth that meanders to cater to both commuters and visitors’. John Nash was a great, innovative architect who is deservedly remembered nearly two centuries after his death. Should this unlovely collection of half-figurative, half-abstract statues be inflicted on the public, it may well linger in public view, but for entirely the wrong reasons.
Even perhaps the least offensive of the designs – not to be confused with ‘the best’ – in the form of Tom Stuart-Smith’s representation of an oak from Windsor Great Park is still bedevilled by unfortunate comparisons. We are told that the statue represents ‘her strength, endurance and the historic place of the monarchy in our constitution’. To which the only response is: Does it? Really?
Public memorials are always nigh-on impossible to get right. Veer too much towards the reverential, and the designers and commissioners will be accused of conservatism; go too far towards experimentalism, and prepare to be reviled for irreverence. I have a great deal of sympathy for those who have taken on the apparently impossible task of memorialising Elizabeth II and doing so in a respectful, fresh and interesting fashion. But these pretentious, positively ugly attempts do little other than desecrate the much-loved memory of the late monarch, and should, ideally, be ditched in favour of something more appropriate. Back to the drawing board.
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