OPINION: Should the Westminster’s Holocaust Memorial wait for better economic times?
With so much debate for and against the £100million monument in Victoria Tower Gardens, is there an argument for putting the plans on hold, asks historian Derek Taylor?
People differ. So you wouldn’t consider there was a single subject on which UNESCO, the Royal Parks, the Environment Agency, the Victorian Society, the London Parks and Gardens Trust and Historic England all agree.
But there is.
They all dislike the proposed location for the Westminster Holocaust Memorial.
We’ll never know anything as terrible as the Holocaust. Even 75 years after the end of the war it’s difficult to conceive of anything so horrific. The Spanish are still apologising for the Inquisition after hundreds of years and the Germans will be equally appalled as the centuries go on.
Not that memorials in London have an untarnished history.
We commemorated winning the Napoleonic Wars by building the Marble Arch. The architect was no less than John Nash, creator of those wonderful terraces in Regents Park. He was fired though by the prime minister, the Duke of Wellington, for overspending the budget.
Then there was Nelson’s Column which only cost £47,000 (About £4 million today) in 1840. The Albert Memorial in 1872 cost in today’s money, about £15 million, but the Westminster Holocaust Memorial is said to have a bill of over £100 million already.
The greatest architects have naturally been chosen to design national memorials. Edwin Lutyens designed the Cenotaph, though you may not have heard of the Frenchman, Hubert Le Sueur, who designed the statue of Charles I at Charing Cross.
The Holocaust Memorial architect is Sir David Adjaye, whose father was a Ghanaian diplomat and whose designs are celebrated.
The creation of the memorial has been under discussion for years now. It is unseemly when we are discussing commemorating something so dreadful.
So what is wrong with the proposed location of the Westminster Holocaust Memorial in Victoria Tower Gardens adjoining the Houses of Parliament? The objection is that it takes up green space which the locals enjoy.
Well; that could have been said of almost every one of the Royal Parks which were originally farmland. The London County Council Improvements Act 1900 also lays down that there should be no buildings on Victoria Tower Gardens, but the government intends to repeal that.
As there are already memorials in Hyde Park and the Imperial War Museum, it is very good of the government to create another, linking the mother of parliaments with the tragedy, but you have to consider the adverse effects of all this opposition.
The Board of Deputies have said they strongly support the memorial. I wonder if anybody has considered that there would be room in Parliament Square for something slightly smaller, where there are already a considerable number of statues.
Basically, the memorial should be created without argument. It isn’t a political subject and all the political parties would approve of the objective. There are Holocaust memorials in many parts of the world, though the memory of many terrible massacres are ignored or forgotten. It’s also worth remembering that concentration camp victims came from different strands of society; the Roma (Gypsies) were Auschwitz victims as well.
The creation of the memorial has been under discussion for years now. It is unseemly when we are discussing commemorating something so dreadful. If the government goes ahead with the location, there will be a sour taste in many mouths for many years.
That’s the last thing there should be.
It would also be better for the Board of Deputies to leave the final decision to the government and keep well out of the discussion.
From the government’s point of view, when far more people are going to food banks because of the cost of living crisis and when there are fine Holocaust memorials in existence already, it would be sensible to put the whole question on the back burner and look at it again when things improve.
- Derek Taylor is an historian
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