'God told me to build a wall of a million bricks, so I did'

Alex Ross speaks to the man behind the monument 'Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer', and the donor who's spent £30m

- Alex Ross

According to the Bible, it was when God had had enough of human wickedness and violence that he sent a message to Noah, telling him to build an ark.

For Richard Gamble, his message from the Lord Almighty came as he lumbered through the village of Burbage - carrying a wooden cross - on a 77-mile tour of Leicestershire to spread the word of Jesus.

“I felt a flash through my mind from God of an idea to build a wall of a million bricks by a motorway,” Mr Gamble, aged 56, said. “Every brick [was to] represent an answered prayer, a testimony, a miracle. It was the beginning.”

It was an ambitious idea, even knocked down as “utter bonkers” by some. But after a decade of praying about it, he decided to quit his job to make the vision a reality, kickstarted by another message from God, that there was some “heavenly land prepared”.

“You go deeper and it gets weirder,” the former Leicester City Football Club chaplain told The Independent, as he revealed he was sent a map with a circle showing the monument’s destined location from a woman who received it from God, while brushing her teeth.

Now, after a challenging decade spent overcoming crowdfunding targets, planning obstacles and spiralling costs, work has finally started on the 167ft-high loop-shaped monument, to be made out of glistening white concrete.

Cast in 188 segments in Portugal and measuring two and a half times the height of the Angel of the North, the sculpture, to be called Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer, will be unveiled in 2028, at a cost of £40m.

On Wednesday, the long-awaited turf-cutting ceremony took place. Around 200 smartly dressed people gathered expectantly under a cloudy sky on a farmer's field wedged between the M6 and M42 just east of Birmingham.