A memorial fit for a queen? Seriously, I have my doubts

If the committee-approved memorial of Queen Elizabeth II in St James’s Park is to be imaginative, well realised and uplifting, it may need a total rethink, says Jonathan Glancey

- Jonathan Glancey

When, perhaps from the top of a London bus, you catch sight of the White Tower, the Norman keep at the heart of the Tower of London, do you ever feel, as I do, that you have come face to facade with William the Conqueror? William was buried in the abbey he founded in Caen, yet this massive, four-square fortress stamping its weighty presence by the River Thames is surely his English memorial. I came. I conquered. I built.

For generations of schoolchildren, William has been the first in the litany of English and British monarchs stretching from 1066, and all that, to the late Queen, and now, to King Charles.

The Queen’s bloodline stretched further back, though, to Athelstan, the first king of England. So, you might well think that there are dozens of glorious memorials – Saxon, Norman, Plantagenet, Tudor, Stuart, Hanoverian, along with those more recent from the houses of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and Windsor – that could serve as inspiration for the Queen Elizabeth Memorial to be built in St James’s Park, London, the design of which is to be revealed this summer.

There are, in fact, precious few outstanding public memorials to our kings and queens. Open-air memorials, that is. There are fine tombs to some, though not all, of our monarchs, while the greatest memorials to date, are perhaps Henry VII’s Lady Chapel at Westminster Abbey, a spectacular display of fan vaults and supreme craftsmanship, Wren’s graceful English Baroque Fountain Court for William and Mary at Hampton Court and, of course, William I’s White Tower.