What is LondonRemembers?
The aim of this website is to document all the memorials in London. That's the plaques, monuments, statues, fountains, etc, that commemorate a person, an event, a building, etc. It's an aim we don't think we will ever achieve but we will enjoy the attempt. Our prime objective is not to research biographies, etc. – anyone can do that using web resources. This website focuses on finding the memorials, photographing them, plotting them on a map and logging them in a searchable database, thus providing a powerful research tool. As far as we know, we are the only people doing this: treating all memorials equally, from the rich and famous to the poor and humble.
Caveat: Be aware that London actually has many more cars, fewer bikes, more rain and less sun than our photos show.
Memorials - purpose and meaning
Robert Musil [1] believed that nothing is as invisible as a public monument, and one of Alan Bennett’s characters concurs: “There’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.” [2] Much earlier Pope, protective of poets’ incomes, declares that patrons “Withhold the pension, and set up the head” (don’t pay agreed fees and erect busts instead) [3]
But once you start noticing memorials they are everywhere. One of Julian Barnes' characters comments on how he has started noticing things since he has been in love.
"I start seeing things I never would have noticed before. You know how you can walk along a street in London and never raise your eyes above the top of a bus? You go along, and you look at the other people, and the shops, and the traffic, and you never look up, not really up. I know what you're going to say, if you did look up you'd probably step in a pile of dog turds or walk into a lamp-post, but I'm serious. I'm serious. Raise your eyes just that little bit more and you'll spot something, an odd roof, some fancy bit of Victorian decoration. Or lower them, for that matter. The other day, one lunchtime in fact, I was walking up the Farringdon Road. All of a sudden I noticed something I must have walked past dozens of times. A plaque set in the wall at shin height, painted cream with the lettering picked out in black."[4]
We have also walked that section of Farringdon Road - click on the picture of the plaque below for more information.
Bennett has more to say on memorials: In a discussion about Hardy’s poem on the burial of a Wessex lad in Africa, ‘Drummer Hodge’, it is noted that the fallen soldier has a name, Hodge. The Boer and Zulu wars “were the first campaigns when common soldiers were commemorated. The names of the dead were recorded and inscribed on war memorials. Before this private soldiers were all unknown soldiers and, so far from being revered, there was a firm in the 19th century in Yorkshire which swept up their bones from the battlefields of Europe in order to grind them into fertilizer.” {5}
Memorials can have a profound effect on the passer-by. Traudl Junge was Hitler's private secretary from 1942 until he committed suicide in 1945. In a documentary film she talks movingly about her shock and horror as, after the war, the true nature of Hitler's regime became known: "I wasn't able at first to see the connection with my own past. I still felt somehow content that I had no personal guilt and had known nothing about it. . . . . but then one day I was walking past the memorial in Franz Josef Street {Munich} to Sophie Scholl, a young girl who opposed Hitler, and I realised that she was the same age as me and that she was executed the same year I started working for Hitler. At that moment I really sensed that it is no excuse to be young, and that it might have been possible to find out what was going on." [6]
References:
1. R. Musil, ‘Monuments, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author’ (1936)
2. A. Bennett, ‘History Boys’ (2004)
3. A. Pope, “The Dunciad: Book IV’ (1741)
4. J. Barnes, 'Talking it over' (1991)
5. As 2 above
6. T. Junge, Transcribed from the English sub-titles for the film: ‘Blind Spot, Hitler's Secretary / Im Toten Winkel, Hitlers Sekretärin’ by André Heller and Othmar Schmiderer, 2002.
Included / excluded
Gathering material for this website entailed setting some guidelines defining what to include and what to exclude. For those visitors interested, here they are, but as they are only guidelines, each one has probably been broken at least once. It's our website - we're allowed.
- Burial grounds, churches, and all such religious buildings have been excluded from our researches. Each one of them probably merits a website in its own right. Communal war monuments spotted in church grounds have however been included.
- We've only actively collected memorials that are on public view.
- Foundation stones. Not normally included. Boring local councillors can't get on our website just by laying a dull foundation stone for a non-descript building.
- Non-commemorative statues - Lovely though some of these are, life is too short to include these in this website, so the rule is: only memorials.
- Many London pubs have plaques, erected by the brewery, giving some information about the local history, often colourful but erected for commercial purposes so of doubtful veracity. These are generally excluded.
Terminology
Every human activity worth its salt has to have its own specialist vocabulary, so here's ours.
- Site: A place on the ground (and pinpointed on the maps) where one or more memorials are to be found.
- Memorial: A plaque, monument, statue, etc.
- Subject: That which is commemorated: a person, an event, a building, etc. This also includes the “Memorial Creators”, those people and organisations involved in creating a memorial, such as the sculptor, the historical society who placed it, the celebrity who unveiled it, etc.
On each Subject page we have tried to provide a picture of the subject, from a website (address given as “Picture Source”) that also gives more information about that subject. If the link is broken please let us know.
Inscriptions
We have transcribed the text off the monuments but not attempted to copy the layout, capitalisation, new-lines, fonts, etc. Where characters are illegible we have replaced them with "?". Within the text we have made statements such as {on the left face:}, or {3rd column:}. Such statements are identified with these {brackets}.
When describing memorials with expressions such as "on the left facade" we always mean: "on the left, as you face the front of the monument".
Sort sequence
For alphabetical sequencing we have adopted the conventions that:
- there are no blanks in surnames such as duMaurier, VanDyck, etc.
- names are arranged as follows: surname, first name(s) or initials, title(s)
- in some lists the subjects are first sorted by type (Event, Group, Person, etc.)
Missing memorials
You know of a memorial and it's not included in this website? If it is surrounded by a lot of other memorials then that means we have searched the area but missed it, so please tell us about it. Our excuses for our omissions are various:
- We have the memorial but have not yet entered it on the website (known technically as a “back-log” and it’s too darn big).
- When we walked that street the memorial was obscured by scaffolding, a bus, etc.
- Perhaps the memorial has been placed since we searched that area.
- We have not yet searched that area. This applies to a lot of London, but we are working on it.
About us
It probably doesn't need stating, but this website is not a commercial concern; it is a hobby. We started collecting data about London memorials in 1999, because we enjoyed walking and cycling around the city, finding out about its history, geography and architecture. We plotted them on maps because we find maps endlessly fascinating and enjoy using them. Then we moved to Brussels for a few years and it seemed that collecting memorials would be a splendid way to investigate that city, and so it proved. We created BrusselsRemembers, but returned to London before Brussels was complete. So now LondonRemembers is live. It also is doomed to remain incomplete (where does London stop?) but certainly will grow and grow. And now (2009) we are using GoogleMaps which means you can move about the city much more easily.
Help us
By now you either think we are crazy to be doing this or you're fascinated and would love to help. Currently we have a huge back-log of memorials waiting to be published. The bottle-neck is the desk research: finding the Subject pictures, getting even just some basic information to put on our database about the people and events commemorated. This all takes time and prevents us getting out on the streets which is what we really want to do. But perhaps you would enjoy this research? Or perhaps you've broken a leg and are looking for some activity that you can do from a chair? We welcome your offer of help.
Contact us and let us know what interests you.
Credits
If you help us we will give you credit (unless you'd rather be anonymous). People who have helped by finding memorials, providing photos, text, etc.:
- Bob Baker (4/2/1943 - 24/10/2004)
- Nicholas Baldwin
- M. Beer
- Franklin Bishop
- Trevor Blake (our American consultant)
- Matt Brown
- Jane Davis
- Beverley Duguid
- Nigel Hall
- Tony Jauncey
- Rosemary Jeffreys (Latin translations)
- Isabel Raphael
- Tina Rickward
- Cathy Surowiec (Italian translations)
- Tony Tugnutt
- Erin Vance
- Margaret Wright
- Museum of the Royal Welch Fusiliers
- Network Rail
The pictures of the subjects have been collected from other websites and we have in each case cited the source website.
Credits go both ways. If you use any of our material please let us know. We are happy for you to use any of our work in a non-commercial publication (on-line or otherwise) on condition that you acknowledge the source of the work as being “London Remembers.com”. If you want to use our work in a commercial publication (on-line or otherwise) then please contact us. We will probably agree, with the same condition of acknowledgement. This is the “Attribution-noncommercial” copyright defined at Creative Commons .
