I’m not sure this group is going to be able to come up with a memorial fit for a Queen

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.

Of statues, there is a fine equestrian bronze of Charles I by Hubert Le Seuer, cast in 1633 and the first of its Renaissance kind in England, looking down Whitehall from a traffic island to the immediate south of Trafalgar Square. Commissioned for the lord high treasurer’s house in Roehampton, it was hidden during the years of Cromwell’s Commonwealth. Here, in October 1660, eight of those who had signed the death warrant of the Stuart king were hung, drawn and quartered.

To the Flemish sculptor, John Michael Rysbrack, we owe the accomplished equestrian statue of William III erected in Queen Square, Bristol, in 1736. Back in Trafalgar Square, George IV – styled as a Roman emperor by Francis Leggatt Chantrey – rides yet another beautifully realised horse. This statue, erected in 1828 and partly paid for by the king himself, was to have sat on top of John Nash’s Marble Arch.

Somewhere in the 20th century, this art of memorialising royalty was lost. The bronze statues of King George VI (William McMillan, 1955) and the Queen Mother (Philip Jackson, 2009) overlooking the Mall from Carlton Gardens feel lacklustre, a little too stiff, as do earlier stone statues of George V, by William Reid Dick, in Westminster’s Old Palace Yard and Edward VII in Waterloo Place, by Bertram Mackennal, even though he’s riding a rather grand horse.

How almost irrelevant such statues seemed in the century of industrialised global war. In contrast, Charles Sergeant Jagger’s cast bronze, an unknown soldier reading a letter from home, standing sentinel on platform one at Paddington station, is deeply and universally moving.

open image in gallery

It memorialises the 2,524 employees of the Great Western Railway who died fighting for king and country during the Great War, a number upped to 3,312 at the end of the Second World War. The statue, wreathed gently in steam from the “King” class locomotives that for four decades hauled famous named trains across the country, represents art and artistry of the highest order in the service of everyone.

As for other celebrated and mourned members of the royal family, Prince Albert’s memorial in Hyde Park is a glorious, contentious, polychromatic Gothic confection orchestrated by a committee, designed by George Gilbert Scott, encrusted with a frieze of distinguished architects, composers, painters, poets and sculptors and adorned with vigorous sculptures depicting the four continents. Gold-leafed, Albert sits under a great Gothic canopy that might just belong to the world’s tallest, if imaginary, Gothic cathedral.

This enjoyable exuberance contrasts with the assured Duke of York’s column overlooking the Mall and St James’s Park from Waterloo Place. Here, architecture, sculpture and pitch-perfect city planning are woven seamlessly.

open image in gallery

The Duke, who died in 1827, had been commander in chief of the British army. He was a success despite the jaunty, up-hill, down-hill rhyme by which we know him best. His statue, sculpted here by Richard Westmacott, stands at the top of a granite Tuscan column designed by Benjamin Dean Wyatt at the top of a flight of steps set between the palatial blocks of Nash’s Carlton House Terrace. He marks a full stop in the Regency architect’s ambitious set-piece route from Regent’s Park to St James’s Park.

How, I wonder, will the design teams shortlisted for the Queen Elizabeth Memorial match or even trump Nash, Westmacott and Wyatt? The memorial will rise from the heart of St James’s Park. It better be good – this a beautiful, much-loved and much-used royal park, after all. It must also be better than the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain, an overscaled Cornish granite version of a Scalextric racetrack, or the oddly drab Diana-with-children sculpture at Kensington Palace.

Significantly, the teams are composed of architects, artists and landscape designers, but to what effect, we will have to wait. It is certainly intriguing, though, to see Foster and Partners, celebrated for their adventurous and technologically accomplished airports and office towers, teamed with Yinka Shonibare, the Royal Academician best known in London, perhaps, for his Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle perched on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square.

open image in gallery

The sails of the ship were made of stylised and colourful West African-like fabric. It’s equally interesting to learn that Thomas Heatherwick, who tried to build the controversial Garden Bridge across the Thames, is working with Halima Cassell, the Pakistan-born sculptor and ceramicist whose patterns are sourced as much from nature as they are from Islamic design. The winning design team is to be announced this summer, and the final design will be revealed in April 2026 to coincide with the centenary of the Queen’s birth.

There is a pattern to be found in the formation of these design teams. One way or another, they represent the Commonwealth Queen Elizabeth was so fond of. And of her love of nature.

Successful memorials in cities, however, demand a certain discipline if they are to endure in the public imagination or to garner critical acclaim with future generations. They need to reflect far more than fashions of the moment. At the same time, it can be hard to reconcile a wish to be popular and multimedia-friendly with the kind of cool precision of the Duke of York column. Equally, there are spaces in cities, the royal parks among them, where nature, however contained by surrounding city streets and shaped in part by the hands and eyes of landscape gardeners, is allowed to triumph over overt human intervention.

open image in gallery

Feeding “cockney” sparrows by hand from the slight, pale blue metal bridge spanning the lake in St James’s Park was always more enchanting than the sight of Portland stone pedestals crowned with glum-looking 20th-century royals could ever be. I have no idea what the late Queen would think of this, yet I wonder if her memorial might be something else altogether.

Of course, there might be a plaque in Westminster Abbey, but what about an animal sanctuary laced around with wildflowers dedicated to horses and dogs and those who wish to care for them in the heart of the countryside, in the Highlands perhaps? A place where people of all ages and backgrounds and capabilities could come to learn to ride and to understand better the animals that make so many lives so much the happier and more content as they did that of the Queen.

Why not several such Queen Elizabeth II memorials the length and breadth of this “sceptr’d isle”? Living horses rather than bronze horses, which are nature’s true art?

Hopefully, the committee-approved memorial will be imaginative, well realised and uplifting. Whatever it proves to be, you will always be able to sit on a bench in St James’s Park, or even on the grass in summer, and listen to birds splashing in the lake and hear the sound of lustrous horses trooping timelessly along the Mall.