Albert Memorial

ALBERT MEMORIAL

The name ‘Albert’ appears all over London, particularly with nineteenth century buildings and construction projects. There are three squares, there is the Albert Bridge, Albert Embankment, Albert Docks, Albert Mansions, Albert Hotel, more than one Albert Tavern, the Royal Albert Hall and its neighbour the Albert Memorial.  They are all named after Prince Albert, The Prince Consort, the husband of Queen Victoria. Prince Albert died many years before the monarch, succumbing to typhoid, at the age of forty-two. The combination of his early death, Victoria’s painful years of mourning and the rapid expansion of London at that time, led to the profuse use of his name in conjunction with many projects of the Victorian era.

After Albert’s untimely death, it was the Lord Mayor of London who first started the initiative for a memorial, with thoughts towards founding a university bearing his name. However, Queen Victoria was determined to have a memorial in its literal sense. During the following years, the plans for the memorial were frequently altered, caused in the main by the deaths of a number of those involved. The memorial we see today was eventually unveiled in 1872, eleven years after Albert’s death and it took a further three years for the statue of Albert to be positioned in his seat, as the centrepiece of the monument. It took twenty full years for the final details to be completed.

The memorial was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott and he considered it to be the masterpiece of his working career. The statue of Prince Albert is robed as a Knight of the Garter and is positioned beneath a decorated Gothic canopy, rising one hundred and seventy six feet above his seated figure. Clearly visible from the four compass points, Albert is shown holding a catalogue from The Great Exhibition of 1851. Prince Albert had taken much pleasure in masterminding the preparations the exhibition, which was held on the lawns of Hyde Park, only a short walk away from the memorial in Kensington Gardens.

More than any other public tribute to Albert, it was declared that ‘this memorial assuaged the ecstasy of Queen Victoria’s grief.’ Put up by public subscription, it is a glorious reminder of Victorian architecture, in fact it is considered the grandest high-Victorian gothic extravaganza of such a scale. It cost one hundred and twenty thousand pounds to build, with, ‘varied and valuable materials befitting the pain of his loss felt right across the British Empire.’ The memorial is inlaid with precious stones and crystals, which were intended, ‘to hold the attention of visitors as they leisurely examined its artistic beauties.’

The Frieze of Parnassus surrounds the central pedestal of the memorial and depicts nearly two hundred figures, consisting of celebrated painters, poets, sculptors, musicians and architects, all reflecting Albert’s enthusiasm for the arts. On top of the corners of the frieze are four groups of sculptures that represent the Victorian industrial arts and sciences of agriculture, commerce, engineering and manufacturing. Beneath the frieze is a pyramid-like quadrangular flight of steps, leading to four further groups of sculptures. They are positioned at the ground level corners and represent Europe, Asia, Africa and America.

The Albert Memorial is in better shape now than since its very earliest years. The fourth and most extensive renovation was completed in 1998, after eleven years of painstaking work and costing eleven million pounds. The potentially fatal rot in its iron skeleton was successfully halted. The repairs involved delicate work on more than a thousand square feet of mosaics. Fifty thousand pounds were spent on replacing the missing gold leaf, after it was stripped off in 1914 as a preventative measure to stop Zeppelins from spotting it in the glare and bombing it. The efforts were worthwhile as the memorial escaped unscathed during The Great War and likewise survived The Blitz of The Second World War.

Prince Albert, facing south, gazes over towards the Royal Albert Hall, (see blog: ROYAL ALBERT HALL) and the nearby modernist Royal College of Art, which was built one hundred years after his death in 1961. A little further on is The Royal Geographical Society, which boasts the first passenger elevator built in London, using technology that would certainly have interested the prince, who died a dozen years before it was constructed. The Albert Memorial is just inside Kensington Gardens, clearly visible from Kensington Road, London W8 5NX. London Underground (Tube): South Kensington or Knightsbridge  

Where to view Albert Memorial and video clips of London

London in motion has some of the best London Stock Footage and London Library Footage with moving clips of many of the above mentioned places to see, are available to browse through by simply visiting the ‘Albert Memorial’ category of this website.  New additions of London video clips are being frequently uploaded and further categories will be appearing over the coming months.