Where time stands still

Memorials are our nation’s collective memory, built to endure and ensure that achievements, individuals and disasters are never forgotten. Susan Owens takes an emotive tour around the British Isles in 50 monuments

- Susan Owens

THE UK writes her autobiography through her monuments. Dolmens, obelisks, statues, sculptures, spires, tombs, pillars, pyramids and crosses unfold a history of soldiers and seafarers, explorers and Imperialists, priests and idealists, writers, eccentrics and advocates for justice. Many figures are the staples of history books, but these memorials also paint a more complex social picture. There is a monument to the nameless Victorian navvies who died building bridges and laying railway tracks; another to miners killed in an underground explosion. Grieving parents have constructed elaborate monuments to infants. Beloved animals are commemorated, too, from Lord Byron’s dog Boatswain to Dr Johnson’s cat Hodge.

The compulsion to set up a marker, whether cairn or column, has the deepest of roots. When Neolithic and Bronze Age people built monuments, they built them to last. The conviction with which they planted these flags in the landscape suggests that the tombs they built for their dead were meant to endure through each solstice and equinox until the end of days.

Monuments are Britain’s collective memory. They are there to ensure that wars, battles and disasters are never forgotten and neither are achievements or individuals—remarkable or otherwise. They are built to endure, although, of course, not all do. Monuments exude the values of their times. Many prompt reflection and awe and a few make us smile, but others provoke and antagonise. What these commemorative hotspots have in common, however, is their emotional power.

London