Park no place for memorial

Published: 12 November, 2010

• I WRITE to you on behalf of those who lost their lives in defence of our freedoms and traditional values. 

But a great wrong is to be perpetrated in their names, needlessly, by the creation of a huge structure in The Green Park for the RAF Bomber Command Memorial. 

Please make your voice count in resisting this and supporting the more appropriate location on Victoria Embankment, and for a more sensitive memorial.

Since January 2010 the Friends of the Green Park have pointed out to the architect, the Bomber Command Association, the Daily Telegraph as a driving force for donations, and the government, that this structure would violate the unique heritage site, without reason or justification. 

That which has remained undulating meadow and woodland should remain so, for recreation and enjoyment for all. It is not to be turned into a “necropolis”.

The issue has been turned by Heritage Foundation, the national press, and “personalities” into a degrading spectacle of excessive fundraising, for an overblown, extraordinary, monument. 

In May 2010 a Westminster council planning sub-committee of only four individuals approved these proposals of national significance, subject to conditions. This was against the city council and Royal Parks policies that there should not be any more memorials in the area.

The appalling setting aside of rightful policies which protect the heritage parkland of The Green Park, is a monstrous dereliction of a duty of care. It is not as though there was any overriding necessity or reason for the memorial to be in park. 

Remembrance is not determined by over ostentation but by genuine concern and the conveying of empathy and sentiment. Hence the great significance of the Cenotaph in Whitehall, and the Gunners’ Memorial in Hyde Park Corner. 

The unseemly posturing to raise ever larger sums of money for the specific Bomber Command structure should cease forthwith. A completely revised assessment is called for, and the spurious reasoning of the promoters that it must be completed for the Olympics or the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee should be dismissed for what it is – unseemly marketing hype .

TOM BALL
for and on behalf of the 
Thorney Island Society – Friends of The Green Park