Proposed Albert Memorial- never built- anyone know the story?

[hammos1]

Came across the following arresting image the other day:

http://skyscraperpage.com/gallery/showphoto.php?photo=376&papass=&sort=1

Now, my knowledge of London is sufficient to tell me that this whopper was never built, and Kensington Gardens was the eventual recipient of a much smaller, but equally grandiose, memorial to Victoria’s late husband.

Does anyone know the story behind this proposed monument? How tall would it have been? (Pretty damn tall, that much is clear, judging by the way it dwarfs the Victoria tower at the far end of the Houses of Parliament- the Victoria tower is no tiddler itself). Why was it not built? (Cost? Or did the Archbishop of Westminster not wish to be cast into shadow every afternoon?)

[CalMeacham]

I’d never heard of this – fascinating.

Read Mark Twain’s essay on the existing Albert Memorial in Kensington (It’s in the collectionLetters from the Earth, edited by Bernard de Voto). Twain thought the existing memorial absurdly grandiose. Noticing that they also had Albert Hall across the street, Twain remarked: “It’s good to have a collection of memorials, to guard against accidents. I mean to have a set of tombstones when I go.”

[ChalkPit]

Well, Victoria tower is 336ft and Big Ben’s Tower is a touch less at about 320ft, so that monster looks like it woulda been a good 450ft plus, maybe gettin on for 500ft.

The tallest spire in England is Salisbury Cathedral at just over 400ft but thats mainly spire less tower.

[APB]

IIRC, it was never intended to be the Albert Memorial, but rather it was to be called the Albert Tower because the tower across the road from it is the Victoria Tower. The idea was that it would be part of a proposed Pantheon for British national heroes. The main bit of the building would have been the structure to the left of the tower in the illustration. The argument was that Westminster Abbey was becoming overcrowded (which it was), so this extension would have provided overflow space for new monuments. I don’t think it ever had any sort of official backing, which no doubt explains why it was never built. The place to find out more is the excellent book by Felix Barker and Ralph Hyde called London: as it might have been (1982, reprinted 1995). This illustration was used as the front cover.

[bonzer]

As someone who does have a copy of London: As It Might Have Been to hand, I can confirm that APB’s recollections are correct. As Barker and Hyde go through, there was quite a long history of proposals for doing something similar on the site, in the face of government footdragging. The design in question is the 1904 proposal by John Pollard Seddon, Diocesan Architect for London, and Edward B. Lamb, who’d both made earlier proposals.

The two men now worked together on an elaborate version of the earlier Seddon-Harvey scheme. One of Lamb’s drawings [the one in question] showed the scene as it would appear from below Westminster Bridge. It is a view of such photographic realism and the proposed buildings fit in so spendidly with the surrounding Westminster architecture, that we have to look twice to realise that the gigantic building does not really exist.
The dominating feature of Seddon and Lamb’s Imperial Monumental Halls is the great tower, 550 ft tall … The main approach is by a right-angle cloister which leads from the Great Cloister of the Abbey to a reception hall, 64 ft across, in the base of the tower. A series of galleries for monuments occupy the inside of the tower and there are rooms above for records. At the top of the tower is an ambulatory, 70 ft square, and above that a lantern constructed to hold bells.
From the Memorial Tower a funeral cortege would move into the Great Monumental Hall that extends 192 ft to Great College Street and culminates in a double transept, 157 ft long. Leading off the Monumental Hall are minor halls for ‘monuments of high art to eminent men and women of all parts of the British Empire … a worthy centre in the metropolis of the Empire “upon which the sun never sets”’.
Seddon and Harvey had been told in 1890 that they had priced themselves out with a similar scheme that would have cost £780,000. Now the Builder commented severely that the tower had ‘a little too much of the megalomania about it’. Seddon and Lamb can hardly have cared. They had enjoyed one wild fling. All architectural inhibitions had been discarded. Though they must have known it was doomed to be a nine-days’ wonder they could delight in having proposed just about the most proposterous folly in London’s history.

They also include a reproduction of the proposed groundplan. There’s no mention of Albert, though if his name was ever attached to the building, APB’s suggestion is plausible.

Barker and Hyde are the experts, but I’m not sure about the last comment. For a start, the similarly-scaled unbuilt tower atop Selfridge’s has always struck me as insane.

[everton]

*Originally posted by hammos1 *
**Or did the Archbishop of Westminster not wish to be cast into shadow every afternoon? **

Slight hijack: Westminster is a Catholic diocese (i.e. the Archbishop of Westminster is Catholic not Anglican, so he didn’t have any political influence in 1904). He doesn’t have any connection to the Abbey either; he’s based at Westminster Catherdral about a mile west of there. The head guy at Westminster Abbey is the Dean of Westminster.