Manchester Cenotaph
Manchester Cenotaph is a war memorial in St Peter’s Square, Manchester, England. It is a grade II* listed structure and in 2015, Historic England recognised it as part of a national collection of Lutyens’ war memorials. The memorial was unveiled on 12 July 1924 by the Earl of Derby. In 2014, Manchester City Council dismantled the memorial and reconstructed it at the northeast corner of StPeter’s Square next to Manchester Town Hall.
About Manchester Cenotaph in brief
Manchester Cenotaph is a war memorial in St Peter’s Square, Manchester, England. It is a grade II* listed structure and in 2015, Historic England recognised it as part of a national collection of Lutyens’ war memorials. The memorial was unveiled on 12 July 1924 by the Earl of Derby, assisted by Mrs Bingle, a local resident whose three sons had died in the war. It cost £6,940 and the remaining funds were used to provide hospital beds. In 2014, Manchester City Council dismantled the memorial and reconstructed it at the northeast corner of StPeter’s Square next to Manchester Town Hall to make room for the expanded Metrolink tram network. In the aftermath of the First World War and its unprecedented casualties, thousands of war Memorials were built across Britain. Virtually every village, town, or city erected some form of memorial to commemorate their dead. Manchester did not get underway until 1922. An estimated 22,000 Mancunians died and 55,000 were wounded in the conflict. By the end of the war, over 13,000 men of the Manchester Regiment, including more than 4,000 from the pals battalions and 13,600 Lancashire Fusiliers, had been killed. The cenotAPH is topped by an effigy of a fallen soldier and decorated with relief carvings of the imperial crown, Manchester’s coat of arms and inscriptions commemorating the dead. The structures, based on classical architecture, use abstract, ecumenical shapes rather than overt religious symbolism.
It was originally proposed to choose an architect by open competition, but the memorial committee was criticised in the local press when it reserved the right to overrule the judgement of the independent assessor. For a civic memorial to the Great War, £10,000 was a relatively modest sum; the public felt that the funds would be better spent on the survivors and survivors’ families. The committee limited the budget to £8,000 and very rapidly raised this sum and very quickly raised the memorial. In 1924, a sub-committee approached Sir Edwin Lutyen directly, who produced, in a matter of weeks, a variation of his design for the CenOTaph in London. The design was based on the classical architecture of the architect’s work, but with a modern twist. The stone of the Stone of Remembrance provided east-facing tribunes for the colour party in memorial parades. In 2015, the memorial was recognised by Historic England as one of the best in the UK for its use of classical architecture and is part of the collection of national memorials of the same name. For more information, visit Historic England’s website or visit the Manchester Cenotsaph website or the City of Manchester’s official web page. The city council has a history of commissioning memorials dating back to the Second World War, when it was founded in 1914. The first memorial to be built in Manchester was in the town’S Albert Square.
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This page is based on the article Manchester Cenotaph published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 07, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
