Historical Statues and Memorials

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 9th February 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Oates on bringing this matter to the attention of noble Lords. Creating new memorials to reflect our broader history would be a very good thing. As I walked through London on my way here today, I looked at the various memorials because I knew that I would be speaking in this debate. I saw a great many men who had had fairly undistinguished military careers gazing heroically down roads, either on horseback or on foot, and they seemed to reflect when the buildings behind them were put up. That tells us quite a lot about the people who built them but only a little about the people represented. I would hope that our new memorials will reflect people who do not have the money to support the building of memorials rather than more statues that are about paying off a relative and the wish to impress someone. We should be encouraging people who are not in that position, and in doing so we would be doing ourselves a service.

The noble Lord, Lord Cope, mentioned war memorials. They are probably an incredibly good example of where we should be going because they represent groups. Individuals may be recorded on them, but they represent groups. If we concentrate on groups and stop trying to reflect the “great men” school of history, we can do no better than look to our war memorials. Then we will be approaching this in the right way. If the Industrial Revolution changes a place, it changes the way a group and a society are structured. If we say that the slave trade affected groups, memorials to them should show how that group was affected.

Such statues are slightly more difficult to put up than those of one person standing on a horse and looking heroically down a shopping precinct, but we have to start thinking about this. We should really start thinking about it when we start building. That is the easy time to do it, when there is money around. I hope the Minister will be able to indicate that anybody building a new project might be encouraged to think about what they would like to record.