"When we place people on a pedestal, we only diminish ourselves"

Statuemania is back, but the political weaponisation of memorials will not end happily, writes Robert Bevan.

There's a short, cobbled street in Munich still known as Shirkers' Alley. It was the route locals took during the Third Reich to avoid passing a Nazi war memorial around the corner. Performing a respectful Hitler salute at the memorial was compulsory. Non-compliance was punished.

It's an extreme example of the reverence sometimes demanded of secular monuments.

Most memorials are erected to events and individuals that we are, often literally, supposed to look up to. Over the past five years they have been a battleground in the culture wars, most obviously in the form of iconoclasm – the pulling down of dishonourable statues of slave traders and colonialists.

Until the late 1800s, public statues that weren't kings or saints were a rarity

A less recognised aspect of these wars are the innumerable new statues now being erected, and the increasingly authoritarian legal regime in place to protect them.

The recently announced shortlist to design a memorial to Queen Elizabeth II is only the latest to be set in train. Donald Trump, meanwhile, has just issued an executive order reviving the idea of a National Garden of American Heroes in Washington DC featuring many random likenesses from Whitney Houston, Julia Child and John Wayne to, irony of ironies, the great anti-totalitarian thinker Hannah Arendt (there are no Native Americans).

This at the same time as Trump is forcing through the renaming of Black Lives Matter Plaza in the same city and the removal of an associated mural.

Until the late 1800s, public statues that weren't kings or saints were a rarity. The late 19th century changed that with a period known as "statuemania". This was the height of European empires and of municipal expansion, and the ruling class wanted to cement its position. Generals, politicians and mercantile elites were cast in bronze and sculpted in stone.

The erection of the notorious, now-toppled statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol was typical of this attempt to manufacture consent. It was put up in 1895, more than 170 years after Colston's death, but coincided with industrial unrest in the city. The Bristol Radical History Group, among others, have argued that this and other Bristol statues were part of a commensurate desire to create cross-class civic bonds.

Yet between 1870 and the first world war, UK street statues were still only being erected at about 100 or so per decade. The figure shot up in the 1990s, when several hundred statues were erected in one 10-year period, and it has continued ever since.

Both left and right are participating in a statuary arms race

Among these newer statues are earnest attempts to counter-balance the monumental narrative by representing groups historically absent from the public realm: women's vote campaigners Millicent Fawcett in London and Emmeline Pankhurst in Manchester are just two examples. These have now earned their place, as has London's memorial to the victims of the Transatlantic slave trade due to be unveiled next year (and after successive governments refused to fund a national memorial).

More often though, they are driven by trivial celebrity – such as entertainers Cilla Black, Ken Dodd, Victoria Wood. They don't even have to be dead; the sports sector in particular seems happy to put up bronzes to those still alive and kicking, often to the internet's amusement.

Such were the burgeoning proposals that the City of Westminster declared a "monument saturation zone" around Westminster and the Royal Parks, where new memorials would be allowed only in the most exceptional circumstances, and then only when the person being honoured has been dead at least a decade.

We don't all live under the same rules, however. The zone is being ignored for the new QEII monument, just as it was for the massive memorial to second world war Bomber Command that the Queen unveiled in 2012 in Green Park. This was pushed through in the face of objections by those horrified at honouring the war crime of carpet-bombing German civilian centres – no matter the bravery of individual RAF pilots. In such ways, monuments compel us to adopt partial versions of history.

Both left and right are participating in a statuary arms race that only those with the deepest pockets and political connections can realistically win. In the long run, it is an expensive and foolish game. When we place people on a pedestal, we only diminish ourselves.

Worse are the intensifying demands that we pay our respects to inanimate monuments. The UK's Police Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023 introduced offences of "criminal damage to memorials and statues", and "locking on". Those convicted now risk prison sentences similar to those handed out to rapists.

Do we really want people thrown in prison for not respecting monuments?

Working its way through parliament right now is a new Crime and Policing Bill that will see those climbing war memorials similarly liable to imprisonment. They don't need to have been damaged, just clambered upon. This appears to be a response to a Gaza demonstration in November 2023 when a couple of protestors climbed on the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner.

Then-home secretary James Cleverly called the protestors' actions "deeply disrespectful", revealing that he was considering "what further measures need to be taken so the police can take action". Even after a change of government, under current home secretary Yvette Cooper here we are still, the criminalisation of protest intensifying.

Weirdly, the bill only applies to 25 Grade I-listed memorials on public land – as if the disrespect worsens with increased artistic or heritage value (that the bill is a hasty nonsense is indicated in that it initially misnamed the grade system as "National Heritage Category One"). A clutch were designed by Edwin Lutyens, but most you will have no clue ever existed.

It is not even a pressing problem; the War Memorials Trust lists dozens of acts of vandalism, theft and graffiti each year, but so-called "anti-social" behaviour caused by climbing is a rarity.

Do we really want people thrown in prison for not respecting monuments, whether that's a British war memorial, however worthy, or a gold statue of Trump in Gaza – a world where a Shirkers' Alley is necessary? That groaning sound you hear is Hannah Arendt turning in her grave.

Robert Bevan is a former editor of Building Design and architecture critic for the Evening Standard and now runs the heritage consultancy Authentic Futures. He is the author of Monumental Lies: Culture Wars & The Truth about the Past, published by Verso.

The photo is by Vitor Fontes via Unsplash.

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