Albert Memorial

Nothing else in London was built with the care and expense of the Albert Memorial, which faces the Royal Albert Hall across Kensington Gore. Queen Victoria commissioned it after Prince Albert died in 1861, and George Gilbert Scott designed it as a Gothic canopy, 54 metres high, over a seated bronze figure of the Prince. The memorial was opened in 1872 and the statue, by John Henry Foley and finished by Thomas Brock after Foley’s death, was placed under the canopy in 1876.

Everything about it is deliberate. Albert holds the catalogue of the Great Exhibition of 1851, which he had championed. Around the base runs the Frieze of Parnassus, 169 figures of painters, poets, architects, sculptors and musicians. At the four corners are marble groups for the continents, and higher up the canopy carries mosaics, enamels and a spire of gilded bronze. The figure was blackened during the First World War and stayed dark for most of the twentieth century. It was restored between 1994 and 1998, and the statue regilded, so it now shines from a great distance.

That shine is what a camera finds. In a wide view across the parks the memorial is a small gold point against the dark mass of the Albert Hall, and in a gigapixel image it can be picked out long before anything else in Kensington. Please click any of the images below to explore the views in high resolution.