Albert Memorial

The Albert Memorial is Victorian grief turned into a jewel box the size of a church spire. After Prince Albert died of typhoid in December 1861, Queen Victoria commissioned a national memorial to her husband, and the design chosen in 1863 was George Gilbert Scott's Gothic Revival canopy: a ciborium like those that shelter altars in medieval churches, enlarged to 176 feet and set in Kensington Gardens, opposite the site of the future Royal Albert Hall. Built between 1864 and 1876 at a cost of about £120,000, it opened in 1872, though the statue of the prince was not seated beneath the canopy until 1875–76.

Scott's canopy is only the frame for a vast sculptural programme. Albert, gilded and robed as a Knight of the Garter, sits facing south with a catalogue of the Great Exhibition in his hand; the figure was begun by John Henry Foley and completed by Thomas Brock after Foley's death. Around the podium runs the Frieze of Parnassus, 169 carved figures of composers, poets, painters, sculptors and architects arranged by discipline, the work of Henry Hugh Armstead and John Birnie Philip. At the corners of the steps, four sculptural groups personify the continents, Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, each by a different sculptor, while higher up four more groups represent agriculture, commerce, engineering and manufacture.

The upper parts shimmer with mosaics designed by Clayton and Bell and made by Salviati in Venice, with gilding everywhere, so that the monument reads differently at every hour of the day. It is a textbook of what the Victorians believed about progress and empire, and it can be studied like one, detail by detail. A major restoration completed in 1998 cleaned the stone, repaired the structure and renewed the gilding, returning it to the blaze of gold that Victoria saw. It has been listed at Grade I since 1970.

Getting there

The memorial stands in Kensington Gardens on Albert Memorial Road, directly across from the Royal Albert Hall, about a kilometre from Bayswater. The nearest airport is London City (LCY), some 16 km away. Kensington Gardens can be reached on foot from Lancaster Gate and Queensway on the Central line and Bayswater on the Circle line, with a walk across the park to the south side.