Thiepval Memorial — war memorial
Amanda Slater , from Coventry (England) · CC BY-SA 2.0

Thiepval Memorial

Mémorial de Thiepval

  • 2 min read
  • 50.051° N 2.686° E

Interesting facts

  • When the remains of a missing soldier are found and identified, his name is filled in with cement, leaving gaps across the panels.
  • The Commonwealth War Graves Commission says over 90 per cent of the men named here died between 1 July and 18 November 1916.
  • The sixteen piers have 64 stone-panelled faces, but only 48 carry names; the panels on the outside of the memorial are left blank.
  • Lutyens's stepped arches grew from a practical problem: fitting more than 72,000 names into a compact form instead of a long, low wall.
  • Sixteen carved stone laurel wreaths name the actions in which the men fell, from Delville Wood and High Wood to Thiepval Ridge.
  • Among the names are the composer George Butterworth, the writer Saki and seven holders of the Victoria Cross.
  • The memorial stands about 200 m from the site of the old Thiepval château; the château grounds were avoided because building there meant moving wartime graves.
  • Most of the men in the Anglo-French cemetery are unknown: 239 Commonwealth and 253 French soldiers, reburied there between December 1931 and March 1932.
  • A French inscription at the top dedicates the memorial to the French and British armies from a grateful British Empire.
  • Unveiled in 1932, Thiepval was the last of the special memorials in Flanders and Picardy to be inaugurated, with Lutyens himself present.

Why it is worth it

In the open farmland of Picardy, a great tower of red brick and white stone rises above the fields. The Thiepval Memorial commemorates more than 72,000 British and South African servicemen who died in the Battles of the Somme and have no known grave, and it is the largest Commonwealth memorial to the missing anywhere in the world. Its designer, Sir Edwin Lutyens, gave it a form found nowhere else: not a single arch but a pile of interlocking arches of four different sizes, stepping upward so that from every side the eye is drawn to the tallest opening at the summit.

The memorial was built between 1928 and 1932 and unveiled on 1 August 1932 by the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII, in the presence of the French president Albert Lebrun. It rises about 140 feet above its podium. The structure stands on sixteen brick piers faced with Portland stone, and on the stone faces of these piers the names are cut, regiment by regiment, in panel after panel. The original French brick weathered badly and in 1973 the tower was refaced with brick from Accrington in Lancashire, which gives it its deep, warm colour against the pale stone.

The experience is one of scale changing as you approach: from a distance the building is a solid, almost abstract composition; beneath it, the arches become towering vaults and the stone surfaces dissolve into columns of tiny names. At its foot lies a small Anglo-French cemetery, with three hundred Commonwealth graves under white headstones and three hundred French graves under grey stone crosses, placed side by side as a sign of the shared losses of the two nations. The cemetery and memorial look out over the ground of the Somme offensive, which opened on 1 July 1916.

A visitor centre with a small museum was opened beside the site in 2004. Ceremonies are held here every 1 July and on 11 November. Since 2023 the memorial has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage listing of funerary and memory sites of the First World War on the Western Front.

Getting there

Thiepval is a small village in the Somme department, about 6 km north of the town of Albert along the D73; Arras is about 28 km away. The nearest airport is Lille Airport (LIL), roughly 65 km away. The visitor centre is at 8 rue de l'Ancre, with a small car park near the memorial.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Hauts-de-France 6The Most Beautiful Places in France 179The Most Striking War Memorials 15The Most Beautiful Squares, Streets and Monuments in France 16The Most Beautiful Squares, Streets and Monuments 173

From the encyclopaedia

The Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme is a war memorial to 72,337 missing British and South African servicemen who died in the Battles of the Somme of the First World War between 1915 and 1918, with no known grave. It is near the village of Thiepval, Picardy in France. A visitors' centre opened in 2004. Designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, Thiepval has been described as "the greatest executed British work of monumental architecture of the twentieth century".

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