TEA RING EDWARD MEMORIAL IN LONDON.
IT is a pity that one of the most striking of the proposals made for a London memorial to King Edward VII. was not published in its full and comprehensive form earlier in the year. Monday, November 7th, was the day appointed by the Memorial Committee to consider, and, as it was believed, to decide finally on, the proposals already submitted to them. And on Monday, too late for the Committee to turn over the matter in their minds before the meeting, a correspondent of the Times made a suggestion as to the form the memorial should take which is widely different from any of the proposals already selected, and, as it were, "starred," by the Committee. The Committee by Monday had narrowed down the proposals before them, a hundred and sixty-four in number, to four:—Lord Avebury's scheme for a central hall for the University of London; Lord Esher's suggestion for a museum on the lines of the Musee Carnavalet in Paris; Lord Eversley's proposal for an extension of West- minster Abbey ; and a proposal, which, we believe, is backed by a petition, for acquiring the Crystal Palace. The corre- spondent of the Times, on the other hand, suggested the pulling down of Charing Cross Railway Station and rebuilding it south of the river, and then replacing the hideous Hungerford Bridge by a noble bridge really worthy of the capital of the Empire.—The proposal was made in substance by Mr. John Burns in his address on October 10th at the Town Pleiming Conference, but its present application is, at any rate, new.—At first sight, we must own, the proposal seems immensely attractive. London traffic becomes worse and worse blocked on Waterloo Bridge every year; Charing Cross Station is a hideous building, and Hungerford Bridge is a blot on the river and the Metropolis ; also, the clearing up of the wharves and squalid streets on the Surrey side neigh- bouring the new London County Council Hall would be an admirable work in itself alone. But it is to be feared that as a scheme for a memorial the project is unworkable. One of the considerations which the Committee have kept steadily before them in their labour of selection is that any scheme to be adopted "should be capable of being carried out for such a sum as would be likely to be raised without difficulty through the medium of a Mansion House fund." That, probably, settles the matter. London Bridge in its original, inadequate form in 1831 cost half-a-million. The new bridge would cost much more. The removing of the station buildings and erecting them on the other side of the river would make the needed sum prodigious. Not even a Mansion House fund, we fear, could cope with so huge a need. If the movement is to be successful, it must form part of some general scheme for embanking the south side of the river.
The Committee, however, have not yet made their final selection. All that they have done is to decide that London shall have a statue of King Edward, and they have referred back all the suggested schemes, including any which may be made subsequently, for further consideration. As for the statue, Lord Redesdale, in recommending that it should be worthy of the King to whose memory it is to be erected, suggested that its cost should be between 250,000 and 270,000. But surely those figures are unnecessarily high. The worthiness of a memorial, after all, does not depend wholly on its cost, and 270,000 is a huge sum to pay for a statue. Such a sum would probably be employed to erect surrounding statuary on a large scale, besides the effigy itself, and a memorial taking that form would not, in our opinion, be in consonance with the ideals which belong to our generation, or with the historical career which we seek to commemorate. We may pass on to consider the scheme which in all its bearings seems to be the most attractive and most workable of the proposals put before the Committee, which is Lord Esher's suggestion for an historical museum in London on the lines of the Mils& Carnavalet in Paris. One of the first of the many recom- mendations in its favour is that there is already in exist- ence, handed by an anonymous donor to the late First Commissioner of Works, a very large sum intended for the purchase of objects suitable for just such a museum. Another recommendation is that the scope of the museum can be made commensurate with the sum of money subscribed by the London public,. But the real and paramount point in favour of the proposal is the essential interest of the scheme itself. We have many museums and institutes in London, but none devoted to the illustration of the history of London itself. And think what wonderful opportunities for study, for instruction, and for the realisation of something of the splendour of the history of the capital of the Empire such a museum would afford. We have many of us during the last few years taken a good deal of interest in pageants. An historical museum would hold the London pageant materialised in perpetuity. But it would hold more than that. Apart from the methods by which such a museum could illustrate history, as, for instance, by pictures, engravings, descriptive scenery, and literary records, there might be visible examples of the manners and customs of our ancestors, of the materials with which they worked, and the surroundings in which they thought Out the problems of their day. We might have an exhibition of national costumes, many of them the clothes or dresses which actually belonged to historical persons. Models of important London buildings or thoroughfares at different stages of their history would give us an idea of London as it showed itself, say, to Chaucer, Ralegh, -Pepys, and Johnson. We should understand something of the development of the City from the building of Old London Bridge to the day when Kensington was still a village, or when English officers like General Ogle- thorpe, the founder of the colony of Georgia, went snipe- shooting in Conduit Mead, where now we see Conduit Street. We should look back on the prison systems of the Fleet and the Marshalsea ; we should be shown a London without the British Museum, the Mint, or Regent Street ; we should watch the opening of the London Docks, the piles sunk for Blackfriars and Waterloo Bridges, the removal of the turn- pikes, the beginning of the penny post, and the opening of the railways to Birmingham, Bristol, and Brighton. Collec- tions of proclamations would illustrate the social and political history of the City ; the great commercial houses, doubtless, would be proud to exhibit their records ; cases of autographs and manuscripts would bring famous citizens and authors as near to us as the written word can bring them. In short, we should realise, perhaps for the first time, something of the influence which London since the day of Alfred has had upon the history of the world. As Lord Esher says, "if such a collection had been begun in the time of Queen Elizabeth, what a wonderful story it would have told." But it is not too late to reconstruct something of that story. We may at least hope to do for our descendants what we should wish that Elizabeth had done for us.
The question of a site for such a museum occurs at once, and the site for the museum suggests, too, a connexion with the site for the proposed statue. We own that we have no great liking for the idea of filling any further space in public parks with buildings or statuary. Our parks should remain parks,—open stretches of grass with trees an water, and flowers bordering broad and sunny walks. What would be much more to the purpose than the erection of statuary where we now have open grass or gravel would be the acquiring of some fine old London house such as the historic William and Mary house in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and the enclosure of neighbouring ground in order to erect the galleries of the museum, and a square or open apace for the statue. Then the memorial would be complete in itself, instead of the statue being isolated in position from the building with which it was connected in original intention and design. If, as is stated to be the case, Mr. Harcourt has already made use of part of the money placed in his hands for the acquiring of objects for an historic museum, he has doubt- less had in his mind the question of a suitable building for Lousing his collection. Possibly his thoughts, too, have turned to buildings already in existence. We hope, in any case, that the Committee, if they should decide on Lord Esher's plan, will not lose sight of the idea of obtaining some fine old London building as a nucleus for the museum, and that they may consider the value of combining the scheme for a statue into the larger harmonies of the memorial.
If unhappily no worthy relic of Older London could be found to form the centre of a museum, why should not recourse be had to the south bank of the Thames ? The piece of foreshore next the new County Council Hall would t be an admirable site, and the cost would, we trust, not prove prohibitive.
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