Southampton Cenotaph

Lutyens-designed 1920 war memorial — prototype for the Whitehall Cenotaph

Address West Park, Southampton

The original Lutyens cenotaph — older by a few months than the more famous Whitehall version, and considered by many architectural historians the better designed of the two. A stone pylon with a tomb-like cap, set on a low stepped plinth in West Park. The proportions are characteristically Lutyens, very subtly battered (tapering inward) so the eye reads them as upright.

The names of the 2,008 Southampton men who died in the First World War are inscribed on stone panels around the base. The memorial sits at the centre of the Cultural Quarter, with the Art Gallery and SeaCity Museum immediately to the south.

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Edwin Lutyens designed the Southampton Cenotaph in 1919 and unveiled it in November 1920 — making it slightly older than its more famous brother in Whitehall, London, which Lutyens completed the same year. Many architectural historians consider the Southampton design the finer of the two.