Albert Memorial

On the southern edge of Kensington Gardens and facing the Royal Albert Hall on Kensington Gore, this memorial is as ostentatious as the subject, Queen Victoria’s German husband Albert (1819–61), was purportedly humble. Albert explicitly said he did not want a monument and ‘if (as is very likely) it became an artistic monstrosity like most of our monuments, it would upset my equanimity to be permanently ridiculed and laughed at in effigy’. Ignoring the good prince’s wishes, the Lord Mayor (with Victoria’s consent) got George Gilbert Scott to build the 53m-high, gaudy Gothic monument in 1872; the 4.25m-tall gilded statue of the prince, thumbing through a catalogue for his Great Exhibition and surrounded by 187 figures representing the continents (Asia, Europe, Africa and America), the arts, industry and science, was erected in 1876. The monument was unveiled again in 1998 after undergoing an £11.2-million renovation.