Uk: monument for police officers killed on duty

[Oldbillplod]

A beautifully austere memorial to police officers killed on duty was unveiled yesterday in London by the Queen.

The £2.3m monument in the Mall, is championed by the film director Michael Winner, and has been 20 years in the making.

PC Yvonne Fletcher was shot dead by a gunman holed up in the Libyan embassy in St James's Square in 1984. Winner responded to her death with his campaign for a permanent police memorial. He has put up £500,000 of his own money. The architects Foster and Partners gave their services free.

The result is a simple glass sentinel standing in a shallow reflecting pool. At dusk this glows police-station blue. It stands alongside a London Underground ventilation duct that has been cleverly screened by black granite panels. This, connected by Portland stone paving, forms the second half of the memorial.
Inside a glass box set into the granite is a book with a roll call of the police dead. Winner plans to turn the pages each fortnight.

Low beat, this nicely judged design is also one of those minor landmarks that turns a corner in central London, pointing the way for visitors, as do much older nearby memorials such as those to the grand old Duke of York and Queen Victoria.

"Lutyens pointed the way with the design of the Cenotaph," says Spencer de Grey of Foster and Partners. "He designed a quiet, civic memorial without swords, cannons or battle standards, a graceful, simple, timeless and remarkably unmilitary monument to those who died in the world wars. It's very much a part of London.

"We wanted to do much the same thing, if on a much smaller scale. We hope, too, that in some small way the memorial might bring police and public closer together in a civilised and humane way, especially at a time when law and order is such a controversial part of the political agenda."

A band from the Kent constabulary played snatches of Elgar and other tunes as rain rattled down their tubas and turned the quietly dignified glass sentinel into a temporary "water feature". A sneering group of Late Elizabethan schoolchildren in damp fleeces and dripping baseball caps arrived.

A police officer with a gun was not amused, but kept his powder dry. The schoolchildren of today, he might have thought, no longer speak as did the be-capped and short-trousered, or bereted and pinafored, pupils of half a century ago, when the only bobby anyone knew of killed on duty was PC Dixon, played by Jack Warner, in that silver screen favourite, The Blue Lamp.

[TheDoghandler]

About time too.
Over 300 names from here on it. :mad:

[fatboyjim154]

Michael Winner's a good lad in my book when he fought for the Pat Dunne Memorial to be placed outside the house where he was shot.

A few neighbours challanged it "as it might lower proerty prices".

He threatened to "name and shame" them in the papers they backed off and it's there.

I always drive my rookies by it to point out nothing is a routine call.

[Wombat311]

Good to see. We got one here a couple years back.

[christrue]

Michael Winner's a good lad in my book when he fought for the Pat Dunne Memorial to be placed outside the house where he was shot.


I always drive my rookies by it to point out nothing is a routine call.

Very Much Appreciated.



(Darn, I am immensely sorry that I never visited London,
and England, when I had a chance to do so in earlier years! :()

[Oldbillplod]

I am immensely sorry that I never visited London,
and England, when I had a chance to do so in earlier years! :()

It's never too late

[christrue]

It's never too late

Thank You for your optimism! :D
Mother Country, y'know!


P.S.: Now may Prince Charles be happy since he's wed the True Love
of his Life, Camilla. Hearth & Home