Northampton War Memorial

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Northampton War Memorial, officially the Town and County War Memorial, is a World War I memorial on Wood Hill in the centre of Northampton, England. It was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and features a Stone of Remembrance flanked by twin obelisks with painted stone flags. The memorial stands in a small garden near the former churchyard of All Saints’ Church.

After the 1918 armistice, plans for a permanent memorial began. A temporary wooden cenotaph stood on Abington Street from July 1919. The Northamptonshire War Memorial Committee, led by Lord Lilford, asked Lutyens to design the monument. Although the designs were ready by 1920, work was delayed for six years because the site was part of All Saints’ Churchyard and needed a faculty from the Diocese. The Reverend Geoffrey Warden helped secure this, and construction began in 1926.

The memorial was unveiled on 11 November 1926 during a large ecumenical service. General Henry Horne unveiled it, and Bishop Norman Lang dedicated it. A wreath was laid by the Prince of Wales in 1927. Unlike many other memorials, this one does not list names of the dead. A separate Garden of Remembrance with the fallen’s names was created in Abington Square in 1937.

The Town and County War Memorial is a grand example of Lutyens’s work. It uses three features common to his memorials: a Stone of Remembrance, a pair of obelisks, and painted stone flags. The obelisks sit on tall columns with decorative niches, and the stones bear the dates of the World Wars in Roman numerals. The east face of the Stone reads “THEIR NAME LIVETH FOR EVERMORE,” and the west face reads “THE SOULS OF THE RIGHTEOUS ARE IN THE HANDS OF GOD.”

The memorial is set in a small garden with a low wall and gates. The wall bears the inscription: “TO THE MEMORY OF ALL THOSE OF THIS TOWN AND COUNTY WHO SERVED AND DIED IN THE GREAT WAR.”

In 1976, the memorial was given Grade II* listing. In 2015, during a national recognition of Lutyens’s war memorials, it was upgraded to Grade I as part of a national collection. Northampton’s memorial remains one of the more elaborate town memorials in England, notable for its pair of obelisks and the painted flags.