Prince Albert’s memorial in Kensington is “problematic” and “highly offensive”, drawing on “racial stereotypes” that reflect a “Victorian view of the world that differs from mainstream views held today”, its presentist custodians at The Royal Parks charity say (Evening Standard, GB News, Telegraph).
Erected in 1872 to commemorate Queen Victoria’s late husband, Prince Albert, the 176ft memorial opposite the Royal Albert Hall in Kensington Gardens, west London, the monument celebrates Victorian achievement and reflects the expansive reach of the British Empire at the time of its construction.
It includes a golden sculpture of the Prince Consort himself, holding the catalogue of the Great Exhibition, held in 1851, which he inspired and helped to organise. Marble figures representing the people and animals of four continents are also represented, along with other figures representing manufacture, commerce, agriculture and engineering.
Asia is depicted as a woman on an elephant, America as a native American, and Africa as a woman riding a camel. The African sculpture also includes a white European woman reading a book to a black African tribesman.
The Royal Parks have now offered a presentist critique of the monument, with the four statues that represent Asia, Africa, America and Europe described as reflective of a “Victorian view of European supremacy”.
“Representations of certain continents draws on racial stereotypes that are now considered offensive,” updated information about the plinth now reads on the Royal Parks website.
The page continues: “Though the Empire has traditionally been celebrated as a symbol of British supremacy, many today consider this view as problematic because colonialism often relied on the oppression and exploitation of people, resources and cultures.”
Also highlighted by the charity is one sculpture of an “uncivilised” man described as “rising up from barbarism” by contemporary guidebooks mirrored the “problematic” views of the time, in which Western influence – i.e., science, empiricism, technology, democracy, emancipation, industrialisation, biomedicine, sanitation, etc – was seen as a civilising force, purportedly rescuing indigenous people from what was regarded as their impoverished slumbers.
“Victorian guidebooks to the memorial describe how this ‘uncivilised’ man hunches over his bow,” the website explains. “This pose was intended to represent him ‘rising up from barbarism’, thanks to his Western teacher. At his feet lie broken chains, which allude to Britain’s role in the abolition of slavery.”
Royal Parks said that it updated its information about the statue late last year as part of an drive to “regularly review and update information about our landscape and heritage features, across all our parks to enhance visitor experience”.
It follows on from statues of historically “problematic” characters being taken down by protestors on the back of the neo-Maoist Black Lives Matter campaign.
At the height of the movement, in 2020, and while those of us without the immunity from COVID-19 that blind faith in Critical Race Theory evidently affords were ordered to “stay at home, protect the NHS, and save lives”, a baying mob removed the statue of 17th century slave owner Edward Colston from its berth in Bristol and threw it into the city’s harbour.
The transvaluation of the Albert Memorial by The Royal Parks follows the news that up to 11 statues of British military heroes could be removed from the heart of Scotland’s largest city over their links to slavery, with Glasgow City Council “awaiting instruction” from an anti-slavery working group over its next potential ‘decolonisation’ drive.
Glasgow’s SNP-led local authority had commissioned a review into public artwork following said BLM protests, with the city’s first African Caribbean Councillor, Graham Campbell, claiming that bronzes of Sir John Moore and Field Marshal Colin Campbell were especially problematic – or, as he puts it: “One played a leading role in killing Indians resisting British colonialism; the other spent a lot of time killing a lot of enslaved Africans resisting slavery in the Caribbean.”
Since 2020, this Year Zero-style frenzy has permeated through to almost every aspect of British society, with museum artefacts, street names, cricket, knitting, clocks, country homes, mathematics, Thatcher’s Cider company and Shakespeare all having been reframed in various ways to bring them more into line with the presentist morality of our cultural elites.
