Monuments
A number of military monuments and trophies ring the outside of the parade ground, including:
- Statues of Field Marshals Kitchener, Roberts and Wolseley
- A Turkish cannon made in 1524 "by Murad son of Abdullah, chief gunner" which was captured in Egypt in 1801
- The Cádiz Memorial, a French mortar mounted on a cast-iron Chinese dragon which commemorates the lifting of the siege of Cádiz in Spain in 1812
- the Guards Memorial, designed by the sculptor Gilbert Ledward in 1923-26 and erected to commemorate the First Battle of Ypres and other battles of World War I.
- In 2003 the Royal Naval Division Memorial, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens in 1925, was returned to its original site in Horse Guards Parade and rededicated on "Beaucourt Day" (13 November 2003).
An oddity is the black background to the number 2 of the double sided clock which overlooks the Parade Ground and the front entrance, it is popularly thought to commemorate the time the last absolute monarch of England, Charles I, was beheaded at the Banqueting House opposite.
Read more about this topic: Horse Guards Parade
Famous quotes containing the word monuments:
“If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)