Memorial Gardens
Since the closure of the railways the railway land in the centre of the town stood empty for many years. Most prominent was a green space between the museum and brook which housed a dis-used pit wheel on a low steel frame, which many passers-by mistook for a spinning wheel. There had long been an aspiration to develop a memorial park or garden on the site to commemorate both the mining history of the town and to provide a new setting for the town's war memorial.
In 2001 a local practice of landscape architects, New Leaf Studio were commissioned by Bath & North East Somerset Council to develop proposals for the land. The first phase of the park, the Memorial gardens were then built for the Norton Radstock Town Council in 2005 to New leaf Studio's designs incorporating a new sculptural base for the old mine wheel by artist Sebastien Boyesen.
The new Memorial Gardens incorporate the war memorial which was moved from Victoria Square as part of the project. The planting employs a naturalistic style with broad drifts of herbaceous perennials and grasses providing colour through a long season, extending through the winter with dry stems and seed heads.
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Famous quotes containing the words memorial and/or gardens:
“I hope there will be no effort to put up a shaft or any monument of that sort in memory of me or of the other women who have given themselves to our work. The best kind of a memorial would be a school where girls could be taught everything useful that would help them to earn an honorable livelihood; where they could learn to do anything they were capable of, just as boys can. I would like to have lived to see such a school as that in every great city of the United States.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)
“If I could put my woods in song,
And tell what’s there enjoyed,
All men would to my gardens throng,
And leave the cities void.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)