Obj. ID: 57205  Hyde Park Holocaust Memorial in London, United Kingdom, 1983

The Hyde Park Holocaust Memorial Garden is the first public memorial in Britain dedicated solely to victims of the Holocaust.

Its erection was organized by the Board of Deputies of British Jews. The campaign for a memorial started in the late 1970s. There has been much debate surrounding the decision to create a Holocaust monument and the place where it should be erected. Finally, the project was accepted. As Steven Cooke writes, "on March 22, 1983, Neil MacFarlane, the Environment Under-Secretary, announced in the House of Commons that there would be such a memorial next to an area called the Dell near the eastern edge of the Serpentine lake in Hyde Park" [Cooke, 457]. 

The person commissioned to design the memorial was internationally renowned architect and designer Richard Seifert [Cooke, 457]. The chosen aesthetics for the monument were harshly criticized. They were called "inappropriate for such a theme", "unworthy"; the stone was called "ugly", with "a few ill-written words" [Cooke, 459-60).

The source of the granites that Seifert used is not, as many believed, the Death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, but an unspecified location in the North of England. There were several reasons for using this type of stone. First, the granite is "hard-wearing, and therefore difficult to damage" [Cooke, 461]. Second, it was chosen as the opposite to Portland stone, which is usually used for the monuments in the UK, "so that the memorial garden does not look like a typical British war monument" [Cooke, 461]. The issue of an appropriate inscription for the Hyde Park Holocaust memorial turned out to be another reason for disputes. On the one hand, in the public discourse the garden aimed to commemorate all 11 million victims of the Nazism. On the other hand, it was a Jewish initiative to erect the monument that would be dedicated to the Shoah victims. As a result, there is no number of dead on the memorial. 
The Hyde Park Holocaust Memorial Garden was dedicated on 28 June 1983. The ceremony was led by then-Environment Secretary Patrick Jenkin, Baron Jenkin of Roding, and attended by a crowd of 500 spectators [Wikipedia].