The Albert Memorial: A Golden Prince and His Catalogue

Why is it significant?

Stop at the foot of the steps and let your eyes climb: a granite staircase, a marble frieze crowded with figures, glittering mosaics, a gilded spire more than fifty metres high, and in the middle, under a Gothic canopy, a golden prince sitting very still with a book on his lap.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stop at the foot of the steps and let your eyes climb: a granite staircase, a marble frieze crowded with figures, glittering mosaics, a gilded spire more than fifty metres high, and in the middle, under a Gothic canopy, a golden prince sitting very still with a book on his lap.

Albert died at Windsor on 14 December 1861, only forty-two years old, probably of typhoid, although some historians now suspect a long chronic illness. Victoria wore black for the remaining forty years of her life. The nation raised money for a memorial, and the architect George Gilbert Scott designed it like a medieval reliquary, the jewelled shrine that holds a saint's relics, scaled up to the size of a church spire. It opened in 1872, but the seated statue by John Henry Foley was not in place until 1875... Foley died before he could finish it.

Now find the book. It is the catalogue of the Great Exhibition of 1851, the event Albert championed against a chorus of sceptics. In Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, a gigantic glasshouse in Hyde Park just east of here, more than a hundred thousand exhibits went on show, and there were around six million visits in under six months. Critics had predicted riots, plague and collapse. Instead the exhibition made a profit of about one hundred and eighty-six thousand pounds.

That money is the reason this whole neighbourhood exists. The Royal Commission for the Exhibition bought land just south of this spot, and Albert imagined an entire quarter of museums, colleges and concert halls devoted to arts and sciences. Londoners teased him and called it Albertopolis. Walk around the frieze at the base and you will meet one hundred and sixty-nine painters, poets, composers and architects, from Homer to Pugin. On the corners, marble groups stand for agriculture, commerce, manufactures and engineering, the four engines of Victorian Britain.

At some point the gold vanished under dark paint; the story usually told is that it was blacked out during the First World War so it would not shine for Zeppelin raiders. It stayed dark until a long restoration regilded it in the 1990s. Now cross the road with care. Opposite rises the great drum of the hall that bears his name, but first turn left, to the red-brick house on the corner of Exhibition Road.