Monitor: Albert Memorial is golden again

Thoughts following the unveiling in Hyde Park of the newly restored monument to Queen Victoria's Prince Consort

The Daily

Telegraph

WHAT COMPARABLE monument can we hope to leave our grandchildren, as a reminder of our achievements? If only we could still build monuments with the panache of the Victorians, then we might produce something that deserved to last. But if we cannot create new monuments, we have at least learnt how to restore the ones we already have. From today, the Prince Consort will be back in his place, gilded again for the first time since 1915, and London will be a brighter city as a result. Welcome back, Albert, you have been sorely missed.

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Evening

Standard

IT MAY have been shoddily built and, if it had been a tower block, its technical failings may have had people calling for the dynamite. It may not be exactly tasteful, but as an embodiment of sheer energy and self- belief, as a record of the fact that sober people could once build such a thing without a flicker of doubt, it commands respect. It is something to be looked at with the same awe we bestow on Egyptian sarcophagi and grave goods in the British Museum. Like the Pyramids, it could not conceivably be built now.

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The Times

FOR MOST of this century the Albert Memorial was despised as the ultimate Victorian bauble, over-egged, overblown, pompous, vainglorious and the absolute antipathy of true British understatement. It was seen as the ultimate test of taste, a monument about which no discerning person could have a single good word to say. This process was already beginning when the statue of Albert was finally set in place in 1876, 15 years after his death. A contemporary at court wrote witheringly that it was "a confection of gingerbread which ought to be under a glass shade on a giant's mantelpiece". The analogy was not wholly inept.