Victoria Tower Gardens, London, UNITED KINGDOM

Victoria Tower Gardens is a small public park partly situated within the World Heritage Site of the Palace of Westminster in London. For more than 150 years it has provided a quiet oasis for parliamentarians, local residents, and tourists alike, offering iconic long views between two fine rows of mature plane trees to the Houses of Parliament and Victoria Tower. It is the only green space in central London which directly overlooks the River Thames. It is a space of rare and uncluttered openness often used for public events, demonstrations and art installations.

Victoria Tower Gardens, London, UNITED KINGDOM

Victoria Tower Gardens is also the location for three iconic and listed memorials: the Buxton Memorial Fountain to the parliamentarians who achieved the abolition of slavery in the British Empire; Auguste Rodin’s Burghers of Calais; and the Pankhurst Memorial celebrating the campaign for female suffrage in the UK. There is a modest and temporary Parliamentary Education Centre on the north side of the park. To the south there is a childrens’ play area: donated in the 1920s by the Spicer family, it was then an innovative space of respite for surrounding slum children, and today, from busy and noisy urban life.

Victoria Tower Gardens is severely threatened by the proposed construction of a UK national Holocaust Memorial and affiliated Learning Centre, which would dominate the whole southern half of the gardens. Tall metal and concrete fins representing the proposed memorial would span the width of the gardens. The design involves introducing hard and soft landscaping around a new mounded landform above the semi-underground Learning Centre, to be located directly in front of the Buxton Memorial. The complex would cut off the children’s play area from the rest of the park and would make casual visits impossible.

Victoria Tower Gardens, London, UNITED KINGDOM

London Parks & Gardens, in their 2019 study, estimates the Memorial and Learning Centre and their necessary security and crowd management installations would encompass 27% of the park’s recreational space. It would irreversibly transform the character and uses of Victoria Tower Gardens’ civic space, as well as decrease the resilience of the park and its trees to changes in the climate and rainfall levels.

London Parks & Gardens, along with Europa Nostra UK, the Save Victoria Tower Gardens movement and the Thorney Island Society, have fought for the last 9 years against the Government’s proposals for the Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre. The nomination of Victoria Tower Gardens to 7 Most Endangered Programme 2025 was made by Europa Nostra UK with London Parks & Gardens.

Victoria Tower Gardens, London, UNITED KINGDOM

The British courts have upheld an existing Act of Parliament which forbids construction in Victoria Tower Gardens. Internationally, in 2023, UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee voiced serious concerns over the “significant adverse impact on the Outstanding Universal Value” to the World Heritage Site of the Palace of Westminster. Given the security requirements of the Learning Centre, the Advisory Panel of the 7 Most Endangered Programme strongly recommends finding another less constrained location for it.

The Advisory Panel of the 7 Most Endangered Programme noted: “The Palace of Westminster is recognisable globally – a symbol of a nation’s ‘governance by the people, for the people’. A World Heritage Site, its architecture expresses democratic accountability. Victoria Tower Gardens provides its essential setting, but it’s also a place in its own right – a breathing space. Space is not a development site to be filled; it has value. The proposal for a Holocaust Memorial in London is understandable, but the location and scale escalate it from being an object IN a garden to being the object OF the garden, suffocating the space. The inclusion of Victoria Tower Gardens in the 7 Most Endangered Programme 2025 is a call for holistic empathy.”