The Imperial Monument Halls and Tower, Westminster, London

In 1904, concern was growing among the clergy that Westminster Abbey was becoming rather overcrowded with monuments. Diocesan Architect for London, John Pollard Seddon, took it upon himself, with the help of Edward Beckitt Lamb, to propose a solution to this problem in the form of the gargantuan Imperial Monumental Halls and Tower. Rising to 168m, looming over Big Ben, it would have been by far the tallest building in the country at the time, a new home for the overspill of monuments and imperial trophies.

A right-angled cloister would lead from the Great Cloister of Westminster Abbey to a new reception hall, 20m across, in the base of the tower. An extensive series of galleries for monuments would occupy the lower stories of the tower, with rooms above for records and an archive. The edifice would be crowned with an open ambulatory, topped with a soaring lantern, constructed to hold bells. It was designed with elaborate state funerals in mind, envisioning that the cortege would move from the Memorial Tower in the Great Monumental Hall, that extends 60m to Great College Street, culminating in a double transept, 50m long. Leading off the Monumental Hall, minor halls would house “monuments of high art to eminent men and women of all parts of the British Empire … a worthy centre in the metropolis of the Empire, upon which the sun never sets.” It was, of course, wildly impractical and utterly impossible to fund, but Seddon and Harvey were used to such things: they had been told in 1890 that they had priced themselves out with a similar scheme that would have cost around £80 million in today’s money. Nor was the project received with critical acclaim. The Builder magazine commented at the time that the tower had “a little too much of the megalomania about it.”