Adjaye Associates
CFI and senior Conservatives have welcomed the approval of the country’s first national Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre in Westminster.
The decision was confirmed yesterday by Minister for Housing and Planning Christopher Pincher, and comes in the wake of a public inquiry into the £100 million project. The memorial, set to be built in Milbank’s Victoria Tower Gardens, next to parliament, will commemorate the lives of six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, and other victims of Nazi persecution, including the Roma, gay and disabled people. The structure will comprise 23 large bronze sculptures and a world-class underground education centre, with construction beginning later this year. The plans were previously rejected by Westminster Council.
Housing and Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick championed the cause, alongside CFI Parliamentary Chairman (Lords) Rt. Hon. The Lord Pickles. More than cross-party 170 MPs and peers also voiced support for the memorial. The news has been widely welcomed by Conservative parliamentarians.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson welcomed the decision tweeting: “We have a duty to ensure that the Holocaust is never forgotten and that it will continue to be taught to future generations”.
Mr Jenrick said on Thursday that he believed the Memorial would “educate and inform future generations about the horrors of the Holocaust” and that he hoped millions of people would visit it every year. The Secretary of State added that it would also foster a better understanding of “the British role in the tragedy – the things we did right and we did wrong”. Lord Pickles and Ed Balls, Co-Chairs of the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation, said: “This is an important milestone, bringing closer the day when we have a national Memorial which properly commemorates the 6 million Jewish men, women and children and all others murdered by the Nazis”.
The Government has pledged that the centre, which has an anticipated completion date of 2025, will have free entry to all. In 2016, then-Prime Minister David Cameron announced that the chosen location for the Memorial was Victoria Tower Gardens, Westminster. He had tasked a Holocaust Commission with establishing what more Britain could do to preserve the memory of the Shoah and ensure that the lessons it teaches are never forgotten, in 2014.
