Memorial to the Missing of the Somme

Gavin Stamp

ISBN 1861978111

July 2006

Price £14.99

Hardback, 224 pp.

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Subjects: History, Travel, Wonders of the World

Other formats available: Paperback

Edwin Lutyens’ Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval in Northern France, visited annually by tens of thousands of tourists, is arguably the finest structure erected by any British architect in the twentieth century.

It is the principal, tangible expression of the defining event in Britain’s experience and memory of the Great War, the first day of the Battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916, and it bears the names of 73,000 soldiers whose bodies were never found at the end of that bloody and futile campaign.

This brilliant study by an acclaimed architectural historian tells the origin of the memorial in the context of commemorating the war dead; it considers the giant classical brick arch in architectural terms, and also explores its wider historical significance and its resonances today. So much of the meaning of the twentieth century is concentrated here; the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing casts a shadow into the future , a shadow which extends beyond the dead of the Holocaust, to the Gulag, to the ‘disappeared’ of South America and of Tianenmen.

The Wonders of the World is a series of books that focuses on some of the world’s most famous sites or monuments. Their names will be familiar to almost everyone: they have achieved iconic stature and are loaded with a fair amount of mythological baggage. These monuments have been the subject of many books over the centuries, but our aim, through the skill and stature of the writers, is to get something much more enlightening, stimulating, even controversial, than straightforward histories or guides.

‘Perfectly formed and beautifully written, this book is a minor masterpiece, a paragon of its genre. It will move all but the hardest heart to tears at the folly, and the glory, that is man.’
— Ross Leckie, The Times

‘Much, much more than architectural history, for here, encapsulated in marmoreally angry prose, is an account of that collective act of mass murder, without parallel in history, known as the Great War. An unforgettable, passionate book. ’
— A.N. Wilson, Evening Standard