More Neo-Gothic Splendour: the Buxton Memorial

In Victoria Tower Gardens, the little public park that runs from Parliament to Lambeth Bridge, stands a very ornate Victorian drinking fountain (now, sadly, disconnected from the water supply) known as the Buxton Memorial Drinking Fountain.

This is an octagonal structure in limestone, marble and granite, about 4m wide and with an extraordinary canopy, a timber-framed eight-sided spire covered in sheets of steel decorated with multicoloured enamel.

It was originally sited on the NW side of Parliament Square so that you passed by it as you walked from St James’s Park towards Parliament, but when the square was extended and remodelled in 1949 the site of the fountain was lost to the new roadway. Neo-gothic was not much liked at this time, so there were few who regarded it as much more than Victorian fussiness, so it was packed away into storage, only emerging to be rebuilt in its present spot in 1957.

The reason why it was rebuilt (the government in 1949 had been constrained by an amendment to the Parliament Act that it would be) and not just disposed of like much of the architecture of similar vintage, was because it commemorates the passing of the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, which abolished slavery throughout much of the British Empire (India was exempted).

It is called the Buxton Memorial after Thomas Fowell Buxton, an early 19th century politician and campaigner (and the Buxton in the brewers Truman, Hanbury and Buxton) who was the parliamentary leader of the anti-slavery campaign, taking over that role when William Wilberforce, the early leader of the movement, stepped back.

The Act came into force on 1 August 1834, freeing enslaved peoples by buying their freedom from their owners and paying compensation of £20 million (around £4.5 billion in today’s money – it represented 5% of the entire GDP of the United Kingdom).

The compensation went to the erstwhile owners, not to those who had been enslaved, and former slaves were designated as ‘apprentices’, compelled to work for their former owners for up to six years after their supposed emancipation.

The memorial was commissioned by Buxton’s son Charles (also an MP) who had considerable creative input into the design which was executed by the architect Samuel Sanders Teulon. It was unveiled in 1865, coinciding with the passing of the 13th Amendment in the USA which abolished slavery in the United States.

A few websites say that the mosaics around the structure are by the famous Salviati company. That is certainly more than possible, but I can’t find an authoritative source for this. One feature that is not there any longer are the eight statues of ‘Rulers of Britain’ that used to stand on the eight points around the memorial. Cast in bronze these included Caractacus (one of the chiefs of the Catuvellauni, beaten by the Romans at the Battle of Medway), and Constantine, Cnut and Alfred (all suffixed ‘the Great’ by history) leading up to Victoria. I haven’t been able to find out who the other three monarchs were, but I’m laying odds that one of them would have been Elizabeth I. 

These statues have been lost, twice. As the Historic England listing tells us “[they] were stolen, some in 1960, the rest in 1971. These [figures] were recast in 1980, but have since disappeared.”

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