Walk down the nave of St Paul’s Cathedral and just before you reach the area in front of the quire you pass between two monumental sculptures on the sides of two of the massive piers that support the dome.
These are the Great War Sculptures by the artist Gerry Judah, commissioned by the cathedral in 2014 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War.
They are cruciform shapes some 6.5m (20′) tall, painted in brilliant white, that evoke the crosses that were first erected in the gravesites on the Western Front, but they are ‘decorated’ with models representing the ruins of modern buildings. This is the destruction of modern warfare that we have seen, and continue to see, on the news each night, the devastated homes and apartments in Aleppo, Kviv, Gaza and elsewhere.
It follows on from Judah’s earlier work ‘The Crusader‘, which is on display in IWM North and has the same message, that the wars of the past continue to resonate in the present. It is a brave work for a cathedral to commission, a World War One (“the war to end war”) memorial that tells us that war and its destruction are still with us, that suffering continues. “We remember this Great War 100 years on” said Judah at the time of the sculpture’s installation, “but since then conflict has been ongoing throughout the world”.
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