Portsmouth Naval Memorial in Portsmouth, Hampshire

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Get directions Portsmouth, Hampshire, England

Coordinates: 50.78244, -1.09577
Cemetery ID:

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Portsmouth Naval Memorial commemorates 9,667 sailors of the First World War and 14,918 of the Second World War who have no known grave but the sea. It is situated on Southsea Common overlooking the promenade.

After the First World War, an appropriate way had to be found of commemorating those members of the Royal Navy who were lost at sea. An Admiralty committee recommended that the three manning ports in Great Britain - Chatham, Plymouth and Portsmouth - should each have an identical memorial of unmistakable naval form, an obelisk, which would serve as a leading mark for shipping. The memorials were designed by Sir Robert Lorimer, who had already carried out a considerable amount of work for the Commission, with sculpture by Henry Poole.

After the Second World War it was decided that the naval memorials should be extended to provide space for commemorating the naval dead without graves of that war, but since the three sites were dissimilar, a different architectural treatment was required for each. The architect for the Second World War extension at Portsmouth was Sir Edward Maufe (who also designed the Air Forces memorial at Runnymede) and the additional sculpture was by Charles Wheeler, William McMillan, and Esmond Burton.