The Hall of Memory, Birmingham
Image: The Hall of Memory at Centenary Square, today overshadowed by modern buildings, including the 2010 new library.
The Hall of Memory in Birmingham was built between 1922-25, over a filled-in canal basin called Gibson’s Arm, on the site of which today you can also find Baskerville House, Centenary Square and the new library. A classical domed octagonal building made of Portland stone, it was designed by Samuel Nathaniel Cooke and Walter Norman Twist. Both served in the war, Cooke as a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Flying Corps, and Twist as a Second Lieutenant in the Worcestershire Regiment.
The hall commemorates 12,320 local citizens who died in The Great War, and 35,000 who returned disabled. Recorded here on a Roll of Honour are the names of Private Amos Morley, aged 20, a former house painter from Nechells, who served with the 9th Battalion Worcestershire Regiment, and Private Ernest Townsend, aged 22, a former errand boy in the Jewellery Quarter, who served with 9th Battalion Royal Warwickshire Regiment. Both were killed in action in Baku on the Caspian Sea on 14 September 1918, as the few thousand British troops were evacuated from the port under attack from an Ottoman-Azerbaijani force numbering 14,000. Both soldiers were hurriedly buried where they fell, to be later reinterred at a dedicated cemetery when the British troops returned in November and the work of the Imperial War Graves Commission began.
The foundation stone was laid by The Prince of Wales on 12 June 1923, later to become Edward VIII, and opened by Prince Arthur of Connaught, grandson of Queen Victoria and a British military officer, on 4 July 1925 with a crowd of 30,000 attending. In 2025 it seems rarely open to the public for viewing.
Postcard of interior of the hall, circa 1925. Sarah Marr Postcard Collection.
For over 100 years, on each 11 November the Hall of Memory was the site of the city's remembrance commemorations; more recently, the event takes place outside St. Philips Cathedral. The four statues placed around the outside represent the Army, the Navy, the Air Force and Women’s Services. It was originally planned to be part of a much larger construction project, which never came to pass.
The model of the original plan for the area (of what is today Centenary Square), Baker Street Studios 1941, which can be found on display at Birmingham Museum and Art Galley. Of the grand scheme only the Hall of Memory was constructed along with the first part of a civic building (just behind the hall), the art deco Baskerville House by the end of the 1930s.
The statues on the exterior were sculpted by Albert Toft (1862-1949), who was born in Handsworth, a suburb of Birmingham, and known for making a series of war memorials.
Postcard view, circa 1990s, also featuring the then newly built Hyatt hotel.
