Queen Eleanor Memorial Cross

Queen Eleanor Memorial Cross
Queen Eleanor Memorial Cross
	The cross in 2011
Location	Charing Cross railway station; London, WC2
Built	1864–1865
Architect	Edward Middleton Barry
Listed Building – Grade II*
Designated	5 February 1970
Reference no.	1236708

The Queen Eleanor Memorial Cross is a memorial to Eleanor of Castile erected in the forecourt of Charing Cross railway station, London, in 1864–1865. It is a fanciful reconstruction of the medieval Eleanor cross at Charing, one of twelve memorial crosses erected by Edward I of England in memory of his first wife. The Victorian monument was designed by Edward Middleton Barry, also the architect of the railway station, and includes multiple statues of Queen Eleanor by the sculptor Thomas Earp. It does not occupy the original site of the Charing Cross (destroyed in 1647), which is now occupied by Hubert Le Sueur's equestrian statue of Charles I, installed in 1675.

Barry based the memorial on the three surviving drawings of the Charing Cross, in the

England, León, Castile and Ponthieu appear on the monument.^[1]

References

^ ^a ^b Historic England, "Queen Eleanor Memorial Cross (1236708)", National Heritage List for England, retrieved 26 December 2014
^ Ward-Jackson, Philip (2011), Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster: Volume 1, Public Sculpture of Britain, vol. 14, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 257–8
^ Bradley, Simon; Pevsner, Nikolaus (2003), London: Westminster, The Buildings of England, vol. 6, London and New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 300