One of the important recommendations in the LGBT Veterans Independent Review by Lord Etherton was that there should be a Government funded public memorial at the National Memorial Arboretum, to all LGBT people who have served and continue to serve in the military. The Government has agreed to fund a Memorial and has allocated a grant to Fighting With Pride for this purpose.
Critical elements of the project are that the Memorial should reflect the views of the LGBT serving and veteran community and that the memorial will provide an appropriate environment for remembrance, build community pride and raise broader awareness of the LGBT Armed Forces community and their experiences. The Memorial will also aim to improve the health and wellbeing of LGBT Veterans, serving personnel and their families, through active recognition and inclusion of the LGBT Armed Forces community.
The design of the memorial will be done in collaboration by a wide variety of organisations, including those which have the support and respect of veterans who served under and suffered from, the Ban (R17 and R18 of the review report). We are proud to be working with the following on the LGBT Armed Forces Community Memorial:
Royal British Legion, Commonwealth War Graves Commission, National Memorial Arboretum, Office for Veterans Affairs, Ministry of Defence, Stonewall, LGBT Foundation, Women’s Royal Army Corps Association, Help for Heroes, SaluteHer, Royal Navy, British Army and Royal Air Force, SSAFA.
Honorary Art Advisors: Lucy Ash.
Fighting With Pride have now started to engage with the LGBT Armed Forces Community to gather ideas to help design an appropriate memorial. A Steering Group has been established, comprising of individuals from organisations and charities with deep knowledge of memorialisation, together with Veterans and serving personnel.
Regional meetings are planned in Portsmouth, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Blackpool in September to facilitate community involvement and there will also be virtual Townhalls to ensure maximum participation. The plan is to have options from the community consultation, refined by the Steering Group and passed to the Fighting With Pride Board of Trustees in November to enable a design decision to be taken. This will be followed by a transparent tender phase and site preparation, construction with a view to an unveiling ceremony in Summer/Autumn 2025.
The end of October and the first part of November has been quiet for the memorial project, as the portal, hosted by the Royal Society of Sculptors (RSS), was open for artists to make their design proposals.
That competition entry closed at midnight on Tuesday 19th of November and by that point we had received an incredible 38 proposals from a wide variety of artists.
Since then, our judging panel of 7 have been busy reviewing those proposals and rating them against the scoring matrix that has been defined to ensure a fair and equitable result.
The judging panel is made up of veterans, an expert from the National Memorial Arboretum, an expert from the RSS, a representative of the Royal British Legion, an artist advisor and a representative of current serving LGBTQ+ networks.
On Monday, 2nd December, the judging panel will be meeting in London to debate the proposals and their merits and that will result in a shortlist of artists that will go forwards to produce more detailed proposals that will be judged at an event in January where the final design is selected.
Roly Woods has been appointed by the Fighting With Pride Board of Trustees to lead this important project as Memorial Officer, very ably assisted by his Deputy, Kevin Bazeley. You can find out more about the Memorial Team here.
The Community engagement phase of the Memorial project has now been completed (10 October 2024). The engagement phase went well, with live-streamed, face to face workshops conducted around the country, several online workshops and briefings completed, and bespoke presentations given at the RN and RAF single service LGBT network conferences. An online briefing was also made available to the Army network. The survey itself generated around 300 responses, with a rough split of 2/3 Veterans and 1/3 serving community and a breakdown by service of approximately 50% Army, 27% RAF and 23% RN. Key data from the survey have been used to develop the Design Brief for artists.
We are now seeking artists who want to submit a design for the memorial. For the selection process we’re using the Curatorspace online portal where the Design Brief is posted. The link to the RSS competition portal is here: https://sculptors.org.uk/awards/lgbt-armed-forces-community-memorial
We’re working closely with the Royal Society of Sculptors (RSS), who have lots of experience in managing design competitions like this. Artists wanting to submit a design will be invited to submit an outline “expression of interest” by mid-November and the judging panel will then whittle all the submissions down to a shortlist in early December, based on agreed judging criteria. The shortlisted artists will have a month to complete a detailed design and manufacture a scale model and will then be interviewed by the judging panel in January, when a final design will be chosen.
The judging panel comprises LGBT Veterans and junior serving personnel, and senior reps from the National Memorial Arboretum and Royal British Legion, together with an artistic advisor and a senior trustee from the RSS who is an experienced sculptor and well versed in the full design process.
Once the final design is chosen it will be announced as part of the events marking the 25th anniversary of the lifting of the ban (12 Jan 2025).
When we have a chosen design, we’ll be into the design, build and install phase, with a very tight timeline. We want everything completed by late August 2025 to enable an unveiling in late October, in time for Remembrance commemorations in November. We’re starting to look at the unveiling ceremony itself and will keep everyone updated as plans firm up next year.
The WordCloud image, part of the Design Brief, distils the survey inputs. 300 people listed around 1,000 words. About 300 unique words were in that list, and these unique words were grouped together where they had similar meanings. These 26 words and word groupings represent 85% of the input from the survey.
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