Look for a white marble king standing upright on a tall pale stone plinth, with dark bronze groups at the base and a crown-like finial above.
This memorial honors King Edward the Seventh... but it also tells a very Birmingham story about newspapers, local pride, and a monument that refused to stay put. In nineteen ten, after Edward died, the Birmingham Mail launched an appeal for a statue, and readers responded fast. Ordinary people, alongside civic leaders, gave more than five thousand pounds on public subscription, meaning lots of people each chipped in, which is something like well over half a million pounds today. A crowd-funded king, long before the internet made that sort of thing fashionable.
The sculptor was Albert Toft, a Birmingham-born artist from Handsworth, and that local connection matters. He was not just making a royal likeness for the city; he was helping shape Birmingham’s public face. This commission even gave him a practical headache: the statue needed a huge block of Carrara marble, the fine white stone from Italy, and finding one large enough for a figure over six feet tall took real effort.
At first, space was set aside for the memorial at Birmingham Children’s Hospital on Ladywood Road near Five Ways. Yet the statue finally entered civic life in Victoria Square, where Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll, Edward’s sister, unveiled it on Saint George’s Day, the twenty-third of April, nineteen thirteen. That gave the ceremony a strong family-and-empire flavor. The finished statue cost about two thousand seven hundred pounds, roughly a few hundred thousand pounds in today’s money, though the fundraising had already made it bigger than a simple bill for stone.
Then the city changed around it. People complained that Edward and Queen Victoria made an ill-matched pair, and when Victoria Square was remodeled in nineteen fifty-one, Edward got moved to Highgate Park. Away from the spotlight, the memorial declined badly. First Saint George’s lance disappeared. Then, in nineteen eighty-five and nineteen eighty-six, thieves stole the three bronze groups representing Peace, Education and Progress, plus Saint George slaying the dragon. None of them ever came back.
If you like, glance at the comparison view in the app; the jump from park exile to the middle of Centenary Square says a lot.
The comeback took persistence. The Victorian Society pushed hard, Birmingham City Council agreed to restore and re-site the memorial, and an appeal in two thousand and seven raised almost twelve thousand pounds toward the work. Cliveden Conservation in Bath began restoration in two thousand and nine, remaking the missing bronzes and the scepter-and-orb top so the whole thing could stand again on its original plinth. Since two thousand and thirteen, it has stood here near Baskerville House, and near Toft’s later work at the Hall of Memory.
So this statue is not fixed in one meaning or one place. It has traveled, shed parts, regained them, and returned with a different role. Public memory, it turns out, is more mobile than stone suggests. When you’re ready, Baskerville House is about a two-minute walk away.
