Canada Gate

About

Canada Gate forms part of the Queen Victoria Memorial scheme in London. An entrance to the Green Park, one of the eight Royal Parks in central London, the gate was presented to London by Canada (at the time in 1901 the senior Dominion of the British Empire) as part of a vast memorial scheme dedicated to Queen Victoria, who died in 1901. The entire memorial, more an act of town planning than funerary monument, was designed by Sir Aston Webb. It takes the form of a processional route from Trafalgar Square to Buckingham Palace. Beginning at Admiralty Arch, the project takes in The Mall and culminates in a "rond point" before the palace, with Sir Thomas Brock's Victoria Memorial at its centre. Canada Gate was commissioned, in 1905, along with the gates for Buckingham Palace and two other similar, but smaller gates presented by Australia and South Africa. The commission was won by the Bromsgrove Guild (a company of modern artists and designers associated with the Arts and Crafts Movement) who completed the work and had the gate in situ by 1911.

The gate stands to the north side of the "rond point" at the junction with Constitution Hill; today, a congested roundabout, but occasionally closed...