Silvertown War Memorial

About

Silvertown War Memorial, also known as Silvertown Explosion Memorial, is a war memorial in Silvertown, in East London. It serves as a memorial for the workers at the Brunner Mond chemical plant who were killed on active service during the First and Second World Wars, while also commemorating the people killed in the Silvertown explosion on 17 January 1917. It became a Grade II listed building in 1999.

The Silvertown factory was owned by the Brunner Mond chemical business, a forerunner to ICI, and had been used for the manufacture of caustic soda. The factory was mothballed before the war, and the government decided to use its spare industrial capacity for the purification of TNT, using a process that was acknowledged to be dangerous in a built-up residential area. At about 7 pm on Friday 19 January 1917, after most of the workers had left for the night, an accidental fire spread and ignited over 50 tons of TNT, killing 73 people in and around the factory (69 immediately, and four later from their injuries), and injuring hundreds more; it also destroyed the factory and hundreds of local houses, and damaged thousands more.

The memorial was erected in the 1920s by Brunner Mond on North...