Adjaye to design London Holocaust memorial

As the daughter of Jewish refugees from Germany, I believe this new project by Parliament is ludicrous

A new Holocaust memorial for London will be designed by Sir David Adjaye, a renowned British-ghanaian architect who has designed homes for Ewan Mcgregor and Alexander Mcqueen.

Sir David said yesterday that his design would ensure the Holocaust would not be “buried under history”.

The 51-year-old, who designed the National Museum of African American History in Washington DC, will team up with Ron Arad, an Israeli industrial designer, on the £50million project.

The structure will be located in Victoria Tower Gardens, a small park close to the Houses of Parliament.

Prince William recently visited the Imperial War Museum to discuss the launch of the next phase of its privately funded Second World War and Holocaust galleries. Maybe this news didn’t reach the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation, which yesterday announced the winner of a competition to build its own education centre and memorial just half a mile away from the museum in Victoria Tower Gardens by the Houses of Parliament – and funded to a cost of £50 million by the unsuspecting taxpayer.

When you suggest a new Holocaust memorial and learning centre ought not to be built, you don’t feel very popular. And when the likes of Natasha Kaplinsky, Alex Salmond and the Chief Rabbi are the powers behind the project, you don’t feel you have a chance to stop it. But this story is not as black-and-white as it might appear and, as the daughter of German Jewish refugees, I don’t believe the memorial or the learning centre belong in their proposed location.

Of course a Holocaust memorial is an admirable idea, but the decision to build it in a park so close to the Imperial War Museum is ludicrous. The museum already has an unbelievably moving Holocaust exhibition and has its own plans for a stunning new exhibition centre.

It bid to be the location of the memorial, and its Foster and Partnersdesigned plans, including a wall of remembrance inscribed with the names of Holocaust victims, were reminiscent of Rachel Whiteread’s Holocaust Memorial in Vienna. The museum has artefacts and content. This new scheme has nothing.

The poorly conceived project was decided upon a couple of years ago by David Cameron when, one can only presume, he wanted to emphasise his party’s diversity. There is no public record of the research that decided on Victoria Tower Gardens as the perfect site, no record of the decision-making process at all. All we know is that Peter Bazalgette was handed £50 million and they decided to build over and under a park next to Parliament.

The relevance of the proximity to Parliament is apparently that the Holocaust and treatment of refugees is a subject close to the hearts of British politicians. But how true is that? Think for a moment about the British relationship with the Holocaust. Britain took in refugees to shelter them from Nazi atrocities. But not only were the British very late to open their doors to Jewish refugees, they were also quick to close them – my uncle and aunt were too late and ended up in Colombia. Plus, after the war, I had to live through an era (is it really over?) when my school had a Jewish quota, as did many of the clubs I might normally have belonged to.

There are other problems, too. Living almost next to Parliament, as I do, you are not only part of a community as local and friendly as any around the world but you are far more aware than most of pollution, traffic accidents, guns, terrorism and road blocks. So close to Parliament and Westminster Abbey, this is not a part of London that needs another potential target. And will we not mourn the unnecessary removal of a much-loved park?

The park has many memorials in it already: one commemorating the abolition of slavery, another the Suffragettes, and yet another a stunning statue by Rodin of the Burghers of Calais. All illustrate the good that can come out of evil. No positives came out of the Holocaust – there is still hatred in the world and genocide is still going on.

This duplicate project will cost £50 million that could have been put towards a good cause: rescuing a few more refugees or, if we want to stick to the Holocaust theme, commemorating British people who took in refugee Jews. The amazing Stolpersteine – brass cubes inscribed with the names and lives of victims of Nazi persecution – that we see on streets all over Europe could be used to thank Britons for taking in Jews like my parents.

For obvious reasons, I am aware of anti-semitism and the effects of prejudice. But I am not convinced that a memorial and learning centre right next to Parliament is going to give Jews a good name. On the contrary, it links Jews with the destruction of a precious park, and with taking £50 million for a project that could have been used to help others instead. The Imperial War Museum is already building a home for memories of Jewish suffering. Don’t diffuse that focus.