C O N T E X T 1 7 1 : M A R C H 2 0 2 2 39 JON GEDLING The restoration of Thiepval At over 45 metres tall, Sir Edwin Lutyens’ Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme in northern France is the world’s largest Commonwealth memorial to the missing. The Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme dominates the landscape of northern France for miles around. Cared for by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC), it stands on the former battlefield of the Somme, overlooking the site of some of the heaviest fighting of the first world war. The memorial commemorates more than 72,000 men of the British and South African forces who died on the Somme and have no known grave, the majority killed in the Somme offensive of 1916. Thiepval was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and unveiled by the Prince of Wales in 1932. Architectural historian Gavin Stamp described it as ‘arguably Lutyens’s finest and most intellectually distinguished executed creation and certainly one of the greatest works of 20thcentury British architecture anywhere’. It is a remarkably clever and extraordinarily complex structure of brick arches piled on arches of four sizes in total, each different in height but proportionally identical. The arches create 16 piers on which the names of the missing are inscribed on nearly 3,000 panels of Portland stone. Open to the elements on all four sides on an exposed hillside, maintaining Thiepval has its challenges for the CWGC. This is exacerbated by some unfortunate construction details, commonplace in their day but problematic a century later. There are 21 flat roofs, for example, all originally covered with a thin bitumen coating and draining into a vast maze of internal downpipes. The structure is a concrete frame faced with brick. Concerns were raised about the suitability of the brick choice even during construction. It was nearly all refaced in the 1950s, although unfortunately with a similarly poor selection. Eventually it was refaced again in the 1970s with the ‘Nori’ Accrington engineering brick from the UK which we see today. The problem is partly that the walls were originally built without a cavity. Severe problems with water penetration were noted after the second world war (when the building was barely 20 years old). The 1950s restorations involved forming a cavity behind the bricks and inserting bronze wall ties. This was an ingenious idea, but The Thiepval memorial at dawn (Photo: Candia Lutyens) The central arch scaffolding in Phase 2 of the restoration, September 2021 (Photo: CWGC)
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