Located adjacent to the Palace of Westminster, Victoria Tower Gardens, the grade II listed park has been shortlisted as one of the most endangered heritage sites in Europe.
In January 2025, the gardens were listed along with monuments and heritage sites in Europe as on of the 7 Most Endangered Programme (Europa Nostra & European Investment Bank Institute). For this reason, the London Parks and Gardens (LPG) charity are pushing for the its inclusion on Historic England’s Heritage at Risk Register. London Parks and Gardens is a registered charity working to ensure green spaces in London, old and new, can be enjoyed by everyone and are protected as indispensable reservoirs of cultural, societal and environmental value.
According to the LPG, proposals to build on the park are being pushed through by Angela Rayner’s Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), with its backers determined to deliver a commitment made 11 years by Prime Minister David Cameron to build a national Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre.
The proposed development would dominate the whole southern half of this small public park partly situated within the World Heritage Site of the Palace of Westminster. The proposed design introduces hard and soft landscaping around a new mound above the semi-underground Learning Centre topped by large bronze fin structures representing the memorial. For more than 150 years this quiet oasis, in a heavily built-up area of London has been loved by parliamentarians, residents, and tourists. Other possible sites were recommended, but rejected by the proposers, naming Victoria Tower Gardens their chosen location.
The gardens offer a valuable “protected London sightline” of iconic long views between two rows of mature plane trees of the Houses of Parliament and Victoria Tower. It’s where thousands queued to see Queen Elizabeth II lying in state, and was used by Air Ambulances as a landing site to evacuate casualties from terrorist attacks on Westminster Bridge and outside Parliament. But the 1900 Act, originally put in place to safeguard the park as a green space is due to be repealed by the government, to allow construction to go ahead.
Victoria Tower Gardens is also home to three listed memorials: the Buxton Memorial Fountain to the parliamentarians who achieved the abolition of slavery in the British Empire; Auguste Rodin’s Burghers of Calais depicting the bravery and altruism of that city’s leaders after the city fell to the English in the Hundred Years war with France; and the Pankhurst Memorial celebrating the campaign for female suffrage in the UK. To the south there is a popular children’s play area: donated in the 1920s by the Spicer family, an innovative space of respite in Westminster’s busy and noisy setting.
“The Palace of Westminster is recognised globally as a symbol of a nation’s ‘governance by the people, for the people’. A World Heritage Site, its architecture expresses democratic accountability. Victoria Tower Gardens provides its essential setting, but it’s also a place in its own right not a development site to be filled; it has value. The proposal for a Holocaust Memorial in London is understandable, but the location and scale escalate it from being an object IN a garden to being the object OF the garden, suffocating the space. The inclusion of Victoria Tower Gardens in the Seven Most Endangered Programme 2025 is a call for holistic empathy,” explained the Advisory Panel of the Seven Most Endangered Programme.
LPG, the Save Victoria Tower Gardens movement and The Thorney Island Society, have fought to protect the park for the last nine years from the scale of the proposed development. The LPG first raised concerns in a 2019 study.
“Parks should not be regarded as vacant land that can be used for building projects. They are key components of a city’s green infrastructure,” explained the Save Victoria Tower Gardens group.
“Being on the 2025 shortlist of the Seven Most Endangered Programme is indicative of the peril Victoria Tower Gardens faces. Development threatens not only the integrity and heritage of the park, but potentially the future status of the Palace of Westminster as a World Heritage site. This is, always has been, and always will be about the heritage, natural, and social value of the gardens. This is clearly a case of a noble development proposal, sadly in the wrong place as recognised by Europa Nostra, UNESCO, those who love the garden, including us campaigners, and Westminster Council who rejected the planning proposal. We hope Historic England will accept our second request for the park’s inclusion on their Heritage at Risk Register,” explained a spokesperson from the LPG.
The parks charity has already successfully challenged the UK Government’s proposals in the British courts. They upheld the 1900 Act of Parliament, forbidding construction in Victoria Tower Gardens. In 2023, UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee voiced serious concerns over the: “significant adverse impact [of the proposal] on the Outstanding Universal Value” to the World Heritage Site of the Palace of Westminster.
A House of Lords Select Committee was formed to investigate the private interests affected by the proposal but according to the LPG was not empowered to dissect the general public policy arguments – the report was published on the 22nd of January 2025. Chair of the Committee Lord Etherton said: “This report highlights some important concerns which need to be addressed, including the need to keep Victoria Tower Gardens as accessible as possible and communicating any security implications for the project.”
A spokesperson for the Save Victoria Tower Gardens group welcomed the few recommendations made by the Select Committee, but added: “We are very disappointed the Committee relies on mere assurances from the Promoter, namely the Government, advised by the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation committee. We consider these assurances worthless and unenforceable, from a Promoter which has consistently shown itself to be unreliable.”
Part of a World Heritage site, Victoria Tower Gardens was bequeathed to the public and protected by law, but sadly all of this is being swept aside, which could result in a loss of approximately 40% of the site. In protection of the Victoria Tower Gardens, the LPG are running a crowdfunding campaign, the details of which can be found here.