The list of the 7 Most Endangered monuments and heritage sites in Europe for 2025 has now been released by Europa Nostra and the European Investment Bank (EIB) Institute. Since its launch in 2013, the 7 Most Endangered Programme has become a key civil society initiative dedicated to saving Europe’s heritage at risk, acting as a catalyst for mobilising expertise, halting unsuitable development, and/or ensuring necessary public and private support, including funding. Each listed site is eligible for an EIB Heritage Grant of €10,000 to assist in implementing an agreed activity that will contribute to the site’s preservation.
EN UK Branch has given strong support to this first UK nomination for several years for the EN 7ME List. We are delighted to hear that the Advisory Panel and the EN Board have included Victoria Tower Gardens in this year’s list.
Victoria Tower Gardens is a small public park partly situated within the World Heritage Site of the Palace of Westminster in London. For more than 150 years it has provided a quiet oasis for parliamentarians, local residents, and tourists alike, offering iconic long views between two fine rows of mature plane trees to the Houses of Parliament and Victoria Tower. It is the only green space in central London which directly overlooks the River Thames. It is a space of rare and uncluttered openness often used for public events, demonstrations and art installations.
Victoria Tower Gardens is severely threatened by the proposed construction of a UK national Holocaust Memorial and affiliated Learning Centre, which would dominate the whole southern half of the gardens. Tall metal and concrete fins representing the proposed memorial would span the width of the gardens. The design involves introducing hard and soft landscaping around a new mounded landform above the semi-underground Learning Centre, to be located directly in front of the Buxton Memorial. The complex would cut off the children’s play area from the rest of the park and would make casual visits impossible.
Victoria Tower Gardens, London UK © Patricia Stoughton 2025
London Parks & Gardens Trust, in their 2019 study, estimates the Memorial and Learning Centre and their necessary security and crowd management installations would encompass 27% of the park’s recreational space. It would irreversibly transform the character and uses of Victoria Tower Gardens’ civic space, as well as decrease the resilience of the park and its trees to changes in the climate and rainfall levels.
London Parks & Gardens Trust, along with Europa Nostra UK, the Save Victoria Tower Gardens movement and the Thorney Island Society, have fought for the last 9 years against the Government’s proposals for the Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre. The nomination of Victoria Tower Gardens to 7 Most Endangered Programme 2025 was made by Europa Nostra UK with London Parks & Gardens Trust.
LPG Trust Interim Director Tim Webb says: “We are simultaneously dismayed and delighted by this turn of events. The park is Grade II listed, sits within a conservation zone, forms part the Westminster World Heritage Site and is protected by law to be maintained as an open public garden since 1900. The reasons for not building there are so clear it should never have been proposed in the first place. The 7ME status rightly rings alarm bells. The gardens are popular with local communities. They are well managed and well maintained by the Royal Parks. The threat is posed not by climate change, not by funding cuts, but comes from those charged with its legal protection. We are keen re-open talks to resolve this decade long impasse.”
Graham Bell, member of the Board of Europa Nostra and the Advisory Panel for the 7 Most Endangered, says: “The announcement that Victoria Tower Gardens have been selected as one of the 7 Most Endangered sites of Europe is a shock. A shock because their tranquillity belies a poised contractor’s excavator. A shock because the threat is unthinkable. But the shock has focused the attention of Europe: to rethink the unthinkable.”
The Advisory Panel of the 7 Most Endangered Programme noted: “The Palace of Westminster is recognisable globally – 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 – a breathing space. Space is 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 7 Most Endangered Programme 2025 is a call for holistic empathy.”
7ME LIST – APPEAL for SUPPORT
You too can help! An appeal to our members. It would be greatly appreciated in particular if our
institutional members can publicise the news of the listing of Victoria Tower Gardens via your own
media to your own members.
A report in your newsletter and/or on your website with a suitable link to the EN website or press
release would spread the word very much more widely. For our individual members likewise, please
do relay the news of the listing to friends and colleagues and to heritage and other organisations
with which you may be connected.
(Note: Best if we can always refer to our partner with its ‘trust’ title, either “London Parks and Gardens Trust” or “LPG Trust” despite absence of the word ‘trust’ in main EN announcements)