Background
Foster + Partners was selected in 2025 to design the national memorial to Queen Elizabeth II in St James's Park, London, commissioned by the Queen Elizabeth Memorial Committee. The scheme sets a family of gardens, meandering paths and a translucent cast-glass bridge across the park, with a new civic space, Queen Elizabeth II Place, at Marlborough Gate. A bronze statue of the Queen will stand 7.3m high on a plinth overlooking The Mall, with a smaller statue of Prince Philip a few paces behind.
The deployment
Ahead of construction, the practice carried out a hybrid mock-up on the site itself. A physical cutout of the statue was hoisted on a cherry picker at the park entrance, while Lord Norman Foster and the design team used a VR headset to preview the statues in place. Combining the on-site physical reference with an immersive virtual model let the team judge the real-world scale of the figures and how they would sit within the historically sensitive setting at Marlborough Gate.
Purpose
The exercise was a design-review and visualisation step, not a public attraction: it helped the architects develop and refine the proposals, testing spatial relationships and proportions that are difficult to assess from drawings or screen-based renders alone. The sculptor Martin Jennings and members of the design team took part, and early risers in the park were able to see the physical cutout element of the mock-up.
