Member

During the helpful meeting that I had with the noble Lord, Lord Katz, last week, I asked about Sledmere, which boasts two of the two dozen memorials in the Government’s initial list. I like to think of myself as someone with a reasonable grasp of the geography of these islands, but I am afraid that I did not know where in the country Sledmere was. I presumed it must be a hotbed of political protest given that it makes up nearly 10% of the initial list in Schedule 14. In fact, it is a peaceable village of just 400 people in the East Riding of Yorkshire. One of its two entries on the list at Schedule 14 is for its Eleanor Cross, not originally a war memorial but one of the 12 commemorative crosses erected by King Edward I to mark the resting places of the body of his wife Eleanor of Castile as she was borne back to Westminster Abbey from Nottinghamshire, where she died in 1290. The most famous of these crosses is the final resting place at Charing Cross, the point from which all distances to London are traditionally measured.