Folkestone War Memorial
War memorial in Folkestone, England
Folkestone War Memorial is a First World War memorial situated in The Leas area of Folkestone, Kent. Designed by Ferdinand Victor Blundstone and unveiled in 1922, it commemorates the 578 men of Folkestone who served in the war, and those who passed through Folkestone Harbour when Folkestone Harbour railway station nearby was an important point of departure and return for passage to the Western Front via Boulogne. The road from the station to the harbour was renamed the "Road of Remembrance" after the war.
Design
The memorial measures 25 ft (7.6 m) high and 26 ft (7.9 m) wide and comprises a bronze statue of a woman, said to represent brotherhood and reverence, standing on a tapering square stone pedestal with flanking stone walls, all on a stone base raised by two steps. The statue is bare-breasted, with its lower half robed. In her left hand, the figure holds aloft a cross with a union flag banner hanging from its shaft at half-mast, and a laurel wreath in her right hand. She faces towards the sea, and across to France beyond.
The pedestal is of Cornish granite, with the inscription picked out in gold, "MAY THEIR / DEEDS BE / HELD IN / REVERENCE". The base of the central pedestal, and the flanking walls of granite to either side, have bronze plaques. The main plaque has a low relief sculpture of ranks of soldiers moving forward, recalling the men who passed by on their way to war, with an inscription that reads:"THANKS BE TO GOD WHO GIVETH US THE VICTORY / IN EVER GRATEFUL MEMORY OF THE BRAVE MEN FROM FOLKESTONE, / AND THE MANY THOUSANDS FROM ALL PARTS OF THE EMPIRE WHO PASSED THIS SPOT ON THEIR WAY / TO FIGHT IN THE GREAT WAR (1914-1918) FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS AND FREEDOM, AND ESPECIALLY THOSE / OF THIS TOWN WHO MADE THE SUPREME SACRIFICE, AND WHOSE NAMES ARE HERE RECORDED, / THIS MEMORIAL IS HUMBLY DEDICATED." Other panels list the names of the dead from both World Wars.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Folkestone War Memorial” is war memorial in Folkestone, England. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Folkestone, Memorial and memorial, not as a finished interpretation.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17546144. Authority coordinates are 51.078, 1.179. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1922, 1914 and 1918.
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This entry incorporates text from “Folkestone War Memorial” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.