Southampton Cenotaph Southampton Cenotaph The Southampton Cenotaph is a stone memorial at Watts Park in Southampton, England, originally dedicated to the casualties of the First World War. The memorial was designed by Edwin Lutyens and features a cenotaph on a plinth atop a gently curved pillar. The monument was intended to be abstract and graceful, encouraging a perception of the soldier having fallen in a peaceful, "beautiful death". Decisions over which names should be engraved on the Southampton Cenotaph proved controversial in the 20th century, but the design was heavily influential in determining the form of Lutyens' more famous Cenotaph in Whitehall.
The Cenotaph, Whitehall designated a Grade I listed building on 5 February 1970. The Cenotaph is the site of the annual National Service of Remembrance held at 11:00 am on Remembrance Sunday, the closest Sunday to 11 November (Armistice Day). From 1919 until 1945, the remembrance service was held on Armistice Day, but since 1945 it has been held on Remembrance Sunday. Uniformed service personnel (excluding fire and ambulance personnel) salute the Cenotaph as they pass. Although the Armistice Day ceremony fell away during the Second World War, in recent years the tradition of holding a ceremony at the Cenotaph at 11am on