Reconstructed War Memorials

Today is Victory in Europe (VE) Day, marking 80 years since the Allies defeated fascism in Europe. The following year, Winston Churchill considered the future of Europe:

“There is a remedy which ... would in a few years make all Europe ... free and ... happy. It is to re-create the European family, or as much of it as we can, and to provide it with a structure under which it can dwell in peace, in safety and in freedom. We must build a kind of United States of Europe."

- Winston Churchill, Zurich 1946

This page presents a map and gallery of 218 memorials to World War II. Tap or click the image to view it full-screen. Use the map or Previous/Next buttons to browse the memorials.

Victory in Europe (VE) Day 2025 marks 80 years since the Allies, formally referred to as the United Nations from 1942, defeated fascism in the Second World War. After reflecting on my grandfather’s own contribution to the war effort in A Sailor’s War, I felt inspired to create this image gallery and map of war memorials in the UK.

Each memorial is represented by a Scalable Vector Graphic, reconstructed to reflect the effects of the passage of time, shifting narratives, and personal biases on remembrance.

To make this page, I created a Python script to scrape images from Wikipedia: World War II Memorials and organize them into folders (adding a delay between requests to respect Wikipedia's Terms of Use). I processed the images using Adobe Photoshop Express and vectorized them with Adobe Express. I stored the final images in Vercel Blob Store and created a JSON file with the schema shown below.

[
    {
    "GUID": "Unique identifier in GUID format",
    "MemorialName": "Name of memorial",
    "Latitude": "Decimal Latitude",
    "Longitude": "Decimal Longitude",
    "WikiPage": "Link to memorial's Wikipedia page",
    "ImageLicense": "Link to license of the source image",
    "URL": "Link to image in Vercel Blob Store"
    }
]

The images are displayed using next/image and Yet Another Light Box. The map component uses Leaflet JavaScript library, originally developed by Ukrainian software engineer Volodymyr Agafonkin.