Letter: Police gift horse

YOUR writer Amanda Baillieu was quite right to report (28 March) that some people found the design for a police memorial inappropriate. Indeed, it is the latest in a series of mediocre designs, unworthy of the Mall.

Successful memorial design is an affair of high subtlety, requiring the harmonious integration of architecture and sculpture; that we have lost this art is shown by the pathetic statue of Earl Mountbatten on a nearby site, something worthy of Tirana or Monrovia.

The reason 12 police associations have approved the latest (and now apparently discarded) design is surely explained by the letter (4 April) from Mr D A Clark of the Police Superintendents' Association of England and Wales when he writes that his 'committee indicated that it would be in poor taste to criticise such a philanthropic gesture': in other words, it must not look a gift horse in the mouth. But more positive reasons are needed to justify so prominent a gesture in the Mall.

Gavin Stamp

Strathbungo, Glasgow