These statues were erected in memory of the brave soldiers who lost their lives in the Crimean war.

Designed in 1914 by John Henry Foley and Arthur George Walker the group of statues depict two of the most famous characters from the war, Florence Nightingale and Sidney Herbert. They are surrounded by unnamed soldiers, representative of the tens of thousands of men who died and whose bodies were never accounted for.

The original monument by John Bell was unveiled in 1859 and consisted of the statues of three guardsmen, with the female allegorical figure known as Honour. They were cast in bronze from the cannons captured at the siege of Sebastopol in the Ukraine. In 1914 they were pulled down and moved to make room for the present statues.

The Crimean War was fought in the mid 19th century between the Russian Empire and an alliance of France, the United Kingdom, the Kingdom of Sardinia, and the Ottoman Empire on the other. The war was part of a long-running battle for power between the main European powers over the declining Ottoman Empire.