New memorial set to honour Wick heroes

Councillors have united with home builders Barratt Homes, in a bid to create a new war memorial to remember Wick’s courageous troops who fell defending the nation.

Ham Ward district councillors Mike Northeast and Tony Squires approached the company, appealing for it to place a tribute site at the new Kingley Gate development on land to the west of Courtwick Lane – a plea which Barratts is now keenly supporting.

It comes after the developers christened the estate’s new roads with the names of fallen soldiers from the Wick area, killed during the First World War.

Mr Northeast, whose father, Stan, is a Second World War veteran, said: “A few years ago we were looking in Wick to put up some sort of war memorial and we drew a blank.

“Because Barratts has now started to name the roads on the new estate after some of our war dead, I thought it would be a good idea to incorporate some sort of permanent war memorial on this site so that the people of Wick could use it to honour their war dead and I’m pleased to say that Barratts have come up trumps.”

Barratts will be working on a range of different memorials in the coming weeks for residents to then choice from.

Pending planning permission from Arun District Council, the aim is to then create the site near the entrance of Kingley Gate, completing it before this year’s Remembrance Sunday event, in November.

“They want to work with us on some designs which, hopefully, in the next few weeks we will be able to put these designs in the paper so that local people can pick the designs that they want and can come up here and honour our war dead in Wick for the first time,” Mr Northeast added.

Malcolm Westcott, senior technical manager at Barratts, is helping lead the project. He said: “We thought this was quite a good opportunity to engage with the local community and Barratts is very good and we do try our hardest to talk to the local community we thought this was a good step forward.”