King Alfred The Great Statue in Winchester

You can’t come to Winchester and not think of Alfred The Great. Perhaps our greatest monarch in history and certainly the only one with the epithet ‘Great’. In so many ways he was ahead of his times and not only freed the lands from the Vikings but set England in particular on course to be the country it was to become.

Winchester of course was his capital before London took the honour and though he was just a blip in the long history of the city, one can’t help but marvel at the tremendously evocative statue of King Alfred The Great towards the lower end of the High Street.

Whilst London does have a few memorials to King Alfred, including this, in Winchester he is absolutely given pride of place.

The statue itself dates to 1899 when it was decided to build a statue of King Alfred to mark the millennium of his death – he died 1000 years earlier having ruled from 849-899 and both liberated England and instigated quite incredible reforms having done so.

The statue was finished in 1901. It has the inscription ‘Aelfred, To the Founder of the Kingdom and Nation’.

Despite the countless historic and much older sites than this statue, you can’t come to Winchester if you have any love of history at all and not pay homage to King Alfred. I certainly spent more than a few minutes here and as is the way with people, when they saw me taking great interest in it, passersby came over to have a look too.