The Commonwealth War Graves Commission stops commemorating at midnight on 31 December 1947. For more than half a century, the families of British servicemen and women killed after that cut-off had nowhere national to find their loved one's name. They had died in Palestine, Korea, Malaya, Aden, Cyprus, the Falklands, Iraq, Afghanistan, and on long bloody decades of patrols in Northern Ireland. They had died in training accidents, peacekeeping missions, and terrorist attacks. None of these losses appeared on the official lists. The Secretary of State for Defence announced the creation of a national memorial in the House of Commons on 10 November 2000, to be paid for by public subscription. An international design competition followed. The winning bid came from Liam O'Connor's practice, with sculptures by Ian Rank-Broadley - the same artist whose effigy of Queen Elizabeth II had appeared on every British coin since 1998.

The walls hold 16,000 names, with space carved for an additional 15,000 yet to come. Each name has been chiselled by hand into Portland stone by the letter-cutter Richard Kindersley, grouped first by year of death and then by the force in which they served - Army, Royal Navy, Royal Air Force, Royal Marines. The earliest qualifying date is 1 January 1948. The memorial does not distinguish between those killed in combat and those killed in training, on exercise, in peacekeeping, or by terrorism. As Prince Charles said at the dedication: 'It does not differentiate between those killed in the heat of battle or on a training exercise, by terrorist action or on peace-keeping missions.' All of them gave their lives in service. All of them appear together. The names included come from operations across the entire post-1945 era: Mandatory Palestine, Korea, Malaya, the Falkland Islands, Iraq, Afghanistan, Northern Ireland.

Two sculpture groups by Ian Rank-Broadley anchor the memorial. The first, the Stretcher Bearers, shows a wounded serviceman being carried by his comrades, watched by his grieving family - the family who waited at home, the cost of war borne by those who never deployed. The second, the Gates, shows the body of a fallen serviceman lifted into the arms of his comrades, with a figure pointing through the Great Gates of Eternity. Rank-Broadley won the Marsh Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture in 2008 for this work. The men and women whose names are inscribed include people most British readers will recognise: Colonel H. Jones, killed at Goose Green in 1982; Earl Mountbatten, assassinated by the IRA in 1979; the bomb disposal expert Olaf Schmid, killed in Afghanistan in 2009; and Talaiasi Labalaba, the Fijian-born SAS soldier whose stand at the Battle of Mirbat in 1972 saved the town of Mirbat from being overrun. They include the first British soldier killed on Operation Banner, Robert Curtis, and the first British servicewoman killed in Afghanistan, Sarah Bryant. They include people whose stories are still painfully recent - and people whose families read these names and remember whole lives, not statistics.

The site was chosen with care. The National Memorial Arboretum opened in 2001 on 150 acres of former gravel pit alongside the River Tame, midway between London and Edinburgh, accessible from every corner of the United Kingdom by motorway and rail. The Armed Forces Memorial cost six million pounds, much of it raised through sales of a commemorative Trafalgar coin by the Royal Mint, with additional grants from the Millennium Commission. Queen Elizabeth II dedicated the memorial on 12 October 2007, with Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams in attendance. It opened to the public seventeen days later. Around it, the Arboretum has continued to grow: more than 300 individual memorials now stand among the maturing trees, dedicated to regiments, services, individual conflicts, and civilian sacrifices. The Polish Forces Memorial stands a short walk away. The Shot at Dawn Memorial sits at the far edge of the grounds. None of these existed when the search for somewhere to remember began.

Every year on Armistice Day, families gather in the stone circle at the top of the mound. The Service of Remembrance falls silent at eleven, and if the sky is clear, a single shaft of sunlight passes through the gap in the eastern wall and crosses the carved names on the floor. The architecture does the remembering. The design exists to make this one moment happen, and to ensure it will keep happening as long as the stones stand and the earth holds together. Even when no one is watching, the sun returns on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, and the names are illuminated. The memorial works at all other hours too - visitors walk the walls year-round, finding the name they came to find - but its true heart beats once a year, when the alignment that the architects spent years calculating finally pays its annual dividend in light.