Edwin Lutyens had spent his pre-war career designing country houses for the rich. From 1917 onwards he gave nearly all his time to memorialising the war dead. For the Imperial War Graves Commission he designed the Stone of Remembrance, used in the first British cemeteries from 1920 onwards. He designed The Cenotaph on Whitehall in London, unveiled in its permanent stone form in 1920, which became and remains the focus of national Remembrance Sunday commemorations. He designed the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, unveiled in 1932, still the largest British war memorial in the world - a vast brick and stone arch carrying the names of 72,337 men whose bodies were never recovered. Spalding was one of his first town-level commissions. He drew a U-shaped cloister around a circular lily pool, with a Stone of Remembrance at its head and a cross in the middle. McLaren approached the council with the plan in January 1918.

Spalding did not simply accept the gift. The proposal generated debate in the local press through the rest of the war and the months afterwards. Alternative schemes were put forward. Why not convert Ayscoughfee Hall into a youth centre instead? Why not a simple clock on the corn exchange? Why not an obelisk in the market place, or a cenotaph, or a fund for war widows? On 1 August 1919 the district council held a public meeting at which three hundred people attended and the three leading options were each given fifteen minutes. On 23 August a public vote was held. Seven options were on the ballot. A modified version of the McLaren-Lutyens proposal - a smaller pavilion in the gardens of Ayscoughfee Hall, paired with a separate clock on the corn exchange building - won 459 votes. The full Lutyens scheme came second with 286. The obelisk came third. Democracy had spoken: Spalding wanted both its commemoration and its clock.

The memorial that stands today was constructed by Hodson Limited of Nottingham at the south end of the Ayscoughfee Hall gardens, replacing an old folly known as the Owl Tower. It cost £3,500 in 1922 money - perhaps £200,000 today. Barbara McLaren and her father-in-law each contributed £1,000. Her brother-in-law donated a pair of painted stone flags. The rest came from voluntary subscription that took until the year of the unveiling to collect. A brick pavilion stands at the head of a long reflecting pool, the pool itself originally an 18th-century canal in the garden that Lutyens remodelled in the style of an Italian formal garden. Three low fountains were added later. Yew hedges line both sides. On the east side, iron gates lead through to a peace garden added in 1994. In front of the pavilion stands a Stone of Remembrance, twelve feet long, carved from a single piece of rock with the slight Greek-temple curvature called entasis that Lutyens used on all his Stones - so subtle the eye cannot quite see it but the mind can feel it. The inscription reads: THEIR NAME LIVETH FOR EVERMORE.

The unveiling took place on 9 June 1922. General Sir Ian Hamilton, who had commanded at Gallipoli, presided. Reverend Alfred Jarvis dedicated the memorial. Hamilton's speech that day did not pretend the war had ended war. The result has been so different, he told the gathered crowd. Europe is a seething cauldron of racial hatred. Mesopotamia, India, Egypt - all straining at the leash of civilisation. If you want to end war, you must end hatred. A bugler played the Last Post. The crowd sang the national anthem. Barbara McLaren and her two sons laid floral tributes around the Stone of Remembrance. A separate plaque was set elsewhere for Francis McLaren alone, inscribed: THIS STONE COMMEMORATES FRANCIS WALTER STAFFORD McLAREN MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT FOR THE SPALDING DIVISION 1910-1917 WHEN HE FELL IN THE SERVICE OF HIS COUNTRY AT THE AGE OF 31. Lutyens used the pavilion design again in several Western Front cemeteries, but none of his other public war memorials follow this template. Historic England has called Spalding an exceptional departure - which it is, and which it was meant to be. A grieving young widow asked for something private at public scale, and the master of monumental architecture quietly gave her what she asked.