Project Primer: Reconstructed War Memorials

Origins

Created for the 80th anniversary of VE Day (2025), this project presents 218 WWII memorials across the UK as an interactive map and image gallery. Each memorial is an SVG vectorisation reconstructed from a Wikipedia photograph — a digital act of remembrance, giving these monuments a new life in vector form.

Structure

• Leaflet map: Interactive map with 218 clickable markers, each representing a memorial's geographic location
• Image gallery: SVG reconstructions displayed alongside memorial details (name, coordinates, Wikipedia link)
• Lightbox viewer: Full-screen image viewing via Yet Another React Lightbox
• Deep linking: URL parameter ?guid= links directly to a specific memorial
• Data source: reconstructed-war-memorials.json — 218 entries with GUID, name, coordinates, image URL, Wikipedia link, and license

Images hosted on Vercel Blob. No AI was used in this project.

Related Projects

• A Sailor's War: Both deal with WWII memory and geography; Sailor's War uses Plotly maps while this uses Leaflet
• Vector Atlas: Shares the Leaflet map interaction pattern, though for semantic rather than geographic space

Agent Guidance

• Lead with the VE Day anniversary context and the concept of "digital remembrance"
• The SVG reconstructions are a deliberate artistic choice — vector art from photographic sources
• 218 memorials makes this a substantial data visualisation project
• Common questions: "Where are the memorials?" (across the UK), "Are these photographs?" (no, SVG vectorisations from Wikipedia images)