The annual Anzac Day service was held there until the February 2011 earthquake; since then the memorial has been behind the fence around the cathedral.

[4] In November 2022, the stone structure making up the memorial was completed, with the bronze figures to be installed over the coming months.

While the Bridge of Remembrance was unveiled in 1924, the Christchurch City Council opposed the Cathedral Square proposal and stopped it from going ahead.

The argument was that the cathedral would dwarf the memorial, and that the bustling nature of the square was an inappropriate setting for a place of reflection.

Gould seized the opportunity and proposed the vacated site for the memorial, and the Anglican Church as the owner of the land agreed under the condition that a cross be incorporated into the design.

[9] The design was accepted in 1933, after which Trethewey refined it before carving the figures in clay, boxing them up, and forwarding them for casting to Arthur Bryan Burton's Thames Ditton Foundry in Surrey.

[11] It was erected next to the cathedral on a site which had been occupied by the statue of John Robert Godley, which was moved back to its original location.

[7] According to MacLean and Phillips in The sorrow and the pride: New Zealand war memorials, it is possible to make 'a good case...for it being the finest public monument in the country'.

[13] In 2011, with the Christchurch Central City cordoned off following the earthquake in February, the service was held in Hagley Park instead.

Just prior to the 2017 Anzac Day service, the Christchurch branch of the Royal New Zealand Returned and Services' Association (RSA) asked for the memorial to be relocated to Cranmer Square, as the protracted negotiations between the government and the Anglican Church about the restoration of the adjacent Cathedral deny the public access.

[18] The memorial was to be put back on display in time for Armistice Day 2022 (11 November),[19] but the date was missed.