It was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens to commemorate employees of the North Eastern Railway (NER) who left to fight in the First World War and were killed while serving.

[3][4] The war memorial is one of several buildings and structures in the centre of York related to the NER, including the company's headquarters and the city's original railway station.

[1][3][5] At a meeting in April 1919, the NER's board discussed the idea of a war memorial, and decided that it should be of "an ornamental, rather than of a utilitarian character".

[6] The board initially planned to seek donations for the project from it workforce, but changed its mind after the general manager reported that the idea met with widespread disapproval among employees.

[7] The project became embroiled in a controversy surrounding its size and location, which grew to envelop the proposed York City War Memorial.

[3][8] The issue was further complicated by the proximity of both proposed schemes to York's ancient city walls; both schemes required the consent of the Ancient Monuments Board (later English Heritage and now Historic England), particularly as Lutyens' design for the NER involved the memorial abutting the city walls and would have required excavation of part of the ramparts, to which the Yorkshire Architectural and York Archaeological Society (YAYAS) strenuously objected.

The NER's in-house architect suggested moving the memorial ten feet (three metres) to the east, away from the wall; Lutyens, in India at the time, dismissed the idea in a cable.

[3][9][10] In February 1922, the secretary of the YAYAS, Dr William Evelyn, gave a lecture in which he was severely critical of the NER's proposed memorial.

[3][12][13][14] The Stone of Remembrance is a monolith in the shape of an altar, 12 feet (3.7 metres) long and curved so slightly as to barely be visible to the naked eye; it is deliberately devoid of any decoration besides the inscription "THEIR NAME LIVETH FOR EVERMORE".

Behind the Stone of Remembrance are 15 slates set into the floor of the memorial in 1984, bearing the names of the LNER's 551 dead from the Second World War.

Grey spoke of the losses caused by the war: "the old North Eastern board and its general manager numbered some twenty persons.

Erosion continued in the years following and in lieu of re-carving them and causing further damage to the memorial, the names were recorded in a book which is held by the National Railway Museum.

NR was reported to have been looking at the feasibility of fresh carving, while acknowledging that it was "notoriously hard to re-carve into already degraded Portland stone".