Discussion of a war memorial for Northampton began shortly after the armistice in 1918, and from July 1919 a temporary wooden cenotaph stood on Abington Street in the town centre.

The monument's design was completed and approved quickly, but its installation was delayed by six years until the site could be purchased from the Church of England, which required a faculty from the local diocese.

The memorial was finally unveiled on 11 November 1926 after a service and a parade including local schoolchildren and civic leaders.

The Northamptonshire War Memorial Committee, chaired by local landowner Lord Lilford, eventually commissioned Lutyens to design a purely commemorative monument, and selected a site in part of the churchyard of All Saints' Church.

[2][6][7] Lutyens's designs were complete by 1920 and approved in November of that year, but as the chosen site was part of the churchyard, and several graves would have to be relocated to accommodate the memorial, the war memorial committee had to seek a faculty from the Diocese of Peterborough (the diocese in whose jurisdiction Northampton falls), which delayed the installation.

[2][17] The stone is a monolith (carved from a single piece of rock), curved so slightly as to barely be visible to the naked eye, 12 feet (3.7 metres) long and devoid of any decoration beyond the inscriptions.

The memorial stands in a small garden now just outside the All Saints' churchyard, defined by a low stone wall to the front and a yew hedge to the rear with ornamental gateways to either side.

[2][20][21] The memorial was eventually unveiled on 11 November (Armistice Day) 1926, as part of a large ecumenical service, which included 5,000 local schoolchildren.

At the conclusion of the service, the crowd proceeded to the new memorial; the parade was led by veterans from the Battle of Mons and included other military representatives, nurses from Northampton General Hospital, and the town's civic leaders.

The local branch of the Royal British Legion launched a campaign for a memorial dedicated to the town and containing a list of names.

The memorial to Edgar Mobbs—a professional rugby player from Northampton who was killed in the First World War in 1917—was moved into the garden.