Ripon Obelisk

It was designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor and constructed in 1702 with the support of John Aislabie, Ripon's Member of Parliament.

[1] It is located in the market square of Ripon, one of the smallest settlements in England to have city status.

Hawksmoor may have been inspired by recent discoveries that Ripon might have originally been a Roman town.

[2] In his 1724 book A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain Daniel Defoe notes "In the middle of it stands a curious column of stone, imitating the obelisks of the ancients, though not so high, but rather like the pillar in the middle of Covent Garden, or that in Lincoln's Inn".

In 1781 the monument was restored by William Aislabie, the son of the obelisk's founder and himself a long-standing MP to celebrate his sixty years in Parliament.