She engaged Lutyens via a family connection and the architect produced a plan for a grand memorial cloister surrounding a circular pond, in the middle of which would be a cross.

After a public meeting and a vote in 1919, a reduced-scale version of McLaren's proposal emerged as the preferred option, in conjunction with a clock on the town's corn exchange building.

The total cost of the memorial was £3,500, of which McLaren and her father-in-law contributed £1,000 each; her brother-in-law donated a pair of painted stone flags and the remainder was raised from voluntary subscription, which took until 1922.

The memorial consists of a brick pavilion at the south end of the garden and a Stone of Remembrance, both at the head of a long reflecting pool, which incorporates the remains of an 18th-century canal.

[4][5] Barbara McLaren engaged Lutyens to design a memorial for the gardens of Ayscoughfee Hall, which Spalding Urban District Council had purchased in 1897 to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria.

About three hundred people attended the meeting, at which the proponents of the two leading options plus a third proposal (the clock on the corn exchange) were allowed fifteen minutes each to outline their scheme.

The ballot paper included seven options, with each voter selecting a single choice: The modified McLaren–Lutyens proposal emerged the clear winner, receiving 459 votes.

On Armistice Day (11 November) 1998, the Western Front Association unveiled a plaque on the South Holland Centre to explain the significance of the clock tower.

The unveiling took place at a ceremony on 9 June 1922, presided over by General Sir Ian Hamilton and dedicated by Reverend Alfred Jarvis, Assistant Chaplain-General to Northern Command.

Europe is a seething cauldron of racial hatred; Ireland [...] is linked in our minds with the idea of murder; Mesopotamia [modern-day Iraq], India, and Egypt are straining at the leash of civilisation."

[12] At the conclusion of the speeches a lone bugler played the "Last Post" and the crowd sang the national anthem; the dignitaries, including McLaren and her sons, then laid floral tributes around the Stone of Remembrance.

The central panel bears the dedication: "IN LOVE AND HONOUR OF THOSE WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES FOR THEIR COUNTRY IN THE YEARS OF WAR MCMXIV – MCMXIX / THIS MEMORIAL IS RAISED IN THEIR HOME BY THE MEN AND WOMEN OF SPALDING".

The pavilion and the pool are surrounded by yew hedges, which on the east side are broken at regular intervals by iron gates which lead to a peace garden, added in 1994.

The Cenotaph and Lutyens's connections from his pre-war work designing country houses led to commissions for dozens of war memorials across Britain and elsewhere in the Commonwealth.

[1] His initial design for Spalding was one of several of Lutyens's early post-war commissions featured in a war memorials exhibition hosted by the Royal Academy at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 1919.