MILITARY chiefs are to march on with plans to move a war memorial honouring Fusiliers killed in action since the Great War.

Despite a spirited offensive by residents to halt the relocation of the Lutyens monument, planning chiefs have sanctioned proposals to transfer the structure from Wellington Barracks in Bolton Road to outside the new multi-million pound Fusilier Museum and Regimental headquarters in Bury town centre.

The move has also been backed by several conservation organisations, including English Heritage and the Lutyens Trust.

The Grade II Listed monument will now be dismantled, cleaned and repaired before it is erected in Sparrow Park in Silver Street, hopefully in time for the official opening of the new museum in April of next year.

Plaques will be placed on the existing barracks entrance as a marker to record the presence of the monument.

Colonel Brian Gorski, colonel of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers (Lancashire), said: “We will work with the residents in Bolton Road to create a pleasant garden, with benches and flower beds, where people can rest and reflect.

“The Lutyens monument is not just a memorial to those Fusiliers who died during the First and Second World Wars but to those who continue to die overseas today. It is right that it should be moved to our new museum and regimental headquarters.”

Protestors formed an action group, Save the Memorial Campaign, to fight the move, saying the ashes of dead Fusiliers have been scattered at the foot of the monument and the ground was now sacred. They also collected a 2,350 name petition in their fight to stop the move.

However, Bury’s planning committee voted in favour of the relocation proposal which they said would afford it greater protection for vandalism in its new position.

This will not be the first time that the memorial has been moved. When it was unveiled in 1922, Wellington Barracks was a much larger site than it is today and the original location of the structure would now be somewhere in the middle of Bolton Road. It was resited in the early 1960s when the scale of the barracks’ buildings was very much reduced.

The design of the memorial centres on a Portland stone obelisk which sits on an octagonal granite block, inscribed with the words: ‘To the Lancashire Fusiliers their deeds and sacrifices for King and country’. The Colours to left and right are in enamelled stone and at the top of the obelisk is a sculpted wreath and crest and the words Omnia Audax.

The sculptor Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens RA was also the designer of the Cenotaph in Whitehall and of the magnificent memorial at Thiepval in the Somme, where the names of 72,000 British soldiers, who died in the front line, are inscribed. He waived his fee for the memorial in Bury as both his father and his uncle served in the regiment.