How will we remember Queen Elizabeth II?

The late Queen Elizabeth, believes the 90-year-old Norman Foster, was “a powerful force for bringing together nations, countries, the Commonwealth, charities, the armed forces”. She also exhibited, as he recalls from such occasions as receiving from her the Order of Merit, both formality and informality. Accordingly, the competition-winning memorial he and his team have designed for her in St James’s Park is about connecting people, joining things up, and combining the ceremonial straight lines of The Mall with the more relaxed meanderings of the park.

Such observations are not of course new – indeed, all the five shortlisted entrants for the competition expressed them in one way or another – and are definitely oversimplified. Yet it’s also easy to feel nostalgic for the spirit of benign coexistence that was at least one of the flavours of her 70-year reign. It is embodied by the personnel of Foster’s team, which includes the artist Yinka Shonibare and the landscape architect Michel Desvigne, and by their design. Foster himself was once radical, one of the modernist architects against whom the present king, as Prince of Wales, railed. Now, his glassy architecture cohabits easily enough, helped by the digital shimmer of the computer images, with some traditional-looking statues, and planting in the English romantic tradition.

The brief for the memorial was not to create a single monument, but a sequence of spaces and objects running from one side of the park to the other, via the bridge across its central lake. Reportedly, this was one of the queen’s favourite places, blessed as it is with famous views of Buckingham Palace and of the cupolas and spires of Whitehall.

There was an obvious danger of gilding the lily. If this spot is so close to perfect, why add to it? Foster’s team, unlike one or two of their competitors, largely avoided this hazard, choosing to leave the views intact and to rebuild the bridge as a more spacious if glitzier version of itself, with glass balustrades intended to recall the diamond tiara that the queen wore at her wedding. On either side of the Unity Bridge, as they call it, are “a family of gardens connected together by a network of meandering paths”, based on such themes as “Commonwealth” and “community”.

At one end of the sequence, where it hits The Mall, an equestrian statue of Her Majesty is promised. At the other, next to the quieter thoroughfare of Birdcage Walk, there will be a representation of her and Prince Philip as a young couple. In between there will be such things as “considered paths of all widths for diverse groups to navigate together”. Low-glare LEDs in Victorian lamps will “consider wildlife”. The queen’s voice will be “ever-present”, in inscriptions of her sayings and recordings of her speaking.

There’s a whiff in all this of being all things to all people, of ticking boxes, of trying to be sustainable and traditional and modern and royal and accessible all at once. The project’s ultimate success, it should also be said, will depend not on the clunky metaphors of tiaras and unity but on the physical experiences of sitting on its benches and walking its paths – a level of detail yet to be fully developed. There may also be more to the idea of making the route across the park into a record of the queen’s life, currently only sketchily suggested by the proposed plaques and voice recordings.

The Foster proposals avoid the pitfalls of cringe and controversy inherent in a royal monument – it would take a particularly twisted culture warrior to get enraged by them. They promise to be pleasant, popular, suited to their setting, reasonably well balanced between monarchical memorial and everyday life, professionally delivered, a touch incoherent. One could wish for more, for something with its own distinctive timbre. But this may be as good a project as a memorial to our late queen was ever likely to be.

Illustrations Foster + Partners