The Imperial War Museums register lists 111,532 war memorials across the United Kingdom. I counted, place by place, how many First World War dead each community's memorial names, and set that against how many people live there today.
Almost every town and village in Britain has one: a cross on the green, a board inside the church door, a list of names that someone reads aloud each November. The Imperial War Museums' War Memorials Register has been recording them since 1989. It now holds 111,532 entries, from Boer War obelisks to a single name added to a family gravestone.
I wanted to use it to answer a simple question for every place at once: how many names does your memorial carry, and is that a lot for a place your size? Doing that honestly means dealing with a problem anyone who has looked at a memorial knows well. The same man is often named three or four times: on the village cross, on the board in his church, on his old school's roll and on the plaque at the works where he had a job. So I picked one community memorial per place and never added memorials together.
This is a companion to my earlier study of Thankful Villages, the handful of parishes from which every serving man came home. Here they become the far tail of a much larger picture.
Each dot is a place in the register with at least one memorial, at the middle of its memorials. The size shows the First World War dead named on the place's community memorial. The colour shows that number for every 1,000 people who live there today, where I could find a population. Green rings are the Thankful Villages. Search for your town or village, or for any memorial by name, and tap a dot for the details and a link to the full record at the Imperial War Museums.
Most entries are not crosses on village greens. The commonest kind is a board, plaque or tablet (39,531), and the second commonest is a name added to a family gravestone (30,175): a son buried in France, remembered at home. Rolls of honour and books of remembrance come next (7,535), then crosses (6,498) and church windows (4,496).
The First World War dominates: 76,160 memorials (68%) commemorate it, against 37,858 for the Second World War. 14,795 commemorate both, usually a First World War memorial with names added after 1945. The South African War of 1899 to 1902 has 2,678, and 2,338 remember civilians killed in the Second World War.
Add up every First World War memorial in the register and you get 2,496,396 names of the dead. The usual figure for the United Kingdom's military dead and missing from the British Isles is about 744,000. So, on average, each man appears about 3.4 times. Some of that comes from 43 huge regimental, national and county rolls that hold 897,502 names between them. Leave those out and it is still about 2.1 names per man.
That is why I never add memorials together. Instead I group the register's memorials into places: those that share a town or village name and lie within 6 km of each other. That gives 17,967 places. For each place I take a single memorial: the community memorial (a cross, cenotaph, board or roll put up by the village or town) that names the most First World War dead. If a place has none, I take its church memorial with the most names, which in many small villages is the parish's own memorial. Memorials to one person, to a regiment, a school, a works, a club, or to a whole county are never chosen.
The effect is large. Summed over every memorial, places carry 2,423,089 names; one memorial per place brings that to 727,184, 3.3 times fewer. That second figure is close to the 744,000 dead, but I would not read much into the match: some places still overlap (a town memorial can include its villages), and many places have no count at all.
Of the 14,119 places with a First World War count, 13,776 have a community or church memorial that records names of the dead. The median is 16 names. Most are short lists: 2,778 memorials have 5 to 9 names and 3,664 have 10 to 19. At the other end, 63 places have a memorial with a thousand names or more, all of them cities and large towns.
A long list in a city is not the same as a long list in a hamlet. To compare places I divide the names by the number of people who live there now. That is the weak point of this study, and I want to be plain about it: what we need is the population in 1911, and for almost every place I only have a modern one, from Wikidata, matched by name. Places that have grown since 1914 will look as if they lost few men; places that have shrunk will look as if they lost many.
With that warning, here is the picture for the 6,108 villages and small towns of 100 to 5,000 residents with an exact count on their memorial. The median memorial carries 18.3 names for every 1,000 people living there today. The middle half runs from 10.7 to 30.0. Pooled together, they name 16.4 per 1,000, almost exactly the 16.4 per 1,000 you get from 744,000 dead in a population of 45.4 million.
The modern population drags the numbers around. The smaller a place is today, the higher its rate: a median of 38.4 per 1,000 for places of 100 to 199 people, falling to 9.7 for places of 2,000 to 5,000. Some of that will be real, but much of it is growth and decline since 1911 that I cannot see.
A better test is possible for a few places. Wikidata holds a 1911 census population for 181 of them. Against 1911 residents their median is 29.9 names per 1,000; against today's residents the same places give 14.7. The memorials name about twice as many men, per head of the 1911 village, as the national rate would suggest. My guess is that village memorials cast a wide net, naming men born there who had moved away and men from outlying farms and hamlets, but that sample is small and not chosen at random.
Scottish places stand out. Their median is 30.0 names per 1,000 residents today, against 17.8 in England and 12.0 in Wales. The Highland area, Dumfries and Galloway and the Scottish Borders top the county list. It is tempting to read that as heavier Scottish losses, and it may partly be. But I cannot separate it from two other things that push the same way: rural places that have lost people since 1911 look worse on a modern count, and a Scottish memorial often serves a whole parish, larger than the village whose name it carries. Wikipedia's list of Thankful Villages notes that none has been identified in Scotland. Welsh places sit lowest, and they are also the biggest in this set: a median of 1,205 residents, against 666 in England and 961 in Scotland.
Many memorials carry both wars. For the 5,730 community memorials with exact counts for both, the median memorial has 0.32 Second World War names for every First World War name: about one for every three. Only 235 (4.1%) list more names for 1939 to 1945 than for 1914 to 1918.
A Thankful Village is one from which everyone who served in the First World War came home. My earlier study used the list of 55 villages on Wikipedia (52 in England and 3 in Wales, 18 of them flagged as doubly thankful because they also lost no one in the Second World War). In the register I found 43 of them. In 20 the register holds a roll of the men who served and came back, a median of 14 names each, and 15 have a memorial with "thankful" or "thanksgiving" in its title. The rest have no memorial in the register within a few kilometres, or only a memorial with no count.
Four have something more. At Nether Kellet the church board is recorded with 21 names of men who died, exactly the 21 who served according to the village's Wikipedia article, as used in my earlier study, which looks like a slip in the coding of the record. At three others (East Norton, Chantry and Tellisford) the only names of the dead are on memorials to one or two people. The register cannot say whether those men counted as villagers; Wikipedia's list notes that doubts are "generally over the place of residence of a serviceman".
Among 6,108 small places with an exact count, only 36 have a community record with no dead at all.
The Thankful Villages are the far end of the distribution above. Of the 6,108 villages and small towns with an exact count, 36 (0.6%) have a community or church record that lists only men who served, with no dead; 8 of those are Thankful Villages. Another 40 name one man and 137 name two. Even the lightest losses were almost never zero.
The register also points to places worth a second look. Across all sizes there are 92 places where the only First World War community or church record is a roll of those who served, and no memorial at the place records any dead. 18 are Thankful Villages. Of the others, 61 are small places with up to 100 names on the roll. They are not new Thankful Villages: a roll of service can sit beside a memorial the register has not recorded, or one filed under a neighbouring parish's name. But they are where I would start looking.
My earlier study found that chance alone, with each serving man facing a 12% risk of death, would predict somewhere between 544 and 1,373 Thankful Villages in England and Wales, far more than the 55 known. This register explains part of the gap from the other side: village memorials name more men, for their size, than a simple count of residents would suggest. A memorial that reaches out to men born in the parish, or living just over its boundary, makes it much harder for any village to have no one to name.
Data. The Imperial War Museums' War Memorials Register, read through its public data interface on 28 October 2026: 111,532 memorials (the interface reported 112,072), each with its title, types, lost flag, locations and, for each war, the number of names, how many died and how many served, and whether the count is exact. 6,891 have no coordinates. I placed each memorial at its current location and took its county and nation from the nearest Ordnance Survey Open Names settlement (Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands from simple boxes).
Names of the dead. The number recorded as died; where neither died nor served is given but there are names, the number of names. A memorial with only served names counts as a roll of service, with no dead.
Kinds of memorial. I gave each memorial one class from its type and title: to one person (a gravestone addition, a serviceman figure, a single name, or a title that starts with a rank or initials), military (a regiment, ship, squadron, aircraft crash or veterans' body), regional (a county, national or clan memorial), school, workplace (firms, railways, banks, the Post Office, police, clubs and societies), church (churches, chapels, congregations, windows and church fittings) and community (the rest). These rules are simple and will misfile some memorials. Memorials to one named person (52,501) are counted but their titles are not published.
Places and the community memorial. Memorials sharing a town name within 6 km of each other form a place. For each place I take the community memorial with the most First World War dead; failing that, the church memorial with the most; a roll of service only when no memorial at the place records any dead. The same is done separately for the Second World War.
Population. A Wikidata settlement with the same name within 5 km of the place, preferring civil parishes and Welsh communities. Wikidata stores a modern figure, mostly from the 2011 or 2021 census. Rates use places of 100 to 5,000 residents with an exact count. It is a proxy, and it is the biggest weakness here.
Known problems. The register is built by volunteers and is not complete: many memorials have no count yet, and a count can be wrong. Big-city figures are often rounded. Town names in the register vary (a suburb or a parish name), so a place here can be a parish, a village or part of a town. The Thankful Villages and their coordinates come from my earlier study, which took them from Wikipedia.