The Martyrs' Memorial stands at the junction of St Giles', Magdalen Street, and Beaumont Street — a towering Gothic spire designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott and erected between 1841 and 1843. It commemorates three Protestant bishops — Thomas Cranmer (Archbishop of Canterbury), Hugh Latimer (Bishop of Worcester), and Nicholas Ridley (Bishop of London) — who were burned at the stake during the reign of Queen Mary I for refusing to recant their Protestant faith. The memorial was itself a product of controversy: it was commissioned by evangelical Anglicans partly as a rebuke to the Oxford Movement, which they feared was leading the Church of England back toward Rome. The design deliberately echoes the Eleanor Crosses of medieval England, standing as a permanent witness to the cost of conscience. Statues of all three martyrs occupy niches in the memorial, with Cranmer facing south toward the city, holding a Bible.