MP’s call for bronze statue of a monster

Tobias Ellwood, who represents Bournemouth East, is hoping the council will agree to the statue being sited on the roundabout at the bottom of Sea Road or in Shelley Park.

The author of the Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, is buried in St Peter's Churchyard and her son Sir Percy Florence Shelley used to live at Shelley Manor in Boscombe.

The house is due to be redeveloped over the next two years to include a doctors' surgery, community and cultural centre, and flats.

" I just feel Bournemouth has a lot to offer from a cultural perspective and the connection with Shelley is something we can build upon," said Mr Ellwood.

"We're supposed to be a family resort and I think a statue such as this would really be something that little kids - and adults - would remember when visiting the seafront.

"Of course there will be sceptics, but life isn't about bricks and mortar. It's also about the place we love and we need a bit of space for things other than flats."

He suggested having a competition to decide the winning design for the statue, which would be a lasting monument to the Shelley family's links with Boscombe.

One problem might be deciding what the monster should look like. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was 19 when she and her future husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, visited Lord Byron at a villa near Lake Geneva. Confined to the house by bad weather, Byron challenged the others to come up with a scary story.

Mary, inspired by a dream, wrote about a young Swiss scientist called Victor Frankenstein who stitches together a creature from body parts and brings it to life. In the story, the monster is never given a name, and description of its appearance is sketchy.

It was not until after the release of James Whale's 1931 film, starring Boris Karloff, that people began to call the monster by its creator's name. The movie also gave the world the iconic image of Frankenstein with a bolt through its neck.