New statue of UK’s Princess Diana to be installed at Kensington Palace

A new statue of Britain’s Princess Diana will be installed at Kensington Palace next July on what would have been her 60th birthday, the palace said on Friday, after a delay due to the coronavirus pandemic.

In 2017, Princes William and Harry said they had commissioned a statue in honor of their mother, who died in a Paris car crash more than 20 years ago, to be erected outside the older brother’s official London home, Kensington Palace.

Later that year, they chose sculptor Ian Rank-Broadley, who produced the image of Queen Elizabeth used on Britain’s coins, to create the statue to commemorate 20 years since Diana’s death.

Diana, the first wife of the heir-to-the-throne Prince Charles, was killed when the limousine carrying her and her partner Dodi al-Fayed crashed in a Paris tunnel in August 1997.

In this July 29, 1981 photo, Prince Charles and his bride Diana, Princess of Wales, and his parents, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip, wave from the balcony of Buckingham Palace in London after their marriage at St. Paul's Catheral (Photo: AP)

William was 15 and Harry 12 at the time.

The first permanent memorial to her, a 210-meter (689-foot) long fountain, was launched in Hyde Park in 2004 after years of bureaucratic wrangling and squabbling over the design.

The new statue will be unveiled on July 1.

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