PLANS have been unveiled to celebrate the city’s Titanic crew members who lost their lives in the disaster by creating a permanent commemorative feature in the heart of the city.

More than 1,520 people lost their lives when the Titanic sank on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York on April 15, 1912, after hitting an iceberg off Newfoundland.

Around 670 were crewmembers and around 500 were from Southampton. The City of Southampton Society has put forward plans to build the memorial next to the existing Second World War remembrance feature outside the mayor’s parlour at the Civic Centre. Society trustee and former chairman Jack Candy said: “There is a plaque to those who died at the cenotaph as well as a plaque for the Titanic engineers but there is no single commemorative feature for the Southampton crew of the Titanic.

“Many of the crew were from the city and this feature would be a fitting way to remember them.”

Similar to the existing memorial to the city’s war dead inside the Civic Centre, it would consist of a record of names contained in a wooden cabinet resting on a marble plinth. It would be paid for by leftover money raised by the society to fund the Queen’s Peace Fountain in East Park, which was built in 2001 to mark 56 years of peace. Then, around £90,000 was raised, but the fountain only cost £67,000 to build.

“We plan to use the balance from the Queen’s Peace Fountain donations to pay for the memorial,” Mr Candy added. “We have contacted all the 148 donors and had no objections to our proposals.

Now we are just waiting for listed building consent to be granted so we can put it in the Civic Centre.”

He said that if plans for a Titanic museum in the city go ahead the feature would be moved there from the civic centre.