Artists from around the world are being invited to compete to design a memorial to Mary Seacole, the Jamaican Crimean War nurse, near the Houses of Parliament.

The memorial appeal has announced an artists selection panel to be chaired by Baroness Amos, Leader of the House of Lords, and organised by Phil-omena Davidson, the former president of the Royal Society of British Sculptors, who has successfully performed the same role for the David Lloyd George statue that is to be installed in Parliament Square later this year.

The £400,000 Seacole appeal has been promised a site for the memorial at St Thomas’ Hospital at Westminster Bridge across the Thames from the Houses of Parliament.

The other members of the panel are Professor Elizabeth Anionwu, head of the Mary Seacole Centre for Nursing Practice at Thames Valley University; Lady Hollick, chair of Arts Council England, London; Lord Smith of Finsbury, the former Culture Secretary; Stephen Deuchar, director of Tate Britain; Alexander Amosu, a ringtones billionaire; and Steve McGuire, director of capital, estates and facilities management at St Thomas’ Hospital.

Ms Davidson said that advertisements will be published later this year asking artists for expressions of interest. She said the commission would be open to all artists and was not restricted to sculptors. The panel will be looking for a design that not only represents Seacole but also reflects the scope of her activities and journey from Jamaica to the Crimea, via London, and back to Britain.

A brief will be drawn up and interested artists asked to submit examples of their work. Ms Davidson said it was important that the artist who designs the memorial works in collaboration with the appeal and within the restrictions of working at St Thomas’s Hospital, which is also the site of the Florence Nightingale Museum.

The list of possible artists will be whittled down by the panel under Ms Davidson’s guidance, with a winner planned to be announced in spring 2008.

The appeal’s original target of £475,000 has been reduced after the construction company Sir Robert McAlpine offered to build the monument at cost price and the hospital offered the site, vastly reducing the cost of acquiring the land.

The memorial will celebrate the life and work of the self-taught nurse, herbalist and businesswoman who made her own way to the Crimea in 1854 where she set up a rest, refreshment and nursing post for troops near Sebastopol and also went out on to the battlefields to tend the wounded.

Her work won the gratitude of the soldiers and the admiration of the officers, and was reported by William Howard Russell, The Times’s legendary correspondent in the Crimea. When she arrived in London penniless after the war ended, The Times led support for an appeal that was also backed by dukes and generals.

In 1857 this newspaper published a letter from Russell referring to Seacole’s “courage, devotion, goodness of heart and public services”.

The appeal, and her bestselling autobiography with a foreword by Russell, helped to put Seacole back on her feet. After a quiet and apparently happy later life, which included a spell as a masseuse for the Princess of Wales, she died in 1881, aged 76, with her obituary appearing in The Times. She is buried at St Mary’s Catholic Cemetery, Kensal Green, northwest London.

www.maryseacoleappeal.org.uk