The National Monument on Calton Hill, in Edinburgh, has remained incomplete since work stopped on it in 1829.

Sandy Stoddart believes completion of the Calton Hill monument, which helped win Edinburgh its nickname as the “Athens of the North,” would be “extraordinarily radical” and has offered to assemble a team of experts to take forward his idea.

He said completing the monument would mitigate the modern-day “generic horrors” which he says are turning Edinburgh into the “Dubai of the North.”

Designed to commemorate the Scottish soldiers and sailors who lost their lives fighting in the Napoleonic Wars, the National Monument was begun in 1822, designed by William Henry Playfair and Charles Robert Cockerell, and based on the Parthenon in Athens.

However, despite prominent backers the project ran out of money and it remained incomplete.

Mr Stoddart, whose most recent public art work for Edinburgh was a figurative statue of Playfair erected outside the National Museum of Scotland, said completion of the monument would be a fitting tribute to the work of Playfair and Cockerell.

He said: “It would be extraordinarily radical to do this. We should actually build the damn thing. It can be done.”