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If you start looking up at London’s public statues and busts (and you absolutely should), you’ll quickly notice something. There are a lot of men. In fact, around 90% of London’s public statues are of men. There are reportedly more statues of named animals in the capital than there are of real or non-mythical women. So, in honour of International Women’s Day, here’s a wander through some of the brilliant women who have made it onto London’s plinths. It’s not exhaustive. But it’s a start. Queen Victoria – The Reigning Champion of Plinth Space If there were an award for “Most Statues in London”, Queen Victoria would win it without breaking a sweat. She has twelve statues in the capital alone. Ten of them are full-length public sculptures. The most famous, of course, is the vast Victoria Memorial outside Buckingham Palace. Whatever you think of the Victorian era, Victoria certainly cornered the market in commemorative stone.  Millicent Fawcett – Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere In 2018, history shifted slightly in Parliament Square. For the first time, a statue of a woman was installed there: Millicent Fawcett. A leading figure in the suffrage movement, Fawcett campaigned for women’s voting rights for over sixty years, favouring debate and persistence over militancy. She’s depicted holding a banner reading: “Courage calls to courage everywhere” - words she spoke after the death of Emily Davison. Fittingly, the statue was created by Turner Prize winning artist, Gillian Wearing - the first statue in Parliament Square made by a woman, too. Read more here.  Florence Nightingale - The Lady with the Lamp A pioneer of modern nursing, Florence Nightingale led teams during the Crimean War, transformed hospital hygiene, and revolutionised medical statistics. Her statue at Waterloo Place shows her as the “Lady with the Lamp”, the nickname earned during her night-time rounds tending to wounded soldiers. There’s another at St Thomas’ Hospital - fittingly close to where generations of nurses have trained in her shadow.  Mary Seacole – A Long Overdue Tribute Installed in 2016 in the grounds of St Thomas’ Hospital, the statue of Mary Seacole honours the Scottish-Jamaican nurse who set up the “British Hotel” during the Crimean War - part convalescent home, part morale-boosting haven. Posthumously voted first in a poll of “100 Great Black Britons”, Seacole’s recognition was long overdue. Noor Inayat Khan – Spy, Hero, Storyteller In Gordon Square Gardens stands a bust of Noor Inayat Khan, the British-Indian Special Operations Executive agent who worked undercover in occupied France during WWII. Captured, tortured, and executed at Dachau in 1944, she was posthumously awarded the George Cross. Her memorial stands close to the Bloomsbury home where she once lived - a quiet square honouring extraordinary courage.  Virginia Woolf – Bloomsbury’s Literary Rebel In Tavistock Square you’ll find a bronze bust of Virginia Woolf. Modernist. Feminist. Literary rule-breaker. A born and bred Londoner and a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group, Woolf lived in the area for over three decades. The bust, unveiled in 2004, quietly marks her long connection with Bloomsbury - a neighbourhood that helped reshape 20th-century culture.  Boudicca – Destroyer of Roman London At the entrance to Westminster Bridge stands one of London’s most dramatic sculptures: a larger than life-size bronze statue of Boudicca and her daughters in a rearing chariot. Positioned opposite Parliament and close to the Palace of Westminster, there’s a neat irony here: she once led the rebellion that burned Roman London to the ground. Ada Lovelace – Look Up! Always look up in London. On Horseferry Road, high on a modern apartment building, stands Ada Lovelace. Lovelace is celebrated mathematician and technology pioneer, at a time when few women entered those fields. Often described as the world’s first computer programmer for her work with Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. Today she’s become a symbol for women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM).  Amy Winehouse – Camden’s Daughter In Camden Market stands a bronze of British singer and songwriter, Amy Winehouse, forever mid-stride, hair piled high. Music fans and tourists pose with, and celebrate, the beloved late singer in her former stomping ground of Camden - the part of town where Winehouse also tragically died in 2011, aged 27. The statue was unveiled three years after her death. Mary Wollstonecraft – A Controversial Tribute When a memorial to Mary Wollstonecraft was unveiled on Newington Green in 2020, it caused debate. Rather than a conventional likeness, the sculpture, by Maggi Hambling, shows a silver female figure emerging from a swirl of forms. Its unveiling provoked a backlash from some who have queried the inclusion of a naked female figure. A radical and writer, Wollstonecraft, best known for ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ which is seen as one of the earliest feminist works for challenging the contemporary notions that women existed only to please men and championing women’s independence.  Edith Cavell – Duty Without Distinction Just off Trafalgar Square, in St Martin’s Place, stands the memorial to Edith Cavell. A British nurse from Norfolk, Cavell worked in German-occupied Belgium during the First World War. She treated wounded soldiers from both sides without distinction, because, to her, care came before politics. She also helped around 200 Allied soldiers escape. For that, she was arrested and executed by German firing squad in 1915. Her memorial bears the simple word: Humanity. Emmeline Pankhurst – Deeds, Not Words Walk into Victoria Tower Gardens from Parliament Square and you’re immediately greeted by an icon: Emmeline Pankhurst. Leader of the Women’s Social and Political Union, Pankhurst took a far more militant approach than Millicent Fawcett. Her rallying cry? “Deeds, not words.” The statue was unveiled in 1930 by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, just two years after women finally achieved equal voting rights with men. It stands within sight of Parliament. Which, to me, feels exactly right. Still a work in progress. Across the UK, only 2.7% of statues depict real, non-mythical, non-royal women. London is improving, albeit slowly, but it’s still a city of generals, politicians and bewhiskered Victorian gentlemen. So next time you’re out walking, look up. Look around. And notice who’s on the plinth - and who isn’t.
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 Five years ago I wrote about the rather testosterone heavy collection of statues in Parliament Square which includes such luminaries as Winston Churchill, David Lloyd-George and Nelson Mandela. Since then, there has been the addition of Mahatma Gandhi in 2015, and a couple of weeks ago was the unveiling of the square’s latest bronze resident, which I wanted to mention. This year (2018) marks the 100th anniversary of ‘The Representation of the People Act 1918’ which was passed by the then coalition government to reform the electoral system in Great Britain and Ireland. Prior to 1918, only adult men who owned property had been eligible to vote. These new laws gave universal suffrage to all men in the UK over the age of 21, and crucially, for the first time, women …albeit with a number of caveats. The right to vote was only granted to women over the age of 30 who were registered property owners with a value over £5, or married to someone who was. About 8.4 million women who had previously had no political voice, now had the right to vote. It would be another 10 years before women had equal suffrage to men, but none-the-less, the Act of 1918 was a huge step forward in the march for women’s rights and was the result of decades of campaigning. Some of the women instrumental in pushing the cause, such as Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Sylvia and Christabel used high profile direct action to grab attention and highlight inequality. Emily Davison, died in 1913 from injuries sustained after she threw herself beneath King George V’s horse at the Epsom Derby and Mary Richardson slashed a painting at the National Gallery. Many women were imprisoned or went on hunger strikes for their cause. One woman, who was a leading figure in the women’s suffrage movement, shunning militant and provocative tactics for moderation and debate was Millicent Fawcett, and she was honoured recently with a statue in Parliament Square. Not only is it the first statue of a woman to be placed on this prominent site outside the Houses of Parliament, but the first to be made by a woman; Turner Prize winning artist Gillian Wearing. Fawcett spent a staggering six decades of her life fighting for equal rights, and is depicted carrying a banner which reads “Courage calls to courage everywhere”, a line from a speech she gave following the death of Emily Davison. The plinth on which the 8ft 4inch statue of Fawcett stands, bears the faces of 59 others who also fought tirelessly for women’s right to vote. It seems almost fitting that Millicent Fawcett died in 1929 at the age of 82, a year after women were granted the vote on equal terms to men; the cause she had spent her entire adult life fighting for.   |
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