Having spent many months wandering around the City considering its long and varied history, I have seen literally hundreds of statues. Many are of instantly recognisable individuals, others trigger memories of university history papers written many years ago, and some I do not recognise at all (and neither, seemingly, does anyone else). Statues matter. They represent who we, as a society, choose to put on a literal pedestal. 

History is full of moments where society has pulled down the memorials of individuals who no longer reflect its values. It is difficult to forget the scenes of jubilation that followed the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Firdos Square in 2003. The image of the huge, decapitated head of Stalin’s Budapest statue sat in the middle of a street remains one of the enduring images of the 1956 Hungarian October Revolution. The precedent is clear; the amount of feeling that public monuments create and the common collective release when they are pulled down should not come as a huge surprise to anyone. However, when the statue of Edward Colston took an inglorious dip in Bristol harbour on 7 June 2020 as part of the George Floyd protests, many commentators seemed to be taken aback.

Opinion on Coston’s impromptu swimming lesson was divided. There were some that felt the statue should never have been left up, some that viewed its taking down as an attempt to erase parts of British history, and those that largely took objection to its violent dunking (but added little commentary on whether having a statue commemorating one of the major shareholders and deputy governors of a company that transported an estimated 84,000 men, women and children into slavery was a particularly good idea). 

The PM’s office stated that the statue’s tearing down was a “criminal act”; Keir Starmer said that it was “completely wrong to pull a statue down like that” but accepted that it “should have been…taken down a long, long time ago.” Predictably, the Daily Mail featured an article in which Edward Colston was described as the “beloved son of Bristol and wealthy slave trader”. No explanation was given as to who it was doing the “beloving”. 

So where do I sit on this? Well, the first point I would make is a general one in relation to those that we have traditionally looked to commemorate. There is no central record of all statues in London but the best figures I have been able to find are that there are somewhere in the region of 265 monuments that depict real individuals (rather than, say, Lady Justice on the top of the Old Bailey). Of those statues, the best guess for the number of women depicted is 17 - so about 6% (all credit to the excellent site “Statues For Equality” for help with the numbers here). 

Save for monarchs (the statue of Queen Anne outside St Paul’s) I have not been able to locate a single statue of a named woman in the Square Mile (I would love to be wrong about this so please shout in the comments if you can think of any). 

The position is worse if you are considering black individuals. From my count, there are four statues of black individuals in the whole of London. If you take Nelson Mandela out of the mix, it is two. 

I think it’s fairly clear that the statues we have at the moment don’t represent the wealth of input that big sections of society have had on our culture, politics, economics or art. There are plenty of individuals that could be cast in bronze but aren’t (you only need to read my article on Cable Street and do a quick Google of Charlie Hutchinson for one). Our public spaces and statues are overwhelmingly focused on those that are white, male and aristocratic.  

That is not to say that there has not always been attempts at greater inclusion and these should be celebrated accordingly. One of my favourites is on the central bronze relief on Nelson’s Column that depicts the “Death of Nelson”. Sculptured by John Edward Carew in 1849, it has a clear depiction of a black sailor apparently created to represent 23-year-old George Ryan who was listed on the muster role for HMS Victory and who fought at Trafalgar. A reminder that the fighting forces of the British Empire were often more multi-cultural then we might think (have a close look at the painting “The Death of Major Peirson” in the Tate for another example). The irony of this inclusion as the base for a statue of Nelson, whose views on slavery are coming under increasing scrutiny, are not lost.

So, if we accept that there needs to be greater equality in the statues that are erected in the future (and I think most would and have if the relatively recent arrival of Mahatma Ghandi (2015) and Millicent Fawcett (2018) in Parliament Square is anything to go by), what should we do about the statues that already exist? Should we consider taking down those of individuals who held views that are now considered distasteful or, frankly, entirely unacceptable?

My view (and it is only my view) is that statues fall into three categories.

The first is of those individuals that few can have objections to. I can’t imagine that anyone is going to be dragging Florence Nightingale into the street any time soon. Similarly, is anyone going to object hugely to the Arctic/Antarctic explorers Sir John Franklin and Captain Scott (save to say that neither were particularly good at keeping their men alive)?

The second category are those statues of individuals like Edward Colston. Colston’s main achievement in life was making an awful lot of money. A significant part of this came from his membership to the Royal African Company, an organisation that held an English monopoly in the trade along the coast of West Africa. Trade is something of a euphemism here and most of its activity was connected with the shipping of slaves from Africa to the Americas. It is estimated that 19,000 people died during this transportation during the time Colston was involved in the company. 

To be fair to Colston, he donated £70,000 (an enormous sum in those days) to the foundation of alms-houses, hospitals and churches in Bristol. But I don’t believe that this good work requires a statue – plenty of other individuals that have given substantially to charity have no memorial. Indeed, the statue itself was only raised in 1895 (almost 200 years after Colston had died) which rather suggests that his impact on the world was fairly minor and that his charitable works rated substantially higher in the late 19th century than the discomfort we now feel about his connections with slavery. Just as the Victorians felt able to put up the statue, we should feel confident about taking it down, along with any other statues memorialising individuals whose contributions to society are now seen as unacceptable. 

My preference would be for these statues to be removed to statue parks where the proper historical setting could be given to them and they could be considered and used as historical learning tools. For example, Colston provides a fascinating insight into the respectability of the business of slavery in the early 17th century along with changing attitudes towards race in the 19th century when the decision was taken to erect the statue in the first place.

If you then ignore the statues where no one can complain and those of individuals that (let’s be honest) haven’t done a great deal, this leaves one final category. What do you do about men (and as above, they are almost all men) who have achieved the incredible but have also done terrible, terrible things to get there?

For me, this is the most fascinating category and one that deserves some careful thought. I am a strong believer in historical relativism – it is wrong to judge individuals from the past based on today’s values. Next to Smithfield Market, Protestants were burnt in the 16th century on the basis that they did not believe in Transubstantiation (that the wine and bread at mass became the literal body and blood of Christ). I doubt anyone gives this a great deal of thought today, but 500 years ago it was a matter of life and death. There are things that we care about today that people will simply not even register in 500 years’ time. Similarly, there are statues that are being erected today that people will want to remove in years to come because of an issue that we aren’t even able to conceive at this point.

Perhaps more fundamentally, history is the study of people. People are complex and flawed. They do “good” and “bad” things in their lives. Our views about what is “good” or “bad” (whatever those mean) change and continue to change over time (as is obvious from the late erection of Colston’s statue). This inevitably means that there are statues of people that are simultaneously heroes and villains.

Take, for example, the statue of Oliver Cromwell in pride of place outside Parliament. The statue is there because it is hard to think of a single individual who did more to promote the interests of parliament over the arbitrary rule of the monarchy – he therefore represents the ultimate in parliamentary sovereignty. At the same time, he established what was effectively a military dictatorship across the country and caused a brutal repression in Ireland that allowed the plantation system in the North of the country. So, was Cromwell a monster or a democrat? The answer is probably both, depending on your own view.

A statue of George Washington stands in Trafalgar Square; a gift from the New World in 1921 (set on a foundation of Virginian soil so as to ensure that the statue didn’t make a lie of his statement that he would never set foot on British soil again). If it could be claimed that one person created the United States, it is George Washington. The original founding father and the man that staved off almost inevitable defeat at the hands of the English, his political legacy was one of national stability and the peaceful handover of power. Washington is a titan in history and deserves his place on the plinth.

Yet, he owned slaves and not just a few. He inherited and purchased humans throughout his life meaning that, when he died, his estate at Mount Vernon included 317 people in its assets (including 143 children). Washington’s attitudes to slavery itself have been subject to thousands of pages of discourse and are exceedingly complex but, of course, the contradictions in the man can’t be writ large in bronze.

The reality is that it is impossible to divorce individuals from their historical context or their questionable morals. My view is that this forms the real beauty in studying history. The stories are complex, the individuals are complex, and the combination is fascinating. I would like to see these issues explored in more detail and each statue accompanied by a panel that provides some of the history behind the individuals involved. The discourse that this might create is truly invaluable and that, for me, is the real benefit from Colston’s immersion last year. We should have the conviction to look with a quizzical eye at the statues that have been erected by our forefathers along with the confidence to interrogate further than the image presented on the plinth.