I first found out about the plan to remove the original Emmeline Pankhurst statue from Victoria Tower Gardens, beside the House of Lords, in late 2016.
I was well into my campaign for the first statue of a woman in Parliament Square; Millicent Fawcett, who was unveiled earlier this year. On hearing that ‘The Pankhurst Trust’ – set up by former Tory MP Sir Neil Thorne – had put forward the application for a new Pankhurst statue, I thought it might be worth meeting to see if we could work together. It seemed silly to have two campaigns.
The meeting did not go well. I suggested that – since there was already a deeply historically significant statue of Pankhurst in the vicinity, not to mention a new one planned for Manchester in 2018 – we could perhaps work together on a monument to someone else.
After all, if you exclude Queen Victoria, (whose enthusiasm for putting up sculptures of herself remains unparalleled) less than three per cent of the statues I counted in the Public Monuments and Sculptures database were of women who actually existed.
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