London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks. Streets Ahead. Story time. History time.
And today, London has a new woman in its life.
She’s ten feet tall.
She’s wearing blue.
She’s in very substantial heels.
And she appears to be going somewhere.
Which, when you think about it, is quite a change for Trafalgar Square.
Because Trafalgar Square is full of people who aren’t going anywhere.
Nelson has been up there since 1843.
George IV is still sitting on his horse.
General Havelock hasn’t budged.
General Napier likewise.
And now, into this great Victorian stone waiting room, comes a woman who is walking.
Head up.
One foot forward.
Blue dress.
Blue shoes.
Purpose in every inch of her.
She’s called Lady in Blue.
And as of September 10th, she’s the newest occupant of Trafalgar Square’s famous Fourth Plinth.
And I rather like her.
Because she looks as though she’s got an appointment.
Maybe she’s late.
Maybe she’s meeting somebody at Charing Cross.
Maybe she’s heading down Whitehall.
Maybe she’s got a London Walk to catch.
Whatever it is, she hasn’t got time to stand around being commemorated.
And that’s the point.
She isn’t a queen.
She isn’t a general.
She isn’t a statesman.
She isn’t somebody who died 150 years ago and was subsequently turned into several tons of bronze.
She’s an ordinary Londoner.
Or, rather, an extraordinary version of an ordinary Londoner.
The artist calls her an everywoman.
A young metropolitan woman.
A woman walking through the city.
And walking into the future.
The artist is the New York-born Tschabalala Self.
That’s SHA-ba-la-la Self.
Born in Harlem in 1990.
Painter, printmaker, sculptor. An artist particularly interested in the human figure and especially in the representation of Black women.
And London matters to her.
She’s said that important milestones in her career happened here. Her first institutional exhibition was here. London, she says, supported her artistic development.
And now London has given her one of the most extraordinary stages any artist could ask for.
Trafalgar Square.
Not tucked away in a gallery.
Not behind a velvet rope.
Not somewhere you have to buy a ticket.
Right there.
Protests.
Buses.
Tourists.
Demonstrations.
National Gallery.
Nelson.
And Lady in Blue.
She’s made of bronze, but she’s been given this extraordinary, glowing blue finish.
Lapis lazuli blue.
And there’s another little story.
Because lapis lazuli is one of the great colours of art history.
A beautiful deep blue stone, mined for thousands of years, ground down to make pigment and once fantastically expensive.
Think Renaissance paintings.
Think Titian.
Think Vermeer.
Think the blue of the Virgin Mary’s robes.
Blue that said: this matters.
And now that ancient, precious blue has landed on a thoroughly modern woman striding across Trafalgar Square.
There’s something rather wonderful about that.
But to understand why she’s up there at all, we have to go back nearly two centuries.
Because the Fourth Plinth is one of those delicious London accidents.
There are four great plinths at the corners of Trafalgar Square.
Three got their statues.
The fourth didn’t.
It was intended for an equestrian statue of William IV.
William IV on horseback.
There was just one tiny difficulty.
Money.
They didn’t have enough of it.
So William never got his horse.
The horse never got William.
And the plinth remained empty.
For more than 150 years.
Which is almost unbelievably London.
Build the pedestal first.
Run out of money.
Spend the next century and a half wondering what to do with it.
And inevitably, suggestions came pouring in.
Everybody had a candidate.
Nelson Mandela.
Margaret Thatcher.
Battle of Britain hero Sir Keith Park.
Alan Turing.
Captain Tom.
And then there was the great whisper.
The London urban legend.
The story that went round for years.
The Fourth Plinth was being kept for the Queen.
Not Queen Victoria.
Our Queen.
Elizabeth II.
The story was that after her death an equestrian statue of Elizabeth II would finally occupy that empty plinth.
And this wasn’t just something somebody made up in a pub.
Former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone said in 2013 that “the understanding” was that the Fourth Plinth was being reserved for Queen Elizabeth II.
After her death in 2022 the idea came roaring back.
MPs discussed it.
The London Assembly supported the idea of a permanent statue of the late Queen somewhere in London.
The Fourth Plinth was very much in the conversation.
But no.
The plinth remained what it had become.
London’s revolving stage.
Because in 1998 somebody had a much more interesting idea.
Instead of deciding once and for all who deserved to stand there forever, why not keep changing it?
Put contemporary art up there.
Let artists have a go.
Let Londoners argue about it.
Which Londoners are extremely good at.
And so began one of the great ongoing public art experiments in the world.
We’ve had a pregnant Alison Lapper, carved in white marble.
We’ve had a gigantic blue cockerel.
We’ve had a boy on a rocking horse.
We’ve had a huge thumbs-up.
We’ve had whipped cream, a cherry, a fly and a drone.
We’ve had 2,400 ordinary people taking it in turns to occupy the plinth for an hour each.
And now we have her.
Lady in Blue.
The sixteenth Fourth Plinth commission.
And perhaps there’s something particularly clever about putting a walking figure there.
Because Trafalgar Square is monument country.
Monuments are about stopping time.
This person mattered.
Freeze them.
Put them on a pedestal.
Keep them there.
Lady in Blue does the opposite.
She moves.
Or appears to.
She’s caught in mid-stride.
She’s not looking backwards.
She’s not saluting.
She’s not conquering anybody.
She’s not on a horse.
She’s simply getting on with her life.
And there’s something very London about that.
Because London isn’t really the buildings.
It isn’t Nelson’s Column.
It isn’t the National Gallery.
It isn’t even Trafalgar Square.
London is people moving through it.
Crossing streets.
Missing buses.
Running for trains.
Going to work.
Going home.
Meeting somebody.
Leaving somebody.
Shopping.
Flirting.
Walking.
Always walking.
Millions upon millions of little human journeys laid one on top of another.
And suddenly one of those walkers has been lifted ten feet into the air.
There she is.
Blue against London grey.
A woman with somewhere to go.
And that brings us to our word of the day.
Plinth.
A lovely little word.
A solid word.
You can almost hear the block of stone in it.
Plinth.
It comes to English through Latin and Greek, from the Greek plinthos, meaning a brick, tile or rectangular block.
Which is exactly what it is.
The thing underneath the important thing.
Except in Trafalgar Square something rather marvellous happened.
For 150 years the thing underneath became more interesting than the thing that wasn’t on top of it.
The absence became famous.
The empty space became the story.
And then London did what London does best.
It filled that empty space with ideas.
One after another.
Some beautiful.
Some baffling.
Some funny.
Some infuriating.
Some loved.
Some hated.
And then, after a couple of years, off they go and London tries something else.
Which may be the best monument to London imaginable.
Not something fixed.
Something changing.
And today, look up.
There’s a Lady in Blue.
Don’t worry about catching her.
She’s already on her way.
London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
Streets Ahead.
And, today at least, ten feet above the streets.
See you tomorrow.