As a cultural conservative, I have once again been owned by a piece of edgy and daring iconoclasm on the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. It is called The End, by Heather Phillipson, and it is a pile of whipped cream with a fly on it, featuring a drone for some reason. I’m sure it’s all very clever and challenges my bourgeois complacency, but to be honest, even just describing it feels like a gigantic waste of mental energy, filling me with boredom and exasperation and a desire to be thinking about literally anything else.
It really is time to permanently fill the fourth plinth. It has been standing empty for a very long time. It was raised in 1841 when Queen Victoria was only 22 years old and therefore predates electric lighting, the telephone, undersea telegraph cables, ironclad warships and almost all of Charles Dickens’ novels. Over the last couple of decades, it has been used as a display for public art installations. Some of these have been quite decent – Alison Lapper Pregnant was a striking piece of unconventional sculpture – but none of them have really been appropriate to the setting.
I think we should have a traditional figurative sculpture portraying a Briton, or British subject (i.e. someone who lived under British rule in the Empire), who was from a non-European ethnic background and achieved genuine distinction in their field. Given the setting of Trafalgar Square, my own preference would be for a military figure, to symbolise the enormous contribution made by Imperial troops in the First and Second World Wars; perhaps one of the 29 Indians or 12 Gurkhas to have been awarded the VC, or – as a Twitter friend suggested when I mooted the idea – the SOE operative and George Cross recipient Noor Inayat Khan.
But there are contenders from other fields. Another Twitter pal proposed Srinivasa Ramanujan, the brilliant and prolific Indian mathematician who lived under the Raj. A name that occurred to me was Learie Constantine, the West Indian cricketer, barrister, politician and civil rights campaigner. He was the plaintiff in the famous Constantine v Imperial Hotels Ltd case, a modest though important early ruling against racial discrimination.
Some will argue that specifically selecting a non-white person is tokenism or a concession to “wokeness”. I just don’t think this is true. All public statues are tokenistic to some degree since we cannot possibly hope to publicly commemorate everyone who is worthy of such commemoration.
As long as the statue is of someone genuinely distinguished, then it seems to me that it is perfectly reasonable to use ethnicity as a key criterion for deciding who to commemorate. The tokenism charge only really makes sense when we asked to treat as historically important or greatly accomplished someone who was not in fact either of those things – someone like Mary Seacole, whose importance has been enormously exaggerated for political reasons.
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