Trafalgar Square & Nelson's Column

8 min read

Trafalgar Square and Nelson's Column seem so inseparable that it is easy to assume they were conceived together: a great national square built around a monument to Britain's most famous admiral. In reality, the square was already being created before anyone decided to put Nelson in it, its principal architect did not want the column there, and the monument itself took almost a quarter of a century to acquire the bronze lions that now seem essential to its design.

The site was not originally a square at all. For centuries much of it was occupied by the King's Mews, the royal stables at Charing Cross. These became redundant when George IV moved the royal stabling to the new Royal Mews beside Buckingham Palace in the 1820s, releasing an exceptionally prominent piece of land at the meeting point of Westminster, the Strand and the West End.

Its redevelopment formed part of John Nash's much larger plan to remake Georgian London. Nash was creating a grand route from the new Regent's Park through Regent Street towards the royal and governmental districts around Pall Mall. The open space at Charing Cross became an important junction in this scheme, connected westwards through the newly created Pall Mall East and eastwards towards the Strand. The name Trafalgar Square was already in use by around 1830, even though the square itself would not be formally completed for more than a decade.

The name commemorated the Battle of Trafalgar of 21 October 1805, when the Royal Navy defeated the combined French and Spanish fleets off the Spanish coast. Horatio Nelson was already Britain's most celebrated naval commander; his death during the victory transformed him into something approaching a national martyr. His body was brought home aboard HMS Victory, lay in state at Greenwich and was carried in an extraordinary state funeral to St Paul's Cathedral. More than 15,000 people passed through the Painted Hall at Greenwich during only three days of lying-in-state.

Yet the square was not initially planned around him. Its northern side acquired another national institution first. Parliament chose the site for the National Gallery partly because of its unusually central position: it could be reached in carriages by wealthy residents of the West End while remaining accessible on foot to poorer Londoners from the east. William Wilkins's National Gallery opened in 1838, six years before Trafalgar Square itself officially opened.

The square as we recognise it is largely the work of Sir Charles Barry, architect of the Houses of Parliament. The natural ground slopes noticeably southwards towards Whitehall, so Barry created a raised terrace in front of the National Gallery, retaining walls and steps, and levelled the great paved space below. The architectural effect remains important today: the Gallery is raised above the square while Nelson's Column stands out against it from the south.

Barry was less enthusiastic about the enormous monument somebody else proposed putting in the middle of his composition. A public campaign for a London memorial to Nelson resulted in architectural competitions beginning in 1838. William Railton's winning design was an immense Corinthian column. Barry objected that it would overpower the National Gallery and undermine the setting he was creating for it, but work on the column had already begun. Trafalgar Square's defining object was therefore inserted into its architect's design against his wishes.

The resulting monument is deliberately overwhelming. Nelson stands more than fifty metres above the square, his five-metre-high stone figure by Edward Hodges Baily supported by a huge fluted granite column and bronze Corinthian capital. At street level Nelson is almost impossible to examine properly: the sculpture works less as a portrait than as a silhouette, permanently visible above the surrounding buildings. He faces south towards Whitehall and the traditional centre of British government.

The details are concentrated around the enormous pedestal below. Four bronze reliefs narrate Nelson's great battles: Cape St Vincent, the Nile, Copenhagen and finally Trafalgar, where the subject becomes not simply victory but Nelson's death. The southern relief by John Edward Carew shows the mortally wounded admiral being carried below deck aboard Victory. Nelson had been hit by a musket ball fired from the French ship Redoutable at about 1.30pm and died several hours later, knowing that his fleet had won.

The reliefs repay much closer inspection than the statue above. They present Nelson's achievements not through abstract symbols but through crowded scenes of sailors, ropes, guns, bodies and fighting. They were cast using bronze from captured French cannon, literally turning the weapons of Britain's enemy into the material of a British national monument. One figure on Carew's Trafalgar panel is a Black sailor or marine; research into the fleet shows that men from Africa and the wider African diaspora were indeed among those who fought at Trafalgar.

Something is conspicuously missing from early images of the completed column: the lions. Railton had always intended sculpture around the base, but the four enormous bronze animals did not arrive until 1867, more than twenty years after the column itself. Their designer, Edwin Landseer, was one of Victorian Britain's most celebrated animal painters rather than primarily a monumental sculptor. They were ultimately modelled and cast with the involvement of the sculptor Baron Marochetti.

Their scale is crucial. Without them the pedestal appears severe and disproportionately massive; the reclining lions spread the monument horizontally into the square and provide a visual transition between the human scale of visitors and the extraordinary verticality of the column. Today they are probably photographed almost as often as Nelson himself, despite being a distinctly later addition to his memorial.

The fountains are another element that appears original but is not quite what it seems. Barry introduced two fountain basins during the 1840s. One reason was practical: the huge expanse of paving created glare and heat. Government officials also saw an advantage in occupying more of the square with water, reducing the space available for the enormous political crowds that London's new public square was already capable of attracting.

The fountains visible today are largely twentieth-century replacements. Sir Edwin Lutyens redesigned their centrepieces in 1937-39 as memorials to First World War admirals David Beatty and John Jellicoe, with sculpture by Charles Wheeler and William McMillan. Trafalgar Square consequently contains layers of naval commemoration from two different centuries: Nelson towering over the Napoleonic Wars at its centre, with memorials to the commanders of the First World War embedded more discreetly into the surrounding landscape.

There are older and stranger layers too. Immediately south of the square, almost lost among traffic, sits the equestrian statue of Charles I. It was cast in 1633, survived the Civil War and was erected at Charing Cross in 1674-75, on the site formerly occupied by the medieval Eleanor Cross. It therefore predates Trafalgar Square by roughly 170 years. Looking south from Nelson's Column you are effectively looking across two completely different traditions of British public monument: the Stuart king on horseback and, behind him in chronological terms, the Victorian cult of the national military hero.

The other statues reveal how the square accumulated rather than followed a single coherent plan. George IV sits on horseback in the north-east corner in a sculpture originally intended for Marble Arch. Generals Henry Havelock and Charles Napier occupy smaller plinths further south. And opposite George IV stands perhaps the square's most successful accident: an empty pedestal.

Charles Barry designed this north-western plinth for an equestrian statue, generally intended to commemorate William IV. The money was never found and it remained empty for more than 150 years. From 1999 it instead began hosting temporary works of contemporary art. The Fourth Plinth programme has turned what was essentially a Victorian funding failure into one of the world's most visible spaces for new sculpture.

This produces an extraordinary contrast with Nelson. One corner of Trafalgar Square contains a nineteenth-century attempt to make a historical reputation permanent in granite and bronze; another deliberately changes every few years. Yinka Shonibare made that relationship explicit in 2010 when he placed Nelson's Ship in a Bottle, a model of HMS Victory with patterned textile sails, on the Fourth Plinth - using contemporary art to reconsider the naval, commercial and imperial history represented by the monument towering beside it.

The square itself has similarly acquired a meaning its designers could only partly have anticipated. Unlike many of London's older garden squares, Trafalgar Square was created as public space. Its proximity to Parliament and Whitehall rapidly made it an obvious place to demonstrate as well as celebrate. Chartists gathered here; unemployed workers and socialists did the same later in the century. In November 1887 attempts to prevent a political meeting culminated in the violent confrontation remembered as Bloody Sunday, in which police and soldiers fought demonstrators trying to enter the square.

That political role continued with Suffragette demonstrations, anti-war rallies, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament gatherings and later protests against apartheid. Yet exactly the same space became a place for victory celebrations, New Year's gatherings, sporting crowds and national ceremonies. Since 1947 Norway has sent London a Christmas tree for the square each year in gratitude for British support during the Second World War.

Even the apparently historic physical relationship between Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery is surprisingly recent. Until 2003 a busy road ran along the northern side, separating the Gallery from the square. A major redesign pedestrianised this section and cut the broad central staircase through Barry's terrace wall. What now feels like the natural entrance from Trafalgar Square into the National Gallery is only just over twenty years old.

Trafalgar Square is therefore much more than the setting for Nelson's Column. It began as a piece of Regency town planning on the site of royal stables, acquired a national art gallery, was remodelled by one of Victorian Britain's greatest architects, and then had an enormous monument inserted into it that its own designer did not want. The lions came decades later, the fountains were rebuilt a century later, one statue is older than the square itself and its most famous modern sculpture site exists because nobody could afford to fill a Victorian plinth.

That accidental quality is part of what makes the square successful. The original architecture celebrates monarchy, military commanders and national power, but the space between the monuments belongs to crowds. Trafalgar Square has repeatedly been occupied by people celebrating the state, protesting against it, feeding pigeons, listening to speeches, climbing on lions or simply sitting beside the fountains.

Nelson remains immovable above it all. Almost everything beneath him has continued to change.