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George Orwell statue, Broadcasting House

Orwell outside the BBC he worked for and disliked, with his line about liberty cut into the wall behind him.

Statues & memorialsFree

Photo by JRennocks, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Martin Jennings's bronze of 2017 stands at the entrance to Broadcasting House, where Orwell produced Eastern Service talks from 1941 to 1943 and where, by tradition, Room 101 took its name from a meeting room he sat in. He leans forward, cigarette in hand, and the wall behind him carries his sentence about liberty meaning 'the right to tell people what they do not want to hear', from an unpublished preface to Animal Farm. The BBC turned the statue down in 2012 as too left-wing; his old employer accepted it five years later.

Where
Broadcasting House, Portland Place, W1A 1AA
Nearest station
Oxford Circus · 5 min walk

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