Monuments & Ruins

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Millicent Fawcett statue

Gillian Wearing's bronze of the suffragist leader, the first woman in Parliament Square and the first statue there by a woman, unveiled in 2018.

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Photo by Anthony O'Neil, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Parliament Square had eleven statues and every one of them was a man until 24 April 2018, when Millicent Fawcett joined Churchill, Gandhi, Mandela and Lincoln on the grass. Fawcett led the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies for more than twenty years, the constitutional wing of the campaign, arguing and petitioning where the Pankhursts' suffragettes broke windows, and she lived to see the vote won in 1918 and made equal in 1928. Caroline Criado Perez started the petition for a statue in 2016, the government paid for it from the fund marking a hundred years of women's votes, and Gillian Wearing made it: Fawcett at fifty, in a tweed walking suit whose weave is worked into the bronze, holding a banner that reads Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere, her own words from 1920, with the portraits of fifty-nine other women and men of the movement set into the plinth. It was the first statue of a woman in the square and the first there made by one.

Where
Parliament Square, SW1P 3BD
Nearest station
Westminster · 2 min walk

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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.

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