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Not every statue in London. The ones worth crossing the road for: Roman wall, medieval ruins, and the monuments that earn a detour.
A lion-headed Egyptian goddess over an auction house door, and the oldest outdoor statue in London.
StatuesFree
Sekhmet was the Egyptian goddess of war and of healing, a woman with the head of a lioness. Hundreds of her were carved for the temple of Mut at Karnak, near Luxor, enough for one to be honoured on every day of the year, and this bust, cut from diorite around 1320 BC, is almost certainly one of them.
She reached London in the rush of Egyptian antiquities that followed Napoleon's expedition, probably through Giovanni Belzoni, a circus strongman who turned excavator, and was put up for sale at Sotheby's in 1822. What happened next is not clear even to Sotheby's: either she sold and the buyer never came for her, or nobody bid and the seller walked away. The firm was left with a goddess it could not shift, and the staff adopted her instead.
She has moved house with them ever since and has sat above the door on New Bond Street since 1917, black against the stone, easy to walk under without seeing. She is usually called the oldest outdoor statue in London; Cleopatra's Needle on the Embankment is older, but an obelisk is not a statue.
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.