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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.
London's first purpose-built road junction still has its 1771 signpost, carved with the distances to Fleet Street, London Bridge and Westminster.
MemorialsFree
Robert Mylne, the surveyor who built Blackfriars Bridge, laid out St George's Circus in 1771 where his new roads met on open ground south of the river, and set this stone obelisk at the centre to tell travellers where they were. Three of its faces are a signpost measured to the foot: one mile to Palace Yard at Westminster Hall, one mile and forty feet to London Bridge, one mile and three hundred and fifty feet to Fleet Street. Four oil lamps once hung from it.
The fourth face names Brass Crosby, Lord Mayor, in the eleventh year of George III. That same year Crosby, as the City's chief magistrate, freed a printer the House of Commons wanted punished for publishing what MPs had said in the chamber. The Commons sent him to the Tower; judges declined to hear the case, London crowds turned out for him, and he was released. Nobody tried to stop the reporting of parliamentary debates again, which is why Hansard, the official record of what is said in Parliament, exists at all.
The obelisk was taken down in 1897 to make room for a clock tower marking Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee, and in 1905 was re-erected in the park in front of what is now the Imperial War Museum. The clock tower was demolished in the 1930s. It was 1998 before the obelisk came back to the island where Mylne had put it, and the lamps never did.
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.