Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, was the kind of aristocrat the Victorian age occasionally produced and then mostly forgot. He campaigned against children working in mines and chimneys, against the use of small boys as sweeps, against the conditions that ground bodies and minds to powder in textile mills. When he died in 1885, a public meeting at the Mansion House decided that a marble effigy in Westminster Abbey would not be enough. London needed a second monument, bronze, in one of its most-trafficked thoroughfares, where the people he had fought for could actually see it. They also founded the Shaftesbury Homes for poor children, paid for by the same public appeal. The fountain at Piccadilly Circus was meant to make philanthropy visible at street level.

The Memorial Committee handed the commission to a 32-year-old sculptor named Alfred Gilbert, who had loudly deplored what he called the "coat and trousers style" of British public statues. Gilbert had no interest in another bronze man in a frock coat. Instead, he chose to recast a winged figure he had already sculpted: Anteros, whom he described as portraying "reflective and mature love, as opposed to Eros or Cupid, the frivolous tyrant." The model was Angelo Colarossi, Gilbert's 16-year-old Anglo-Italian studio assistant, born in Shepherd's Bush in 1875. The figure was the first sculpture in the world to be cast in aluminium, then a costly, almost magical metal, set above a heavy bronze fountain ornamented with fish and waves. When the Duke of Westminster unveiled it on 29 June 1893, the response was immediate, vocal, and not what the committee had hoped.

Critics complained that the statue was too sensual for a sober, respectable earl, and too vulgar for the theatre district that surrounded it. Some called it indecent. The committee tried to head off the scandal by rechristening the figure The Angel of Christian Charity, the closest Christian approximation they could invent for the Greek role Anteros played. Nobody listened. Within months the statue had been nicknamed Eros, the god of carnal love rather than the god of selfless love, and the joke wrote itself: a memorial to a chaste philanthropist standing watch over what was, even then, a neighbourhood famous for its appetites. The Evening Standard adopted a stylised version of the statue as its masthead emblem. The naming was wrong, and the wrongness was perfect.

The whole monument has been hauled away from the circus twice. In 1925 it was dismantled so engineers could excavate the Piccadilly Circus tube station directly beneath it, and it spent five years in Embankment Gardens before returning in 1931. When war broke out in 1939, the statue alone was evacuated to Coopers Hill, a country house near Egham in Surrey that the London County Council had bought as an emergency headquarters; the bronze fountain stayed in place, ringed with sandbags. Anteros came home on 29 June 1947, watched by a crowd of thousands in heavy rain. Two flower sellers also returned, each of whom claimed to have been working at the foot of the statue for more than fifty years. During the 1953 coronation, Sir Hugh Casson designed an ornamental cage to protect the statue from revellers. In 2012 a tourist broke the bow string and a new one was fitted.

Today the fountain sits not at the centre of Piccadilly Circus but at the south-east corner, where it was repositioned after the war. The illuminated advertising hoardings opposite have cycled through generations of brands, but the boy with the bow has stayed roughly where the city put him. Tourists still arrange to meet "by Eros," still pose at the steps for photographs, still assume he represents desire rather than the quieter virtues that built the Shaftesbury Homes. The wings catch streetlight after dark and turn the same colour as the surrounding signs. Anthony Ashley Cooper, who would probably have preferred a portrait in a frock coat, ended up with a winged boy in aluminium standing for him in the loudest junction in London. It is the most wrong, and the most right, memorial in the city.