Qualla: Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain

Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kalaha, CC BY-SA 1.0. Everyone calls him Eros, the Greek god of erotic love. Everyone is wrong. The winged figure poised above the fountain at Piccadilly Circus is actually Anteros, Eros's lesser-known brother, the god of selfless and mature love. The sculptor Alfred Gilbert chose him deliberately, as a tribute to a Victorian earl who had spent his life pulling children out of factories and putting them into schools. The renaming committee tried desperately to call the statue The Angel of Christian Charity. Londoners ignored them. The wrong name stuck, and a memorial to philanthropy became the unofficial mascot of theatreland, neon, and a thousand drunken rendezvous beneath those aluminium wings.

Image: Kalaha | CC BY-SA 1.0

Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain: An Earl Worth Remembering

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Isaac Israëls, Public domain. 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 bod...

Image: Isaac Israëls | Public domain

Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain: The Sculptor's Quiet Joke

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK, CC BY 2.0. 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 ...

Image: Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK | CC BY 2.0

Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain: The Wrong Name That Wouldn't Die

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK, CC BY 2.0. 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 close...

Image: Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK | CC BY 2.0

Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain: Travels and Returns

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit James F., CC BY 1.0. 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 sta...

Image: James F. | CC BY 1.0

Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain: Aluminium Under Neon

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carl Purcell, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 ci...

Image: Carl Purcell | CC BY-SA 3.0