Qualla: Statue of Millicent Fawcett

Statue of Millicent Fawcett: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jwslubbock, CC BY-SA 4.0. Caroline Criado Perez was jogging through Parliament Square one morning on 8 March 2016 - International Women's Day, as it happened - when she stopped and looked around. Churchill. Lloyd George. Mandela. Gandhi. Lincoln. Smuts. Disraeli. Eleven statues, all of them men. She went home and started a campaign. Two years later - on 24 April 2018, exactly a century after British women over thirty won the parliamentary vote - the Prime Minister Theresa May, the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, three generations of women, and two schoolgirls together pulled the cover from a bronze figure of Dame Millicent Fawcett. It became Parliament Square's first statue of a woman, its first statue by a woman, and proof that monumental geography in Britain could be changed by one journalist's curiosity and 74,000 signatures.

Image: Jwslubbock | CC BY-SA 4.0

Statue of Millicent Fawcett: 2.7 Percent

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Lubbock, CC BY-SA 2.0. Criado Perez had run this campaign before. In 2013 she had noticed that the Bank of England was about to remove Elizabeth Fry from the five-pound note and replace her with Winston Churchill - leaving no women on any British banknote except the Queen. She organised. She petitioned...

Image: John Lubbock | CC BY-SA 2.0

Statue of Millicent Fawcett: Suffragist, Not Suffragette

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Garry Knight from London, England, CC0. Criado Perez's choice of subject surprised some campaigners. The popular imagination of women's suffrage in Britain is dominated by the Pankhursts - Emmeline, Christabel, Sylvia - and the militant Women's Social and Political Union with its bricks through windows, hunger strikes,...

Image: Garry Knight from London, England | CC0

Statue of Millicent Fawcett: Wearing's Banner

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jingru shao 0906, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Turner Prize-winning artist Gillian Wearing was commissioned to make the statue. Wearing had spent her early career photographing strangers holding up handwritten cards with their personal thoughts - work called Signs That Say What You Want Them To Say And Not Signs That Say ...

Image: Jingru shao 0906 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Statue of Millicent Fawcett: What Changed

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Garry Knight from London, England, CC0. The arts editor for BBC News, Will Gompertz, gave the statue five stars. 'The Fawcett statue,' he wrote, 'makes most of the others look ridiculous, or pompous or both.' He excepted only her immediate neighbour - the statue of Gandhi - and praised Wearing's design for giving Parli...

Image: Garry Knight from London, England | CC0