Distances from London are measured from this square. Officially, in legislation - when a sign on a motorway says how far you are from London, it is telling you how far you are from a brass plaque set into the pavement on the south side of Trafalgar Square, on the spot where the original Charing Cross stood. So whatever you think you know about where London is, the British government has decided that London is here, in a square named for a Spanish cape, looked over by an Admiral who never set foot in it. The name was not chosen until 1835 - thirty years after the Battle of Trafalgar - and the square itself did not open until 1844. Before that, this was the King's Mews, where royal hawks were kept for moulting, and later horses.
The site has been important since the 13th century. Edward I hosted the King's Mews here, at the T-junction where the Strand from the City meets Whitehall coming up from Westminster. The name "Mews" comes from "to mew" - to moult - because hawks were brought here to shed their feathers in seclusion. After a fire in 1534, Henry VIII rebuilt the buildings as stables. George IV moved the Royal Mews to Buckingham Palace in the early 19th century, freeing up the site. In 1826 the Commissioners of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues asked John Nash - the same Nash who designed Regent Street - to plan a redevelopment. Nash died in 1835 with the project incomplete. William Wilkins built the National Gallery on the north side between 1832 and 1838; after Wilkins's death in 1839, Charles Barry produced new plans for the square itself, and Trafalgar Square finally opened to the public on 1 May 1844. Building work on the south side in the late 1950s uncovered something unexpected: river terrace deposits from the Last Interglacial, 130,000 to 115,000 years ago. The fossils included cave lions, rhinoceroses, straight-tusked elephants, hippopotamus, and the dung of cave hyenas. They walked here when this was a tropical floodplain.
The Nelson Memorial Committee approached the government in 1838 proposing a public-subscription monument to the victor of Trafalgar. A competition was held, won by the architect William Railton with a design for a 218-foot Corinthian column. There were widespread public objections. Construction went ahead in 1840 with the height reduced to 145 feet. The column was finished and Nelson's statue raised in November 1843. The bronze reliefs around the pedestal were not done until May 1854. The four lions that everyone now associates with the column were not added until 1867 - a full 24 years after the column was complete. They were sculpted by Edwin Landseer, who asked the London Zoo to send him a dead lion to use as a model. He took so long sketching it that the corpse began to decompose, and he had to improvise the missing parts. This is why the lions' paws look more like cat paws than lion paws. Each lion weighs seven tons. They have been climbed on by every Londoner under the age of ten.
The historian Rodney Mace described Trafalgar Square as developing "from an esplanade peopled with figures of national heroes, into the country's foremost place politique." The 1848 Chartist rally - working-class demand for parliamentary reform - assembled here. Bloody Sunday in 1887 was a riot in this square after police charged a demonstration against unemployment. The Suffragettes bombed the National Gallery's edge in May 1913 (the bomb failed to explode) and St Martin-in-the-Fields church in April 1914 (it did, shattering windows on people passing by). The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament's first Aldermaston March set out from here in 1958, with Bertrand Russell speaking. In March 1968, 10,000 people demonstrated against the Vietnam War before marching to the American Embassy. Throughout the 1980s a continuous anti-apartheid protest was held outside South Africa House on the east side. In 1990 the Poll Tax Riots began with a demonstration of 200,000 people. In November 2015, after the Paris attacks, crowds came here to sing La Marseillaise. The square remembers all of it - the Animal Rebellion protestors who dyed the fountain water red in July 2020, the climate strikers in February 2019, the COVID lockdown opponents in September 2020.
Every December since 1947, a Norway spruce arrives in Trafalgar Square. The Norwegian government sends it as a thank you for British support during the Second World War, when the Norwegian king-in-exile broadcast home from London and the Royal Navy escorted convoys to Murmansk through arctic seas that swallowed merchant ships whole. The Head Forester of Oslo selects the tree from the city's municipal forest. It is shipped across the North Sea to the Port of Felixstowe, then trucked to London. The first tree, in 1947, was 48 feet tall; recent ones run around 75 feet. The lighting ceremony, twelve days before Christmas, draws crowds for carol singing. Westminster City Council threatened in 1980 to cancel the event to save £5,000. The decision was reversed. In 1987 several protesters chained themselves to the tree. The tree comes down on the twelfth night of Christmas and is recycled.
Barry's 1840s scheme provided four plinths around the square. Three got their statues fairly promptly - George IV on the eastern plinth in 1843 (intended for Marble Arch, redirected here when funding ran out), Sir Charles Napier in 1855, Major-General Sir Henry Havelock in 1861. The north-west plinth remained empty. It stayed empty for over 150 years. Since 1999, that fourth plinth has hosted a rotating series of specially commissioned contemporary artworks - Marc Quinn's pregnant statue of artist Alison Lapper, Antony Gormley's One & Other (where 2,400 members of the public stood on the plinth for one hour each, around the clock for 100 days), Yinka Shonibare's bottled HMS Victory, Heather Phillipson's giant whipped-cream-and-fly sculpture. The Fourth Plinth has become the most-watched public art programme in Britain. Hubert Le Sueur's 1633 equestrian statue of Charles I, standing on the south side on the original site of Charing Cross, has watched it all happen. The Charles I statue is where distances from London are officially measured from. The brass plaque is set into the pavement nearby. London begins, by law, here.
Trafalgar Square sits at 51.5081°N, 0.1281°W in the City of Westminster. Nelson's Column is the dominant visible feature - a 145-foot stone shaft set in a large open square. Best viewed at low altitude. Westminster Abbey lies a short distance south, the Mall and Buckingham Palace southwest, the Thames south, and St Paul's Cathedral east. Nearest airports: London City (EGLC) east; London Heathrow (EGLL) west.