Apart from royalty, and naked models, you will not find many women rewarded for their contribution to history among London’s statues. I guess that does mean any who have received the honour must have been remarkable people. These are all I can find. Oddly, Nightingale, Blake and Pankhurst are all by the same sculptor: AG Walker.
Edith Cavell
Cavell was shot in 1915 by the German army during World War I for helping Allied soldiers escape from Occupied Belgium. Her death was used as a propaganda tool although she herself said: ‘Patriotism is not enough,
I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.’
St Martins Place WC2
Tube: Charing Cross
Famous Women
Louisa Blake
Edwin Lutyens - famed for the Cenotaph - designed this fine 1937 memorial to Dame Louisa Brandreth Aldrich Blake (1865-1925), dean of the London School Of Medicine For Women. She was the first female surgeon in Britain and the first to operate on cancers of the cervix and rectum.
Tavistock Square WC2
Tube: Russell Square
Emmeline Pankhurst
Pankhurst (1858-1928) was a leader of the Suffragettes who fought for the vote for women, a right not won until 1928. Imprisoned 13 times between 1908 and 1914, She suspended her campaign at the outbreak of World War I, when many women did men’s jobs - hastening votes for women over 30 in 1918.
Victoria Tower Gardens SW1
Tube: Westminster
Virginia Wolff
Woolf (1882-1941) was a member of the racy Bloomsbury Group of writers and artists who lived in this area of London. Considered one of the leading writers of her generation, she suffered from severe depression and drowned herself after filling her pockets with stones.
Tavistock Square WC2
Tube: Russell Square
Margaret Ethel MacDonald
The wife of Ramsay MacDonald died in 1911, at their home nearby, just before he became the first Labour Prime Minister. A feminist and socialist, this lively bronze by Richard Goulden (more noted for his war memorials) shows her with nine children - she did much charity work with the young.
Lincoln’s Inn Fields WC2A
Tube: Holborn
Florence Nightingale
This statue, sculpted in 1867 by AG Walker, backs onto the Crimean War Memorial. Oddly, she carries an oil lamp, instead of her actual candle lantern. Nurses leave a wreath here every year on May 12 - the anniversary of the death of ‘The Lady With The Lamp’ who transformed military hospitals.
Waterloo Place W1
Tube: Trafalgar Square
Sarah Siddons
The actress Sarah Siddons (1755–1831) - herself an amateur sculptor - is immortalised as the tragic muse after a painting by Reynolds. Famous for the role of Lady Macbeth, she was also the first woman to play Hamlet. Often painted, there is also a statue of her in Westminster Abbey.
Paddington Green W2
Tube:Edgware Road/Paddington
Catherine Booth
Methodist lay preacher William Booth founded the Salvation Army in 1878 and his wife Catherine (1829-1890) bore him eight children. Painfully shy, she nevertheless broke the convention that women did not speak at adult meetings to become a powerful preacher in her own right.
Champion Park SE5
Rail: Denmark Hill
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Mary Seacole
Jamaican-born, mixed-race nurse Seacole ran a front-line hotel/store/hospital during the Crimean War in 1855, Nightingale having refused her help, despite Seacole’s experience of tropical disease. She has become a symbol of racial and class prejudice in Victorian times and there is an ongoing campaign to erect a statue.
Violette Szabo GC
The Special Operations Executive (SOE) performed sabotage in occupied Europe during World War II. Karen Newman sculpted this SOE memorial bust of Violette Szabo - a former Brixton shopworker - captured on a mission in France and executed at Ravensbruck concentration camp aged 23.
Albert Embankment SE1
Tube: Westminster
