Trafalgar Square

How the square came to be

The site was the Great Mews of the royal stables, made redundant in the mid-1820s when new stabling was built behind Buckingham Palace. An Act of 1826 approved John Nash's scheme for the area, including a new square; the name was settled in 1830; and the National Gallery, built by William Wilkins between 1832 and 1838, fixed the north side.

The square itself is not by one hand, and the attribution usually given is wrong. Wilkins died in 1839 and Charles Barry took over the square, levelling a sloping site, building the north terrace with its stairs, the granite retaining walls, the bollards and the original fountains between 1840 and 1845. The column is not his: it was designed by William Railton and built between 1840 and 1843. Chantrey's equestrian George IV went up on the north-east plinth in 1844, by which time the square was in public use. The bronze reliefs were fixed from 1852, and in 1876 the Board of Trade set the imperial standards of length into the north terrace, where they remain.

The square is on the register of parks and gardens at Grade I.

Nelson's Column, and its height

The monument commemorates the victory off Cape Trafalgar in 1805. The statue of Nelson on top is by E. H. Baily and was set in place on 3 November 1843.

Its height is the thing worth getting right, because the figure in circulation is wrong and has been for twenty years. The conservation programme of 2005 and 2006 established 169 feet 3 inches, or 51.59 metres, measured from the bottom of the pedestal to the top of the admiral's hat. That is some sixteen feet less than the 185 commonly quoted, and the origin of the larger number could not be traced. It survives in official hands as well as unofficial ones: the Imperial War Museums' register of war memorials still gives 184 feet. Any figure quoted for a monument of this kind should carry the basis on which it was measured, which is precisely what the old numbers lack.

The lions and the reliefs

Sir Edwin Landseer designed the four lions; Baron Marochetti cast them, working between 1858 and 1867, and they were added in 1867 — a quarter of a century after the column itself was finished. Accounts crediting Landseer with sculpting them collapse two jobs into one. They were not the first attempt: John Graham Lough was chosen and declined in 1846, and models by Thomas Milnes were rejected in 1858 before Landseer was brought in. Note that Historic England's own records disagree between 1867 and 1868 for the installation, so the year is best given with that caveat or as a span.

The four bronze reliefs round the base, showing Nelson's battles, are by four different sculptors — Carew, Ternouth, Watson and Woodington — and not by Baily, to whom they are often attributed.

The fountains

The fountains in the square are not Barry's. His were replaced in a remodelling to designs by Sir Edwin Lutyens in the late 1930s, with bronze groups of mermen and mermaids by Sir Charles Wheeler and William McMillan, as memorials to Admirals Beatty and Jellicoe; busts of the two admirals were set against the north terrace wall in 1948. They were refurbished in the spring of 2009, when the lighting was replaced with a far less power-hungry system.

The fourth plinth

The plinth in the north-west corner was built by Barry in 1841 to carry an equestrian statue of William IV. The money was never found, and it stood empty for a hundred and fifty-eight years.

What fills it now is the best-known thing about the square, and older accounts have nothing on it. The commissioning programme was conceived by the Royal Society of Arts in 1998 and the first work, Mark Wallinger's Ecce Homo, went up in 1999; a government-commissioned report then recommended a rolling series of temporary commissions, which is what it became. It is run by the Mayor's culture team, advised by an independent commissioning group, and funded by the Mayor with Arts Council England and a philanthropic foundation. Artists submit models, the shortlist is shown publicly at the National Gallery with an opportunity for comment, and two winning works are chosen at a time, each standing about two years.

Sixteen commissions have stood there, among them Marc Quinn's figure of Alison Lapper, Antony Gormley's hour-by-hour occupation of the plinth by members of the public, Yinka Shonibare's model of Nelson's ship in a bottle, Katharina Fritsch's blue cockerel, Hans Haacke's horse skeleton and David Shrigley's thumb. The seventeenth is due in 2028. Because the occupant changes, a description of the programme survives where a description of the current sculpture does not.

Charing Cross, and the measuring of distances

At the square's south side stood one of the crosses Edward I raised in memory of Eleanor of Castile. She died in 1290 but the Charing cross was built between 1291 and 1294, and it was pulled down in 1647.

The equestrian statue of Charles I that now stands near the spot has a longer history than it looks. The bronze is by Hubert Le Sueur and was cast in 1633, commissioned three years earlier for a garden in Roehampton; it was not put up at Charing Cross until 1674 or 1675. It is said to be the earliest equestrian statue of its kind in England, and it is listed Grade I.

Distances to London are conventionally measured from the site of the original cross, and a Westminster City Council plaque in the square says so. It is worth putting as convention rather than law: no statute or Ordnance Survey rule could be found that establishes it, a second marker nearby puts the practice in the past tense, and the road numbering of England and Wales radiates from St Paul's rather than from here.

The pigeons

Older accounts describe a recent and controversial campaign against the square's pigeons. It is neither recent nor unresolved. The bird-seed seller's licence was ended in 2000, a Harris's hawk was introduced in late 2002, and an interim arrangement allowing one supervised early-morning feed was rescinded in 2003, when byelaws prohibited feeding birds on the part of the square the Greater London Authority manages. Feeders moved to the terrace by the National Gallery and the surrounding streets, and Westminster City Council closed that gap with a byelaw of its own in 2007. The prohibition is now carried by the Trafalgar Square byelaws of 2012, and the hawk is still flown each morning.

The rebuilding of 2003

The square was reshaped under a scheme called World Squares for All, of which it was the first phase; the masterplan also covered Parliament Square, Whitehall and the river frontage, and the rest was not carried out. Foster and Partners won an international competition for it in 1996 and the work took about eighteen months, reopening in July 2003.

What changed was the relationship between the square and the National Gallery. Traffic was taken off the north side and replaced by a terrace, with a broad central staircase cut through the terrace wall to link the gallery directly to the square, two lifts, and a café and lavatories built underneath. The area round the Charles I statue was enlarged, St Martin's Place was pedestrianised and the surrounding pavements widened.

The buildings round the square

The National Gallery holds the north side. To its east is St Martin-in-the-Fields, by James Gibbs and built between 1722 and 1726 — not by Wren, as recycled accounts often have it — and listed Grade I; Nash isolated the church deliberately so that it would read as part of the new composition.

Canada House, on the west, is by Sir Robert Smirke and dates from the 1820s, built for the Royal College of Physicians and the Union Club and later converted. Canada bought into it in 1923. It is the Canadian High Commission and does the work a high commission does — consular, trade, diplomatic and visa business. It was thoroughly refurbished and formally reopened in February 2015, bringing the whole staff under one roof for the first time in over fifty years, with more than two hundred Canadian works of art installed. Accounts offering visiting Canadians a reading room with newspapers and electronic mail describe something that has not existed for a very long time.

South Africa House, on the east, is by Sir Herbert Baker with Alexander Thomson Scott and was built between 1931 and 1933: a steel frame behind a Portland stone front, classical in outline with Arts and Crafts carving of South African animals and emblems. It is the South African High Commission, and the listing describes it as the most complete and richly fitted of Baker's four London buildings for the empire.

Protest, and permission

The square has been a place of assembly since it opened, and the authorities have been trying to manage that for as long. Chartists gathered in 1848. A demonstration in February 1886 ended in looting and window-breaking along Pall Mall. In November 1887 the Commissioner of Police banned meetings in the square, and the demonstration held five days later against unemployment and British rule in Ireland became known as Bloody Sunday: some ten thousand people faced about two thousand police, four squadrons of cavalry and four hundred soldiers, three protesters were killed and more than two hundred injured. A week later a clerk named Alfred Linnell was crushed by a police horse at a follow-up gathering and died. Suffragette, disarmament and anti-war rallies followed through the twentieth century. The police observation tower in the south-east corner is a relic of all this and still stands.

The square passed to the Greater London Authority under the legislation of 1999, and access is now governed by byelaws made in 2012. The Mayor's written permission is required to hold or take part in an assembly, display or performance, to make a public speech, to use musical instruments or amplified sound, to display a banner, to put up a structure, to climb on anything, to collect money or to photograph commercially. The Authority says plainly that rallies and demonstrations are frequently held at weekends and that the Mayor supports that tradition, with events arranged through his office. The restrictions on encampments that apply to Parliament Square Garden are a different matter and do not apply here.

The Christmas tree

A spruce has come from the people of Norway every year since 1947, in thanks for British support during the Second World War. It is lit at a ceremony in December and stays up until shortly before Twelfth Night. The Authority does not say who performs the lighting, so no name is given here; it names officials only for the felling, which takes place in Norway in November in the presence of the Lord Mayor of Westminster, the British ambassador and the Mayor of Oslo.

Two things nearby that older accounts get wrong

Downing Street is a few minutes' walk south. Walpole took up residence at number 10 on 22 September 1735, and the government's own account gives 1735; the date of 1732 that circulates has no basis.

Dr Johnson's house is about a mile away, and Johnson did not write the first English dictionary. Robert Cawdrey's appeared in 1604, Henry Cockeram used the word dictionary in a title in 1623, and Nathan Bailey's of 1730 held some six thousand more words than Johnson's and served him as a working base. Johnson's of 1755 was the most influential English dictionary before the Oxford English Dictionary, which is a large enough claim without the false one.