Do Not Pass Go by Moore Tim

Author:Moore, Tim [Tim Moore]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2003-10-01T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

The Reds

I DIDN’T REMEMBER about Mike’s nine until the following morning; such was my easy familiarity with the board I didn’t need to open it to know where his throw had taken me.

Nowhere else on the board so perfectly embodies London’s civic dithering as Trafalgar Square. In 1829 the royal stables of King’s Mews and the less grand buildings around were demolished as part of John Nash’s Charing Cross Improvement Scheme; Nash was the first architect to throw his hat in the ring, but he died soon after and the vacant space was quickly knee-deep in toppers and stovepipes.

First they couldn’t agree on the name – the initial working title was William the Fourth’s Square – and having finally settled on Trafalgar, they couldn’t agree on how to honour the admiral mortally wounded during that famous victory over the French and Spanish fleets south of Cadiz in 1805. The competition for a new Nelson Monument wasn’t even held until 1839, and the one hundred-odd entries were all so poor they had to hold a second. One proposed a pyramid, another a prodigious globe held aloft above a lake by the figures of Fame, Neptune, Victory and Britannia and topped by the man himself. The largest of the several column suggestions was a 218-foot monster of cast iron, and though most stuck Horatio on top, James Hakewill put him at the bottom, explaining ‘it was improper for a mere subject, however heroic, to look down on royalty’.

William Railton supplied the winning design, but the public hated it. His column was called ‘a monstrous nine-pin’, and a Commons Select Committee declared it ‘undesirable’. But no one could agree an alternative, and work began by default. Finally, fourteen years after the space for it was cleared and thirty-eight after he died at Trafalgar, the 17-foot image of Nelson was bolted to the top of 145 feet of fluted granite. Around its base were bronze bas-reliefs of his victories, cheekily cast from melted-down French cannons captured therein.

That was a start, but the issue of what to do with the vast space behind remained. The original scheme had been to fill it with a grand new home for the Royal Academy, but now people were talking about a coliseum. The chief architect, Charles Barry, still wanted to bin the newly erected column and place a more modest group of statues in the middle of the square. In the end, though, they agreed on the fountains, but it took a further two years to complete them and when the water was turned on they leaked. It would be another quarter of a century – long enough to become a staple London joke – before those famous lions were put in place (six times over budget), and an additional fifty-eight years until the square was properly paved.

Nothing, however, illustrates Trafalgar Square’s sloth-like development quite so perfectly as the epically drawn-out saga of its corner statues. Generals Napier and Havelock commandeered the southern corners in a whippet-like

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