Trafalgar Square

The story of Trafalgar Square

Trafalgar Square is the great paved public square in front of you, and the first thing to notice is Nelson’s Column rising from its centre. The square takes its name from the Battle of Trafalgar, the British naval victory over France and Spain on 21 October 1805 off Cape Trafalgar.

The ground here has been important for a very long time. Distances from London have been measured from Charing Cross since the 1200s, and the site was part of the King’s Mews until the reign of George IV, when the mews were moved to Buckingham Palace and the area could be redeveloped by John Nash. Nash’s plans were interrupted by his death in 1835, and the square did not open until 1844.

What you are standing in now was built as a public space, not a garden. Britannica describes Trafalgar Square as a plaza that has always been public and has had no garden. It was constructed between the 1820s and ’40s on the site of the former King’s Mews, and the space you see was completed around 1840, with work on the whole public space completed in 1845 in another account. The square was meant to link the major routes across London, and its open paving still gives that sense of a civic crossroads.

Look around the edges and you can see how deliberately it is framed. It is flanked by the National Gallery and the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, with Canada House and South Africa House among the buildings facing it. On the south side, at the original Charing Cross site, stands the bronze equestrian statue of Charles I, cast in 1633 and placed here in 1678. The square also has three busts of admirals against the north wall: John Jellicoe, David Beatty and Andrew Cunningham, installed in connection with the fountains.

The central monument is the square’s most unmistakable feature. Nelson’s Column was planned separately from the rest of the square and grew out of a proposal in 1838 for a monument to the victory of Trafalgar, funded by public subscription. A competition was won by William Railton, who proposed a tall Corinthinan column with Nelson on top and four sculpted lions below. Britannica gives the monument as 1839–43 and says it includes a 17-foot statue of Nelson by E.H. Baily, with four bronze lions at the plinth by Sir Edwin Landseer and cast by Baron Marochetti. The column is Grade 1 listed.

The square has also been a place of public gathering and protest. It has hosted Bloody Sunday in 1887, the culmination of the first Aldermaston March, anti-war protests and campaigns against climate change. It is also a familiar setting for annual New Year’s Eve celebrations. Since 1947, the government of Norway has donated a Christmas tree to the square, and it is erected here for twelve days before and after Christmas Day.

There is one other layer under your feet. Building work on the south side in the late 1950s revealed river terrace deposits with fossils from the Last Interglacial, around 130-115,000 years ago, including cave lions, rhinoceroses, straight-tusked elephant and hippopotamus, as well as feces of cave hyenas.

Today the square is maintained by the Greater London Authority and is Grade I listed as a park and garden since 1996-11-22. If you want the strongest visual anchor while you are here, stand back far enough to take in the column, the fountains and the lions together; that combination is what has made this one of London’s most recognisable civic spaces.