It has long been a sad truth that for a woman to be immortalised as a civic statue in the UK, she must either be a monarch – preferably Queen Victoria – or a naked nymph frolicking in a fountain. The male domination of public monuments may slowly be eroding, however, with three pioneering women to be celebrated in statue form in the next few years.

Fearless Labour MP “Red” Ellen Wilkinson, the only woman on the Jarrow march, who introduced free milk and school dinners as education secretary, will become the first woman to grace a plinth in Middlesbrough.



In Bury, Greater Manchester, a statue of comic Victoria Wood is expected to be unveiled this summer after a crowd-funding campaign by her brother. Dame Judi Dench contributed £1,000 towards the statue, which will show Wood as Bren from her TV sitcom Dinnerladies.



An earlier plan to site a memorial in Victoria station in Manchester never came to fruition. That design would have showed the comedienne in character as the beret-wearing girl looking for her friend Kimberley (“She’s really, really tall and really really wide: if she had a suitcase on her ‘ead she’d look like a fitted wardrobe”). Chris Foote-Wood, her brother, has raised almost £24,000 towards the statue, which will be erected in the town centre near the museum.

In Manchester, suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, who was born in the city’s Moss Side neighbourhood, will become the city’s first female statue that isn’t of Queen Victoria after a campaign by local councillor Andrew Simcock.

His WoManchester project will receive no public money from the cash-strapped city council. He aims to fundraise the £100,000 cost in time for the unveiling on International Women’s Day in May 2019, 101 years after Pankhurst and colleagues won women the right to vote.

Six sculptors have been commissioned to produce a 40cm bronze maquette of their vision for the sculpture of Pankhurst. On the shortlist is Martin Jennings, whose work includes Sir John Betjeman at St Pancras Station, Women of Steel in Sheffield and the recently unveiled Mary Seacole statue in London, and Sean Hedges-Quinn from Ipswich, creator of the new Gracie Fields statue in Rochdale, Captain Mainwaring in Thetford and football managers Sir Alf Ramsey and Sir Bobby Robson in Ipswich. The maquettes will be auctioned at a fundraising dinner in Manchester on 9 March, with the winner announced the following week.

In Middlesbrough, local people recently voted to celebrate Ellen Wilkinson, Labour MP for Middlesbrough East from 1924 until 1931 and nearby Jarrow from 1935 until her death in 1947. The vote came after a campaign by local woman Emma Chesworth, who had noticed that all seven of the town’s statues were of men.

“There are many remarkable women who lived and do live in Middlesbrough, and this campaign aims to highlight their tremendous achievements,” said Chesworth, who works as a senior case worker for Middlesbrough MP Andy McDonald.

She received abuse and criticism when she launched her Eighth Plinth campaign last year, which asked people to vote from a shortlist of six women including Mary Jacques, a nurse who funded and opened Middlesbrough’s first cottage hospital; Gertrude Bell, an academic, archaeologist, explorer, linguist and renowned mountaineer who drew the borders of modern Iraq; and Viva Talbot, an artist who used woodblock prints to depict images of Teesside steelmaking.

“When I started the campaign, the abuse and backlash I got were quite unbelievable. People were saying things like, ‘I don’t know why you are bothering. I’ve never heard of anyone on your list’, which rather proves my point,” said Chesworth. “It is so important to celebrate women’s achievements in order to inspire the next generation. As the phrase goes: you cannot be what you cannot see.”

Some people pointed out that Middlesbrough already had a female statue, carrying the scales of justice, outside the law courts. “But she is an allegorical figure, a woman surrounded by two squabbling children. I think we should celebrate the achievements of real women,” said Chesworth, who will soon begin applying for grants and launch a crowdfunding campaign. She is determined to commission a female sculptor to cast Wilkinson.

Research by the campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez, who has pressed for a female statue in Parliament Square, found that of 925 public statues in Britain, only 158 are of solo women. Of the 925 total, 110 listed in the database of the Public Monuments and Sculptures Association feature allegorical figures such as Justice or Art. A further 14 depict the Virgin Mary. Forty-six are of royalty, 29 of which are of Queen Victoria.

The Labour MP Sarah Champion, who is shadow minister for women and equalities, said: “The lack of women represented in public art can only be seen as a physical embodiment of how we fail to respect and recognise women’s achievements in our society.”

She said women’s taxes helped pay for the statues, yet our other contributions seemed unwanted because they were not publicly recognised.

“Public art sends a clear message on the qualities of leadership and achievement we value. By not recognising women leaders in this way, we are denying them a place in history. Worse, we are preventing them becoming visible role models for the next generation.”

The best female statues in Britain

Sheffield’s Women of Steel

This wonderful statue of two women in overalls celebrates the thousands of women who were conscripted to work in Sheffield’s factories and steel mills during the two world wars while the men were away fighting. Standing proudly in Barker’s Pool in the city centre, the bronze statue by leading sculptor Martin Jennings was unveiled on 17 June 2016. Over 100 surviving women of steel came along to the unveiling ceremony.

Gracie Fields in Rochdale

A statue of the entertainer Gracie Fields, the world’s highest-paid female actor in the 1930s, was unveiled outside Rochdale’s Grade I-listed town hall in September. Fields, who was born above a Rochdale fish and chip shop in 1898, often performed to crowds on her many return visits to the town during her travelling performances for the troops during the second world war.

Amy Johnson in Hull

Also in September last year, a statue of Amy Johnson, the first woman to fly solo from the UK to Australia, was unveiled in Hull. Actor and writer Maureen Lipman, also born on the Humber, described Johnson as “the greatest export we ever had”. The sculpture is within a park in a new housing development near Hawthorne Avenue, close to Johnson’s childhood home.

A Real Birmingham Family in Birmingham

Turner Prize-winning artist Gillian Wearing made this sculpture of two single-mother sisters, Roma and Emma Jones, and their sons Kyan and Shaye, which has stood outside Birmingham library since 2014. The sisters were chosen from 372 nominations as representing a “real Birmingham family” after a four-year collaboration between the city’s Ikon Gallery and Wearing.