The Map→Notable Landmarks→Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain ('Eros')

Notable Landmarks · London, Greater London

Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain ('Eros')

London's classic lovers' meeting point — 'meet me under Eros' — though the statue is actually Anteros, the god of mature, requited love, chosen to commemorate the philanthropist Lord Shaftesbury (Gilbert called Eros/Cupid 'the frivolous tyrant').

StatusDocumented history

Dateunveiled 29 June 1893 by Hugh Grosvenor, 1st Duke of Westminster

The peopleSir Alfred Gilbert, Angelo Colarossi (model), 7th Earl of Shaftesbury

The sitePiccadilly Circus

Coordinates51.50984, -0.13449 (confidence 5/5)

The story

Start with the correction, because it is the whole story: the winged archer over Piccadilly Circus is not Eros. Sculptor Alfred Gilbert made it as Anteros — Eros's brother, the god of selfless, mature, requited love — to crown the 1893 memorial to the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, the Victorian reformer who fought child labour. A nude love-god was the last thing anyone would have chosen for so pious a man, which is exactly why Gilbert picked the chaste brother. It was the first statue in the world cast in aluminium, light enough to balance on one tiptoe.

Almost nothing went to plan. The fountain's basin was too narrow and splashed passers-by into mud; the drinking cups were stolen at once; the "sensual" nude was condemned as unfit for the sober Earl. Officials tried renaming it the Angel of Christian Charity. The public ignored them all and called it Eros — the god of desire — and the name stuck forever.

The memorial bankrupted its maker. Gilbert was paid £3,000 but spent around £7,000, called it a great financial débâcle, resigned from the Royal Academy and fled to Bruges. The statue itself has been shifted repeatedly — to Embankment Gardens for tube works, to Egham in the war — before returning to its present corner in 1947.

The final irony would have appalled Gilbert: his monument to non-sexual love became one of London's most famous pick-up spots, and Piccadilly — "the Dilly" — the recognised centre of male prostitution in the West End, documented from Wilde's time onward. A statue of chastity became a byword for exactly the thing it was built to disown.

More stories at this spot

The flower girls of the steps

For decades the fountain's steps were the pitch of Piccadilly's flower sellers, so much a fixture that when the memorial was removed in 1925 for tube works, The Times ran a leader on where the ten displaced flower girls would go. Six found new stands around the Circus; the Duke of Westminster provided a site near Park Lane for the rest. The monument to charity had become, without trying, a small welfare case of its own.

The snow globe that deflated

In the winter of 2013–14, in a bid to protect the statue from festive vandals (and to sell yet more advertising), the authorities sealed Eros inside a giant inflated PVC snow globe with fans blowing fake snow. High winds promptly damaged and deflated it, and it was never repaired. Gilbert's fragile aluminium god, having survived two world wars and several house-moves, was nearly finished off by a novelty bubble.

The Evening Standard's borrowed god

For generations the figure everyone wrongly calls Eros served as the masthead symbol of London's Evening Standard. A statue that is the wrong god, on a fountain that never worked, commemorating a man it doesn't resemble, thus became the daily emblem of the city itself — which is, if you think about it, extremely London.

Sources

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Documented history

Spotted an error, or hold a better source? Write to marquis@marquisdemayfair.com — corrections are made, never defended. Our methodology.