Rahul Rao

In August 2026, the statues in Glasgow’s George Square began returning to their plinths. First up was the equestrian statue of Prince Albert, gingerly lowered into place by a crane, followed by those of Queen Victoria and Sir John Moore. A British army officer and Whig politician, Moore is remembered for his defeat of the French in the Battle of Corunna (1809) but also, rather more complicatedly, for his part in the suppression of the Irish Rebellion of 1798. Eight other statues of mostly Victorian figures will return to their former locations in the square over the next several months. They include politicians William Gladstone, James Oswald and Robert Peel, scientists Thomas Graham and James Watt, the poets Robert Burns and Thomas Campbell and Field Marshal Colin Campbell who, like Moore, is remembered with ambivalence for his service against Russia in the Crimean War but also for his reprisals against Indian mutineers during the Revolt of 1857. For over a year the statues had been in the care of conservationists who laboured at a cost of £632,000 to remove years’ worth of paint and bird droppings by a process known as aerobraiding, which involved gently sandblasting the statues to remove grime without damaging the underlying metalwork. The restoration of the statues is part of a larger £20 million pound refurbishment of George Square which—Glasgow City Council promises in the gushing prose that wraps around every building site these days—will become a greener, more pedestrian- and child-friendly space.

The disappearance of the statues made some people nervous. In February 2024, a petition appeared on the platform CitizenGo under the title ‘Save our Statues: Stop Cancel Culture Erasing Glasgow’s Heritage’. Responding to reports that some of the statues could be permanently removed from the square on the recommendation of an Anti-Slavery Working Group, the petition pointed to the alleged removal of 200–250 monuments over the previous five years in the United States and elsewhere as a sign of things to come. In a wearyingly familiar line of argument, it accused antiracist opponents of colonial statues of judging historical figures by the standards of the present, and warned that removal would leave “a blank canvas vulnerable to manipulation”. And it suggested a solution by pointing out that Glasgow could retain the statues while providing more historical detail about the events in which their referents were implicated to provide “balance: context, not erasure”.1 In January 2025, The Ferret—a Scottish investigative journalism cooperative—reported that CitizenGo had been set up by an anti-LGBT Spanish lawyer named Ignacio Arsuaga whose conservative Catholic organisation HazteOir (Make Yourself Heard) received funding from wealthy European and Russian donors and featured far-right speakers such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Italy’s Matteo Salvini at its annual gatherings. The platform has also hosted petitions against “woke gender indoctrination” in the Scouts movement, the UN’s alleged decriminalisation of paedophilia, and the UK Labour government’s ban on anti-queer conversion therapy.2

The keyboard warriors behind the petition were no doubt animated by the memory of scenes from 2020, when the statues in George Square—as in many parts of the western world—became the focus of confrontation between antiracist and white supremacist groups. In June 2020, when Black Lives Matter protests erupted worldwide in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, the statue of Robert Peel—founder of the Met Police and twice British Prime Minister—became a particular flashpoint in a moment when the institutional racism of the police was under scrutiny. When the Glasgow Youth Art Collective called for a peaceful protest and public deliberation over the future of what it described as the “racist and anti-working class statues of George Square”, hundreds of counter-protesters—many of whom were affiliated with far-right and loyalist organisations—descended on the square with the declared intention of protecting the statues, even after the original protest was called off.3 Three days later, National Defence League members rallied in the square to ‘protect’ the Cenotaph, facing off against activists from No Evictions Glasgow who were there to protest the conditions that asylum seekers faced and were chanting “refugees are welcome here”.4

These mobilisations offered an early intimation of the range of opinions that fed into the consultation that Glasgow City Council conducted over the fate of the statues. Undeniably the antiracist arguments have had traction, yielding a wide-ranging audit of the city’s historic links to slavery and colonialism, an apology to the descendants of enslaved people, and a new Legacy of Slavery and Colonialism Trail that more visibly ties sites in the city centre to slavery enrichment. Yet what seems to have emerged from this exercise so far as the statues are concerned is something very much like what the CitizenGo petition demanded. The statues are all coming back, but this time they will be accompanied by text and QR codes that promise to tell a more complex story. For now, ‘balance’ and ‘context’ have won.

In this regard, the decision hews closely to the policy of ‘retain and explain’ developed by the Boris Johnson Conservative government following the toppling of the Colston statue in Bristol in 2020.5 Intended to impede further removals of colonial states and monuments, the policy was mooted and then transformed into law by the then Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick, lately of the Reform Party. What began as a far-right manoeuvre against a radical revisioning of public space has hardened into the common sense of our time, to the point where it can now be deployed by a Scottish National Party-led council with little pushback.

‘Contextualisation’ has emerged as the great fudge, the via medium between stasis and change. Whatever its potential to inform and educate, contextualisation—effected through wordy plaques and digital resources—is a pre-emptive move, intended to stave off the dangers of defacement and vandalism. The very term ‘vandalism’ was coined in France in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, when the Committee of Public Instruction tried to discourage the over-zealous destruction of the symbols of the ancien regime by comparing revolutionary iconoclasts to Goths, Vandals and other barbaric tribes of classical antiquity.6 Post-revolutionary authorities sought to defuse these energies by wrenching feudal, royalist and sacred symbols from their pre-revolutionary contexts and transforming them into ‘art’ for display in a new kind of institution—the museum, of which the Louvre became the exemplar. Thus, what gets called ‘contextualisation’ is not so much the narration of an original story as a relocation of the object in a new context, an instruction to the viewer that it is to be regarded in a new light. Ironically, (re)contextualisation can only contemplate with horror the forces that bring it into being. It cannot comprehend, let alone stomach, the joyful catharsis experienced by a crowd that has toppled and destroyed a hated symbol, on the ruins of which a new kind of community might be forged. It remains the ultimate liberal move: made possible by radical direct action, it must immediately shut down that action to avert what Robespierre darkly called the ‘democratic excess’ from going too far.

Contextualisation treats statues as information, ignoring their aesthetic qualities and leaving the power that flows from them intact. What prose could possibly disrupt the towering presence of Confederate statues resplendent on plinths, the tallest of which once stood sixty feet high on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia? What—other than the more-than-human forces of lichens, guano, wind and rain—could besmirch the three-acre-wide carvings of Confederate figures on Stone Mountain in Georgia, aptly described as the largest shrine to white supremacy in the history of the world? There is something odd about expecting a few small words to compete with the physicality, elevation and sheer thrusting phallicness of statues. It is as if the statue and its liberal critics who wish to resignify it function in incommensurable registers.

Compare this to the drama of a new statue mysteriously appearing overnight in April 2026 in Waterloo Place in central London. Installed by the graffiti artist Banksy, the dark resin statue depicts a man in a suit carrying a huge billowing flag that wraps around his face and obscures his vision, so that he cannot see that he is about to step off his plinth. Facing an equestrian statue of Edward VII and a gigantic column capped by a figure of Frederick, Duke of York, and with its back to the Crimean War Memorial, the Banksy statue matches them in scale, evoking the blind patriotism on which the imperialism and militarism of the figures that surround it are premised. As with all Banksy art, the unauthorised nature of the installation added to its frisson. Yet the artist’s celebrity meant that his intervention was welcomed by the very authorities who might otherwise have been expected to remove it: Westminster City Council said it was “excited to see Banksy’s latest sculpture in Westminster, making a striking addition to the city’s vibrant public art scene”.7 If the canonisation of some forms of dissent is what allows liberalism to masquerade as an ideology of freedom, we must look to other unauthorised and unspeakable interventions for the limits of that freedom: red paint on killing machines, and sometimes mere words—“I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action”—the utterance of which has cost countless people their freedom in the current moment.

Just as there is no straightforward way to measure the power of words and monuments against each other, there is also no simple relationship between them if only because sometimes we build monuments to words. Dead centre in George Square is the Scott Monument, which commemorates novelist, poet and historian Walter Scott by lifting him eighty feet into the air on top of a Doric column. Scott’s place in the Scottish literary firmament is amply confirmed by the grandiosity of memorials to him. The Glasgow memorial is dwarfed by its counterpart in Edinburgh which, reaching a height of two hundred feet, was the largest memorial to a writer built anywhere in the world at the time of its completion in 1844 till it was eclipsed by Cuba’s memorial to José Marti in 1958.

The Edinburgh memorial is a spiky, multi-tiered Victorian Gothic structure supported by flying buttresses and made of sandstone blackened over the years by soot. It towers over a sculpture of the writer seated with his dog Maida and is festooned with carvings of sixty-four individual statues representing characters from his works. The building exacted a heavy toll. One study estimates that between a quarter and half of the stonemasons who worked on the monument died of silicosis over a period of four years, from inhaling clouds of dust particles that they produced as they carved hard sandstone into intricate shapes with drills and chisels in unventilated sheds.8 Those deaths are not memorialised anywhere on the site. Indeed, at the time I looked at it while writing this article, the electronic display in the visitor’s gallery described the building process in words that might have been drafted by a lawyer: “not a single life is lost on site, a rare achievement at this time”. What would it mean to contextualise monuments in ways that paid attention not only to the dead greats whom they memorialise but also to those killed by that very effort? Perhaps the mere display of words that tell the truth does have the potential to shift what and whom we honour.

Indeed, the appearance of such words can prove too much for some, even when they relate to figures long gone. A central focus of recontextualisation efforts in Edinburgh has been the Melville Monument, a 150-foot column in St Andrew Square that immortalises Henry Dundas (1742–1811)—Home Secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty, and so dominant a figure in the Scottish politics of his time that he was sometimes referred to as ‘The Uncrowned King of Scotland’. In 2021, following a wide-ranging review of its legacies of slavery and colonialism, the City of Edinburgh Council affixed a brass plaque to the base of the monument which explained that Dundas had delayed the abolition of the slave trade causing the enslavement of an additional half million Africans, and dedicated the monument to those who had suffered as a result of his intervention. The decision was greeted with outrage by a group led by a direct descendant of Dundas which, two years later, physically removed the plaque from the monument. It argued that Dundas was an abolitionist whose gradualism was intended to smooth the passage of legislation through Parliament—a claim that historian Stephen Mullen has persuasively refuted.9 In 2024, the council installed a replacement plaque with the same wording, which remains on the monument at the time of writing.

Re-contextualisation apart, some limited aesthetic disruption of the statues returning to George Square has been permitted. Taking note of the fact that the statues of Moore and Campbell had stood without their swords ever since they had mysteriously been relieved of these accoutrements in the 1980s, Graham Campbell—Glasgow’s first Afro-Caribbean councillor—successfully argued against the restoration of these features, pointing out that to do so would be tantamount to celebrating the massacre of Indians, Caribbeans and Africans by these historical figures. The decision was described as ‘truly ludicrous’ by prominent Scottish historian T. M. Devine, who saw it as pandering to modern sensibilities.10 Yet in his fidelity to the statues’ original form, Devine’s reaction seems out of synch with a city whose very identity has become synonymous with the piss-taking resignification of statues—a practice that began with the appearance, half a century ago, of a traffic cone on the statue of the Duke of Wellington that stands outside what is now the Gallery of Modern Art, and that was joyfully exported as a symbol of Scottishness itself when the so-called Tartan Army travelled to the US for the 2026 Football World Cup.

Conservationists use the term ‘restoration’ innocuously to refer to the process of returning an artwork or artefact to a prior state. But for political theorists the term is rather more loaded with connotations of reaction to progressive change and with attempts to reverse it. The current moment collapses both sets of meanings into one another. In the US, the second Trump administration has reinstalled Confederate statues that were toppled following the murder of George Floyd, even as Minneapolis—the city in which he was killed—once again became a deadly battleground in early 2026, this time on account of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents killing legal observers who attempted to witness their detention of allegedly undocumented migrants. In the UK, the summer of 2026 saw another Black man killed by institutional racism when Jason Arday, the youngest Black professor in the history of the University of Cambridge, was hounded to his death by the combined actions of a racist ‘whistleblower’ pursuing a vendetta, a media that pursued Arday relentlessly, and a university that used his appointment to expiate its historic guilt but was willing to jettison him when questions began to be asked about his achievements. The continued litigation of those questions seems about as relevant as asking whether Floyd had indeed used counterfeit currency to buy cigarettes—the offence for which he was ostensibly arrested. In so many ways, the edifice of white supremacy that seemed to teeter ever so slightly in 2020 seems restored to a prior stability.

In Revolution and Restoration, political philosopher Massimiliano Tomba seeks to attenuate the antonymy between these terms by homing in on the tension between revolutionary elites and the social forces that they sought to mobilise. Drawing on the thinking and practice of the English Diggers, the French sans culottes and Communards, the German insurgents in the 1919 Revolution and the Haitian enslaved amongst others, he argues that in contrast to revolutionary visionaries who sought to transform societies by seizing and deploying the power of the state, these groups were typically motivated by a desire to restore traditional social practices of communal deliberation and ownership of property. Restoration here is not a reactionary opposition to change, but an attempt to steer the revolutionary trajectory in a different direction by reactivating elements of the past.11 Walter Benjamin had something similar in mind when he theorised the revolutionary potential of turning towards the past: “Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing ‘the way it really was’. It means appropriating a memory, as it flashes up in a moment of danger … Every age must strive anew to wrest tradition from the conformism which is working to overpower it.”12

What would it mean to restore George Square in this sense? It is telling that the only reference to mass action in the square is the Cenotaph, which commemorates those killed in the two world wars—a monument, if anything, to mass obedience to the imperative of conscription. Equally telling is the failure to commemorate the history of insurrection in this space—most notably, the Battle of George Square of 31 January 1919, when tens of thousands of workers flooded into the square and raised the red flag during a strike organised by the Clyde Workers’ Committee to demand a 40-hour working week. Described by the government as a “Bolshevist rising”, the protest was brutally suppressed.13

Given that many of the statues in the square were erected by public subscription, I wonder whether a contemporary public might unsubscribe from statues by ceasing to care for or about them, forcing local authorities to allow them to be eroded by the vagaries of weather and pigeon droppings—something that should not be difficult in a time of permanent austerity when organised abandonment has become the default mode of governance. Several post-totalitarian contexts, most recently in the former Soviet world, suggest themselves as examples here. Well before them, postcolonial India had—within a few years of Independence—consigned its colonial statuary to statue graveyards in the erstwhile imperial capitals of Delhi and Calcutta, preferring benign neglect to destruction, veneration or recontextualisation.14

Or could we imagine ripping out the paving stones and restoring the square to a time before statues, ‘rewilding’ even, as we might say in a more contemporary argot? Not such an outlandish thought in a time of unprecedented urban heating, and certainly the direction of travel that Paris has taken in the redevelopment of the area around the Notre Dame Cathedral after the devastating fire of 2019.

All of which is to ask: why do we hold ourselves hostage to a peculiarly Victorian conception of urban civic space even as we go through the motions of renewal and regeneration? Writing in a different context, Paul Gilroy has suggested that this might be because this is the historical moment in which the nation—at the zenith of its power—is most comprehensible to and habitable by its white majority, before it begins its long decline and is transformed beyond recognition in their eyes by the flow of postwar migration.15 Whatever the reason, at stake in these contending visions for restoration in the present is an argument over which pasts might yield the most desirable futures.

A group of people stand and walk near a large statue in a foggy urban park with bare trees and distant buildings.

Notes

  1. CitizenGo, ‘Save our Statues: Stop Cancel Culture Erasing Glasgow’s Heritage’, 6 February 2024, https://www.citizengo.org/en-gb/pt/14548-save-our-statues–stop-cancel-culture-erasing-glasgow-s-heritage. ↩
  2. Karin Goodwin, ‘Global “anti-woke” petition campaigns on Glasgow statues and Stornoway’s Tesco closed on Sundays’, The Ferret, 17 January 2025, https://www.theferret.scot/global-anti-woke-petition-campaigns-glasgow-statues/. ↩
  3. BBC News, ‘Clashes headed off by police at Glasgow statue protest’, 14 June 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-53041047. ↩
  4. BBC News, ‘Sturgeon condemns “racist thugs” after Glasgow protests’, 17 June 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-53086488. ↩
  5. Gareth Harris, ‘Retain and explain guidance on contentious UK heritage is published—at last’, The Art Newspaper, 6 October 2023, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/10/06/retain-and-explain-guidance-on-contentious-uk-heritage-is-publishedat-last. ↩
  6. Stanley J. Idzerda, ‘Iconoclasm during the French Revolution’, The American Historical Review 60, no. 1 (1954): 13–26. ↩
  7. BBC News, ‘Banksy confirms he’s behind statue in central London’, 30 April 2026, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y9wlnwl85o. ↩
  8. Ken Donaldson, William A. Wallace, Christopher Henry and Anthony Seaton, ‘Death in the New Town: Edinburgh’s Hidden Story of Stonemasons’ Silicosis’, Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh 47, no. 4 (2017), 375–383. ↩
  9. Stephen Mullen, ‘Henry Dundas: A “Great Delayer” of the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade’, Scottish Historical Review 100, no. 2 (2021). ↩
  10. Greig Cameron, ‘Historian attacks “ludicrous” changes to statues with slavery links’, The Times, 22 November 2025, https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/tom-devine-glasgow-statues-slavery-links-lwgtmpwf8. ↩
  11. Massimiliano Tomba, Revolution and Restoration: The Politics of Anachronism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2025), 38. ↩
  12. Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940) in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), 389–400, 391. ↩
  13. Henry Bell, John Maclean: Hero of Red Clydeside (London: Pluto Press, 2018), chapter 11. ↩
  14. Paul M. McGarr, ‘“The viceroys are disappearing from the roundabouts in Delhi”: British symbols of power in post-colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies 49, no. 3 (2015), 787–831; Tapati Guha-Thakurta, ‘Why statues matter: The changing landscape of Calcutta’s colonial and postcolonial statuary’, November 2019, https://criticalcollective.in/Pdf/Why_Statues_Matter.pdf. ↩
  15. Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London: Routledge, 2004), 97. ↩