Equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington, Glasgow


The equestrian Wellington Statue is a statue of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, located on Royal Exchange Square in Glasgow, Scotland. It is located outside the Gallery of Modern Art near the end of Ingram Street. The statue was sculpted by Italian artist Carlo Marochetti and erected in 1844. Capping the statue with a traffic cone has become a traditional practice in the city, claimed to represent the humour of the local population and believed to date back to the first half of the 1980s, if not before. The statue is a Category-A listed monument, and is one of Glasgow's most iconic landmarks. Due to minor damage and the potential for injury that the placing of cones involves, the practice had been discouraged by Glasgow City Council and Strathclyde Police. In 2011 the Lonely Planet guide included the statue in its list of the "top 10 most bizarre monuments on Earth".

History

In a bid to reduce the cost of removing traffic cones from the statue, alleged to be £10,000 a year, Glasgow City Council put forward plans in November 2013 to double the height of its plinth as part of a £65,000 restoration project. The plans were withdrawn after widespread public opposition, spearheaded by a Facebook campaign called "Keep the Cone" started by Scottish musician Raymond Hackland and Glaswegian photographer Steven Allan. An online petition defending the cone received over 10,000 signatures. As the council indicated that action against the practice could still be considered, National Collective organised a rally in defence of the cone. In 2015, Glasgow City Council tested hi-tech CCTV software worth £1.2m by checking to see whether it could automatically detect people putting cones on the statue, which it could. In June 2020 during worldwide Black Lives Matter protests in response to the killing of George Floyd, the orange cone was replaced with a black one bearing the Black Lives Matter logo.