The Mary Poppins statue in Leicester Square [Juliet Rix]

MEN on plinths, watch out! A new book by West Hampstead author Juliet Rix shows there’s been a rapid rise in the number of female statues carving their place in London’s scenery.

In London’s Statues of Women Juliet breathes life into sculptures new and old, contending that the females are a more varied and intriguing bunch than the men on pedestals.

There are statues of queens, spies, actresses, activists – even one of a fantasy woman clutching a designer handbag, commemorating Joan Roberts, who worked at the Royal Free Hospital, Hampstead. She had her ashes interred in a Gucci bag.

A 2021 survey found that only one in six of the capital’s statues commemorating a named individual were for women, but Juliet said that in just three years since then “more statues of individual women have been erected in London than in the whole second half of the 20th century”. In 2022-23 more statues of women were installed than of men.

London’s first statue of a named non-royal woman dates from 1897. It’s of actress Sarah Siddons, on Paddington Green. New ones include a 2022 bronze sculpture of Victorian mathematician Ada Lovelace, high above Horseferry Road, Westminster, with two giant golden punch cards referencing her contribution to early computing.

Juliet taps fascinating chinks into private lives. Lovelace eloped with a tutor in her teens and later, after her marriage, rumours of her extra-marital affairs swirled. She lost substantial sums gambling.

Where there’s a statue there can be an argument. Many thought feminist icon Mary Wollstonecraft’s monument at Newington Green, featuring a nude female figure, had little connection with her. Juliet told Review she doesn’t think it is appropriate to Wollstonecraft, “especially as she actually complained that women were judged on appearance not brains”.

But the statue’s creator Maggi Hambling tells her: “It’s a statue for Mary Wollstonecraft, not of her. For her spirit. And she was actually quite a goer herself!”

An 18th century statue in Queen Square, Bloomsbury, is “widely regarded” as representing Queen Charlotte, wife of King George III.

Juliet said: “I thought how this unusual black lead statue was a figure for Bridgerton fans – Queen Charlotte of course being portrayed in the series as a woman of colour. The real surprise came when I started researching and found that Bridgerton’s portrayal is not entirely their invention.”

There was speculation even in Charlotte’s lifetime, but Juliet added: “She almost certainly was not a woman of colour – and what’s more, some experts think this statue is not Queen Charlotte but Queen Anne”.

Arriving in London on September 8, 1761, teenage German princess Charlotte met the king, her husband-to-be, for the first time, put on her diamond-encrusted wedding dress – which nearly fell off because she’d lost so much weight being sea-sick on the voyage – and married him, all within six hours.

Juliet Rix

Other Bloomsbury sculptures include Virginia Woolf and Second World War spy, hero and passionate anti-fascist Noor Inayat Khan.

Another, 2022 statue of Woolf sits beside the Thames at Richmond, the location briefly criticised as insensitive because she drowned herself in a river – but that was the Ouse in East Sussex.

“Lively, ambitious” Royal Free worker Joan Roberts died in her 40s and left money for a statue.

Her former colleagues chose the handbag-toting Doo Wah Diddy figure, opposite the hospital’s main entrance.

A “saint-style” figure commemorates Victorian philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts at Holly Village, Highgate. Dubbed “Queen of the poor” for her good works, aged 67 she “scandalously” married her 29-year-old assistant.

Life-size and life-like, Amy Winehouse’s statue stands in Camden Town, and in theatreland Agatha Christie looks out from the centre of a giant book. Christie learnt about poisons during her wartime work in hospital pharmacies. And who knew that she is said to have been the first Western woman to surf standing up?

Suffragist Millicent Fawcett’s statue – the only free-standing female one in Parliament Square – holds a banner declaring: “Courage calls to Courage Everywhere.” Juliet writes that unfortunately the banner has gained the statue a nickname: “Hanging out the washing.” She laments: “It could only happen to a woman.”

“An astonishing number of bare breasts overlook London’s streets,” Juliet observes, “and most date to periods famously prudish about actual women.”

In contrast, prim Mary Poppins lands on a Leicester Square flowerbed, umbrella aloft – but minimally dressed Wonder Woman bursts from the side of a cinema nearby.

Sculptures’ stories are often moving. The Islingtonian War Memorial at Highbury Corner, featuring a woman as “Glory”, honours locals who died in the Boer War.

Acknowledging that it glorified a colonial war in South Africa, historian Neal Ascherson wrote that it remembers “the poor lads who died in this completely stupid war”. Rather than remove it, he said, another memorial should be added.

He suggested a black woman to commemorate those caught in the crossfire.

Juliet admires the “evocative” Lai Dai Han Mother and Child monument, in St James’s Square Gardens, Westminster, to Vietnamese women and the thousands of children born to them as a result of rape, or relationship and abandonment, by South Korean soldiers fighting alongside the Americans in the Vietnam War.

Perhaps the most expensive flip-flops in town belong to park statue Golders Hill Girl. When one of her sandals was stolen, a similar pair was bought from Camden Market and given to the original foundry, resulting in her gaining the £1,000 footwear.

London’s first public statue of an individual woman of colour, Joy Battick, was unveiled in 1986, part of a sculpture of three Brixton locals “waiting for their trains”.

Now there’s a second, 2023, statue of Joy at Brixton station. She tells Juliet: “In 1986 we were just coming out of the Brixton riots… It was a harsh, tense time, and it shows.” She says the second statue, created following her cancer treatment, “was a real tonic”.

The statue Alison Lapper Pregnant (she has congenital photomelia and was born with no arms and very short legs), displayed in Trafalgar Square from 2005-7, isn’t on public view today. Alison says she’d like to see it back in public – “challenging ideas of beauty” and helping people get better at “dealing with difference”.

• London’s Statues of Women. By Juliet Rix, Safe Haven, £16.99