It’s time to retire Trafalgar’s fourth plinth

The fourth plinth includes plaster casts of the faces of 726 transgender people
The fourth plinth includes plaster casts of the faces of 726 transgender people - Matthew Chattle

The long march of gender ideology through the institutions has now arrived at the door of Trafalgar Square. Yesterday a towering cuboid depicting the faces of 726 transgender people was erected atop the controversial fourth plinth in London.

The three-tonne sculpture features plaster cast “life masks” taken from transgender people and assembled on a Mesoamerican “tzompantli”, or skull rack. The installation will blight our capital until 2026.

Aesthetic considerations aside, it remains unclear why Sadiq Khan’s Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group have concluded that this artwork serves the public interest. Produced by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles, it is a tribute to her friend, Karla La Borrada, a transgender singer and sex worker who was killed in Ciudad Juárez in 2015.

Although tragic, why has London been chosen as the site for a monument to a murder that happened five thousand miles away almost a decade ago? Ekow Esun, the chair of the commissioning group, declared the piece would “unite the trans community around the world”. This is debateable; however, what is certain is that plaster cast masks of over three hundred trans people living in Mexico offers little of value or relevance to most Londoners.

The Greater London Authority Act 1999 transferred control of Trafalgar Square to the GLA. This has given Sadiq Khan a blank cheque to utilise the fourth plinth as a platform for proselytisation. He is guided only by a commissioning group – who he appoints and who are answerable only to him and his team.

There is an urgent need for scrutiny over what the fourth plinth project has become. Members of the GLA Planning and Regeneration Committee must ask serious questions about why the art on the plinth has drifted so far from the public interest. Will Dame Caroline Dinenage MP, the new chair of the Culture Media and Sport Committee, call Sadiq Khan to give evidence on how exactly these pieces have been chosen? This is about more than London: it is about how we represent our nation, and ourselves, to the world.

As Policy Exchange’s Biology Matters workstream has repeatedly revealed, gender identity ideology has proven tremendously harmful in a number of ways. Children have undergone harmful and irreversible medical interventions, women have lost the right to same-sex care, and fairness in sport has been decimated. Whilst trans people should be treated with compassion, is this necessarily something we should be rushing to celebrate in one of London’s most popular tourist attractions?

London is covered with increasingly politicised artwork. We’ve lost our sense of the importance of beauty in the public realm. Instead, progressive political statements have gradually come to dominate the public space.

Whilst the shortlist is subject to a vote – we are only ever offered highly political or transgressive options – and even after the vote is complete, it’s the “independent panel” and the Mayor who have the final say.

Is public accountability sufficient to protect us from a Mayor determined to indulge this agenda? This is why it is vital that the House of Commons and the GLA step up. While beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, recent artworks do not seem to have been constructed with aesthetics in mind; and the square’s original role as a site of unifying national commemoration has been undermined.

Above all, we need a Mayor who seeks to build an urban space in the interest of the vast majority of Londoners, not one specific sectional interest whose connection to our capital is so very tenuous.


Lara Brown is a Senior Research Fellow, Culture and Identity, at Policy Exchange