Answer: Where's the statue now?

In this week's Challenge I was wondering about a statue that USED to be between two fountains in a well-known public square in London that was once-upon-a-time trafficked by Straight-Tusked elephants. 

1.  Whose statue am I describing? 

2.  What square was it originally located in?  

3.  Where is that statue now?  (Can you find a picture of it?)  



To solve the Challenge, I started with the clues about the Straight-tusked elephant.  First, what IS a Straight-tusked elephant? 

     [ straight tusked elephant ] 

That brings me to the Wikipedia entry for the Straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus), where we learn it was a common elephant in Britain (not a sentence I thought I'd ever write), that became extinct some 115,000 years ago, being replaced by the more widely-spread Wooly Mammoth.   (To be sure, I checked around a bit and found other sources with the same information.)  

So, where was such an elephant discovered under a public square in London? The query: 

     [ straight tusked elephant london discovered square ] 

tells you it’s Trafalgar Square (Natural History Museum's blogpost and a paper about "Interglacial Deposits at Trafalgar Square" published in New Phytologist 59.2 (1960): 145-152).  

At this point most readers did some version of the search: 

    [ Trafalgar Square statues ] 

then turning to the Wikipedia article about Trafalgar statues, or looking at the UK Trafalgar page.  

I hadn't realized it when I wrote this Challenge that the Wikipedia page would say: "The other, of General Charles George Gordon by Hamo Thornycroft, was erected on an 18-foot high pedestal between the two fountains in 1888. It was removed in 1943 and re-sited on the Victoria Embankment ten years later." And then provide a link to a 1976 book about the Square's statues.  

So it should be straightforward to read the Wikipedia article General Gordon and find the statue. 

BUT... it's harder than you think.  

The Wiki article says it's on the Victoria Embankment.  But if you look at Maps.Google.com for the Victoria Embankment, you'll find a nice, relatively small park on the Thames with many statues.  None of which are of General Gordon.  

Looking back at the Wiki article about General Gordon, you'll find a nice image of the statue: 

which is consistent with the descriptions of the statue when it was in Trafalgar Square.  This is the statue by Thornycroft, but where? 

If that's the current location of the statue, it's clearly NOT in the Victoria Embankment Park. When I use Streetview to check out the Embarkment park, it's either leafy green, or a view of the river Thames, or other office buildings with Doric columns and other kinds of edifices.  This building in the back of the statue shown above doesn't match! 

So where IS this statue?  

I thought to search for a tool to help me locate monuments and statues in London.  

     [ London statues map Victoria Embankment ] 

which led me to this lovely statues and monuments database:  LondonRemembers.com  

But after a few minutes of looking at all of the statues in the Victoria Embankment Park, I realized that it's not there...  the database is incomplete.  

Luckily, they have a database search function (so I don't have to poke one-by-one at all of the pins on the map).  I searched for [ General Gordon ] and [ General George Gordon ] and [ Gordon ] ... but there's no statue!   Dead end.  

Could it have been moved since the last document I found?  

I went back to the Wikimedia source page for the image, and read carefully.  I learned that the source of the image was the Geograph website, a British project to "photograph every grid square" (of the Ordnance Survey grid).  

Looking at the Geograph web page for the photo, you'll find that they give the lat/long for the statue.  This is great!  They say it's located at 51.5045, -0.1238.  Dropping that lat/long into Maps shows me that it's fairly south of the Victoria Embankment garden, and located directly in front of 1 Horse Guards Avenue.  A quick visit to Streetview yields this image: 

General Gordon statue looking out over the Thames.
Near, but not in, Victoria Embankment Gardens.

  
Clearly the same statue.  Not in the LondonRemembers database, but handily located by tracking back to the original source of the picture. It turns out that the statue is in the area known as the Embankment, and not in the "Victoria Embankment Garden" area.  

Just for clarity, I went and looked up "Victoria Embankment" just to see how others defined it.  

Turns out that "Victoria Embankment" is "...is part of the Thames Embankment, a road and river-walk along the north bank of the River Thames in London. It runs from the Palace of Westminster to Blackfriars Bridge in the City of London."  

So the statue really IS in the Victoria Embankment, and not in the Victoria Embankment Park.  

As I said, this is a fine solution--but not what I was expecting everyone to do.  



My solution:  Instead, my first solution to figure out what was at the center of Trafalgar Square (and between the fountains) was to seek out an old map of Trafalgar Square! 

I know that a great collection of online maps is at the Google Maps Gallery, so I started there.  

There are roughly 1000 maps (I don't know the exact number, but it's growing).  That's a decent resource, and well worth a quick search.  

To find the maps of London, in Maps Gallery I did a search for:  

     [ London OS ] 

Why OS?  You have to know that this is the handy shorthand for  “Ordnance Survey” maps, which is the official mapmaking agency in the UK, and the term that's used everywhere.  (It's the USGS of Great Britain, although their maps have a distinctly cultural quality in addition to geography.)  

It was then pretty simple to find the map of London in the 1890s.  Here's the OS map from 1893 of Trafalgar Square, centered on the place I was asking about... and you can see that this is where the "Gordon Statue" was originally placed.  

I want to point out a subtle feature about these kinds of maps--notice the slider (marked in red above).  This allows you to shift the transparency of the overlap map.  In the image below, I've tried to show the effect of switching from the current view (shown on the left) with the map (shown on the right).  Try it yourself on the Maps!   You can see that there's a blank spot where George Gordon once stood.  

(And if you look at the Map's metadata, you'll find out that the images are originally from the National Library of Scotland.   You can look there for the originals there.)   



Search lessons:  First, as always, check the answer you find.  Although many sources say "Victoria Embankment," it's actually in the AREA known as the Victoria Embankment, and NOT in "Victoria Embankment Park," which you'd first think.  Tracking down the exact placement of the statue required a bit of working backwards to the original source of the data (in this case, the picture) and figuring out where that source said it was.  The lat/long from the original publisher turned out to be correct. 

Also, not all databases are complete.  Although the LondonRemembers database is a great resource, it just happens to be missing this one statue.  

Finally, remember that there are great collections of resources that you need to keep in mind.  

This is why I asked about your favorite collections.  It's not always obvious which kind of document (or which kind of collection) you need to search in order to find the answer.  

In this case, I knew that the Maps Gallery had a lot of historical maps.  Luckily, a map of exactly this time period (when Gordon WAS in Trafalgar Square) was in the collection, and so it was easy to see where he stood.  

I'll write a bit more next week about collections and how much you need to know about them.  While Google does a great job of search, there is still some stuff you've just got to know.  This business about collections--what they're called, how their organized, how their indexed, and what kinds of things they collect--is still something you need to have quickly at hand. 

But more on that later.  

Search on!