Fourth plinth
The fourth plinth on the northwest corner, designed by Sir Charles Barry and built in 1841, was intended to hold an equestrian statue of William IV, but remained empty due to insufficient funds. A statue of Edward Jenner, funded largely by public subscription, was unveiled on the fourth plinth in 1858, but protests by anti-vaccinationists led to its removal to Kensington Gardens four years later. Later, agreement could not be reached over which monarch or military hero to place there.
In 1999, the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) conceived the Fourth Plinth Project, which temporarily occupied the plinth with a succession of works commissioned from three contemporary artists. These were:
- Mark Wallinger: Ecce Homo (1999) – Wallinger's Ecce Homo — the Latin title of which means "Behold the man", a reference to the words of Pontius Pilate at the trial of Jesus Christ (John 19:5) — was a life-sized figure of Christ, naked apart from a loin cloth, with his hands bound behind his back and wearing a crown of barbed wire (in allusion to the crown of thorns). Atop the huge plinth, designed for larger-than-life statuary, it looked minuscule. Some commentators said that, far from making the Man look insignificant, his apparent tininess drew the eye powerfully; they interpreted it as a commentary on human delusions of grandeur.
- Bill Woodrow: Regardless of History (2000)
- Rachel Whiteread: Monument (2001) – Whiteread's Monument, by an artist already notable for her controversial Turner Prize-winning work House and the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial in Vienna, was a cast of the plinth in transparent resin placed upside-down on top of the original.
Companies have used the plinth (often without permission) as a platform for publicity stunts, including a model of David Beckham by Madame Tussauds during the 2002 FIFA World Cup. The London-based American harmonica player Larry Adler jokingly suggested erecting a statue of Moby-Dick, which would then be called the "Plinth of Whales". A television ident for the British TV station Channel 4 shows a CGI Channel 4 logo on top of the fourth plinth.
The best use of the fourth plinth remains the subject of debate. On 24 March 2003 an appeal was launched by Wendy Woods, the widow of the anti-apartheid journalist Donald Woods, hoping to raise £400,000 to pay for a statue of Nelson Mandela by Ian Walters. The relevance of the location is that South Africa House, the South African high commission, scene of many anti-apartheid demonstrations, is on the east side of Trafalgar Square.
A committee convened to consider the RSA's late-1990s project concluded that it had been a success and "unanimously recommended that the plinth should continue to be used for an ongoing series of temporary works of art commissioned from leading national and international artists". After several years in which the plinth stood empty, the new Greater London Authority assumed responsibility for the fourth plinth and started its own series of changing exhibitions:
- Marc Quinn: Alison Lapper Pregnant (unveiled 15 September 2005) – a 3.6-metre, 13-tonne marble torso-bust of Alison Lapper, an artist who was born with no arms and shortened legs due to a condition called phocomelia.
- Thomas Schütte: Model for a Hotel 2007 (formerly Hotel for the Birds) (unveiled 7 November 2007) – a 5-metre by 4.5-metre by 5-metre architectural model of a 21-storey building made from coloured glass. The work cost £270,000 and was funded primarily by the Mayor of London and the Arts Council of England. Sandy Nairne, director of the National Portrait Gallery and chairman of the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group that recommended Quinn's and Schütte's proposals to the Mayor in 2004, said: "There will be something extraordinarily sensual about the play of light through the coloured glass ... [I]t's going to feel like a sculpture of brilliance and light."
- Antony Gormley: One & Other (6 July — 14 October 2009) – over the course of a hundred consecutive days, a total of 2,400 selected members of the public each spent one hour on the plinth. They were allowed to do anything they wished to and could take anything with them that they could carry unaided. Volunteers for the Fourth Plinth were invited to apply through the website www.oneandother.co.uk, and were chosen so that ethnic minorities and people from all parts of Britain were represented. For safety reasons, the plinth was surrounded by a net, and a team of six stewards were present 24 hours a day to make sure that, for instance, participants were not harmed by hecklers. There was a live feed of the plinth on the Internet sponsored by TV channel Sky Arts. Gormley said: "In the context of Trafalgar Square with its military, valedictory and male historical statues, this elevation of everyday life to the position formerly occupied by monumental art allows us to reflect on the diversity, vulnerability and particularity of the individual in contemporary society. It's about people coming together to do something extraordinary and unpredictable. It could be tragic but it could also be funny."
- Yinka Shonibare: Nelson's Ship in a Bottle (24 May 2010 — present) – this work, by a leading Anglo-Nigerian artist, consists of a replica of Nelson's ship, the HMS Victory, with sails made of printed fabric in a colourful African pattern inside a large glass bottle stopped with a cork. According to the Greater London Authority, the artwork is the first "to reflect specifically on the historical symbolism of Trafalgar Square, which commemorates the Battle of Trafalgar, and will link directly with Nelson's column. It is also the first commission by a black British artist."
In February 2008, Terry Smith, the chief executive of trading house Tullett Prebon, offered to pay more than £100,000 for a permanent statue acceptable to "ordinary Londoners" of Air Chief Marshal Sir Keith Park in recognition of his work as commander of No. 11 Group RAF during the Battle of Britain, as it was this Group that was responsible for the defence of London. A Greater London Authority spokesman said: "There are many worthy suggestions for statues on the fourth plinth and some people feel passionately about each of them. All proposals will be judged on their merits including its current use as one of the most high profile sites for contemporary public art in London. The cost of erecting the current work on the plinth is £270,000. The cost of a permanent monument is likely to be considerably more." Subsequently, it was announced in May 2009 that in autumn that year a 5-metre high fibreglass statue of Sir Keith would be placed on the fourth plinth for six months, with a 2.78-metre bronze statue permanently installed in Waterloo Place.
Fountains
When the square was first built in 1845, the fountains' primary purpose was not aesthetics, but rather to reduce the open space available and the risk of riotous assembly. They were originally fed by a steam engine behind the National Gallery from an artesian well underground. However, the engine were generally considered to be underpowered, so in the late 1930s the decision was made to replace them with stone basins and a new pump. At a cost of almost £50,000, the fountains were replaced with a design by Sir Edwin Lutyens and the old fountains were sold to donors and became gifts to Canada, eventually installed in Ottawa and Regina, where they are still in use today. The Lutyens design is now listed Grade II.
Further restoration work became necessary and was completed by May 2009. The pump system was replaced as only one of three pumps was functioning. The new pump is capable of sending an jet of water into the air. A new LED lighting system was also installed during this restoration to reduce the cost of lighting maintenance as the old incandescent bulbs cost £1,000 to replace and were failing regularly. The new lighting has been designed with the London 2012 Summer Olympics in mind and for the first time will project many different combinations of colours on to the fountains. In addition, the new lighting system has a much lower energy requirement and will reduce the carbon footprint of the lighting by around 90%.
Pigeons
The square is famous for its feral pigeons, and feeding them is a popular activity with Londoners and tourists. The National Portrait Gallery displays a 1948 photograph of Elizabeth Taylor posing there with bird seed so as to be mobbed by birds. The desirability of the birds' presence has long been contentious: their droppings look ugly on buildings and damage the stonework, and the flock, estimated at its peak to be 35,000, was considered to be a health hazard. In 1996, police arrested one man who was estimated to have trapped 1,500 birds for sale to a middleman; it is assumed that the birds were being trapped to be eaten.
In 2005, the sale of bird seed in the square was controversially terminated and other measures were introduced to discourage the pigeons, including the use of trained falcons. Supporters of the birds – including Save the Trafalgar Square Pigeons – as well as some tourists continued to feed the birds, but in 2003 the then-Mayor, Ken Livingstone, enacted byelaws to ban the feeding of pigeons within the square. Due to frequent circumvention of these byelaws, on 10 September 2007 further byelaws were passed by the Westminster City Council to ban the feeding of birds on the square's pedestrianised North Terrace, the entire perimeter of the square, the area around St Martin-in-the-Fields Church, the space directly in front of the National Gallery, Canada House, South Africa House and parts of The Mall, Charing Cross Road and The Strand. There are now few birds in Trafalgar Square and it is used for festivals and hired out to film companies in a way that was not feasible in the 1990s.