The 1805 Battle of Trafalgar stands in British consciousness something like the Battle of Lexington and Concord (“the shot heard round the world”) stands for Americans. His Majesty’s Navy trounced the French, who’d threatened to invade, and established a dominance on the sea that lasted until World War II. Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, who’d already sacrificed one eye and part of an arm in his 34-year career, lost his life in the Battle.
His statue tops a 170-foot column in Trafalgar Square. One of the great public spaces in London, citizens have gathered there for celebrations and protests for a century and a half. On the Friday that I visited, a stage awaited the Mayor’s annual festival marking the end of Ramadan.
The moment of Nelson’s death at the base of his memorial column, with the spire of St. Martins-in-the-Fields behind it. It’s been a long time since it was actually in the fields: sometime in the 17th century, maybe?
Four lions surround the column.
Four plinths stake out the Square’s corners. This one stood empty for 150 years, until the 1990s, when the government asked the public what they’d like done with it. The public chose to continue a recently started series of contemporary sculpture. The ninth resident, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, recreates a 700 B.C. Assyrian sculpture that was destroyed by ISIS in 2015. It’s sheathed in metal bits of Iraqi date syrup cans; an industry that also fell victim to war in the 1980s. On the left is the National Gallery; more on that next.
St Martin-in-the-Fields, built in the 1720s, influenced a lot of churches in the U.S., including St. Paul’s Chapel in Manhattan and St. Michael’s in Charleston.
The church has a huge music program. I went to one of the midday concerts: the Albany Piano Trio played some Ravel and a new work by Judith Bingham inspired by the landscape in Dorset. An unusually persistent English sun shone through the gorgeous east window, designed by the Iranian artist Shirazah Houshiary. A Guardian critic called it a “gynaecological reworking of the ultimate symbols of Christianity and modernism - the cross and the grid.”
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