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I was much attached to Kaled. She stood at the corner of Fleet Street and Chancery Lane, pert, stylish, mocking the scribes and hacks scurrying round her feet. She was faintly androgenous, a pageboy Tiresias who saw and knew all that passed along that street of shame. She is there today, much battered but still with her swagger.
Nothing peoples a city as do statues. The more inhumane the architecture the more desperately we cling to relics of humanity, even if they are in stone and metal. Nobody seems to notice them. How many Fleet Street hands salute as they pass effigies to King Lud, Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, Northcliffe, Edgar Wallace, Prudence, Justice and Liberality? But that makes our enjoyment of them the more intimate.
The Public Monuments and Sculpture Association is engaged on a massive project to record urban statues throughout Britain.
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