One of London’s most curious landmarks is the statue of Eros at Piccadilly Circus. At one of the capital’s busiest junctions, drifting on clouds of traffic fumes, floating over throngs of shoppers and tourists, lit in multiple colours by the flashing and flickering digital adverts across the street, this elegant Greek god with his butterfly wings lets his eternal bowstring twang.

Above a bronze fountain, the naked Eros teeters gracefully, almost overbalancing but not quite. This god of carnal and romantic love, both bawdy and beautiful, is perhaps a suitable deity to hover over the West End with its numerous distractions and entertainments, pleasures and indulgences, and ephemeral crowds seeking sometimes innocent amusements, but also sometimes darker and more destructive goals.

But why, you might wonder, is a Greek divinity poised in such a place? The statue has a strange and controversial history, a history involving opium wars, heroin addiction, enormous levels of prostitution, naughty World War II servicemen, temperamental fugitive sculptors, puns and ribald word plays, earnest Victorian philanthropists, and outraged calls for Eros to be removed and melted down.

But what if I were to tell you that – contrary to popular belief – Piccadilly Circus’s Eros statue isn’t of Eros at all? It was originally intended to be his brother, Anteros. There is, admittedly, a family resemblance – both are lithe, winged, bow-and-arrow wielding gods with a penchant for nudity.

But while Eros’s fiery arrow creates intense lust and obsessive romantic love; the love inspired by Anteros’s missile is of a more sober, respectable kind – a love for one’s fellow humans and deep concern for their welfare. Anteros shuns self-centred sexual urges and all-consuming crushes and instead encourages us to take a broader view, inspiring us with a disinterested and level-headed benevolence.

Indeed, Piccadilly’s Anteros monument is officially known as the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain. It was built to commemorate Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the Seventh Earl of Shaftsbury (1801-1885), a Tory politician, committed evangelical Christian and social activist. During his long career, Shaftsbury fought to improve the lives of child labourers and the inmates of insane asylums, as well as campaigning against Britain’s involvement in the opium trade. Some of Lord Shaftesbury’s admirers – disapproving of the pagan background of Anteros – even insisted the sculpture be renamed The Angel of Christian Charity.

Eros stands guard over Piccadilly Circus

Eros stands guard over Piccadilly Circus. (Photo: London City Calling)

It’s the thesis of this blogpost that the statue in Piccadilly Circus has proved an ambiguous and ambivalent deity, presiding over – on the one hand – lust, debauchery and pleasure seeking, and – on the other – zealous attempts at urban improvement and moral reform. Under Eros’s – or Anteros’s – raised bow and archer’s gaze, all kinds of things have transpired.

But who exactly was Eros? Who was Anteros? Who was Lord Shaftesbury? Who sculpted Piccadilly Circus’s controversial statue and why has it been so infamous? How has ‘Eros’ survived bombing raids, urban upheavals, vandalism and repeated attempts to remove him from his exalted post? Read on and we’ll find out.

Eros – the Greek God of Sex and Love

Eros was the Greek God of romantic love and sexuality. His Roman equivalent was Cupid and he’s lingered on through Christian and modern times as the type of arrow-armed cherub seen on Valentine’s cards. Eros’s name comes from the Greek ἔραμαι, meaning to desire or love.

In later Greek sources, Eros is the son of the love goddess Aphrodite. A mischievous character, his meddling in the affairs of gods and mortals causes them to fall passionately in love with often unsuitable individuals. Unlike the plump Cupids of Renaissance art and modern iconography, though, the Greeks depicted Eros as an athletic young male, brimming with sexual vigour.

The Roman philosopher and dramatist Seneca wrote of Eros: ‘He smites maids’ breasts with unknown heat, and bids the very gods leave heaven and dwell on earth in borrowed forms.’ A Greek epic of the 3rd century BC has the goddess Hera telling Athena: ‘We must have a word with Aphrodite. Let us go together and ask her to persuade her boy, if that is possible, to loose an arrow at Aeetes’ daughter, Medea of the many spells, and make her fall in love with Jason.’

Eros brandishes his fatal arrow

Eros brandishes his fatal arrow. (Photo: Shrine of Eros)

Another epic – this time from the 5th century AD – states, ‘Eros drove Dionysus mad for the girl with the delicious wound of his arrow, then curving his wings flew lightly to Olympus. And the god roamed over the hills scourged with a greater fire.’

According to the Roman poet Ovid, not even Eros’s mum was immune to his potent arrows: ‘Once, when Venus’s son was kissing her, his quiver dangling down, a jutting arrow, unbeknown, had grazed her breast. She pushed the boy away. In fact, the wound was deeper than it seemed, though unperceived at first. (And she became) enraptured by the beauty of a man (Adonis).’

In addition to roguishly triggering love and lust, Eros had other functions. Some saw him as a god of liberty and friendship and warriors from Sparta and Crete offered him sacrifices before battle in the hope he’d protect them and ensure victory. Eros seems to have – somewhat fittingly – been worshipped by a fertility cult in late antiquity and to have been a popular object of veneration, along with his mother Aphrodite, in Athens. The fourth day of every month was dedicated to him.

Eros was a member of the Erotes, a group of winged male deities frequently linked with love between men. He also formed part of a triad – along with the god Hermes and divine hero Heracles – that granted gay lovers characteristics such as beauty, loyalty, eloquence and strength.

Some saw Eros as a very ancient god. In his Theogony (one of the oldest of Greek sources), Hesiod states that Eros was the fourth god to appear, being preceded into existence only by Chaos, the earth goddess Gaia, and Tartarus (the abyss). The philosopher Parmenides believed Eros was the first of all gods to manifest. Participants in the Orphic and Eleusinian Mysteries viewed Eros as an extremely early god, claiming he was the son of Night:

‘Black-winged night laid a germless egg in the bosom of the infinite deeps of Darkness, and from this, after the revolution of long ages, sprang the graceful Love (Eros) with his glittering golden wings, swift as whirlwinds of the tempest. He mated in the deep abyss with dark Chaos, winged like himself, and thus hatched forth our race, which was the first to see the light.’

Eros about to plunge his arrow into a helpless victim

Eros about to plunge his arrow into a helpless victim. ‘Sacred and Profane Love’ (1602-3) by Giovanni Baglione

But, despite his many legends and capabilities, Eros is chiefly remembered as a love god. Interestingly, a Greek and Roman folktale – Eros and Psyche – has Eros getting a taste of his own arrows. Psyche – though just a mortal woman – was so stunning she caused men to leave off the worship of Aphrodite as they all rushed to pay devotions to her. The jealous goddess sent Eros to make Psyche fall in love with the ugliest being in the world, but Eros was instead smitten with her himself. The pair endured separation and heartache as they dealt with the meddling of Psyche’s envious sisters and a series of impossible tasks Aphrodite set the mortal beauty to see if she was worthy of her son.

Psyche managed to complete the challenges and was granted immortality. With Eros, she had a daughter – named either Voluptus or Hedone (meaning physical pleasure or bliss). On winning immortality, Psyche seems to have acquired butterfly wings. She symbolised the human soul and her name meant ‘butterfly’ in Ancient Greek.

So Who Was Anteros?

Eros’s brother Anteros was quite a different entity. He symbolised a calmer, requited love rather than the burning, passionate love represented by his sibling. Eros’s mother Aphrodite and father Ares produced Anteros as a playmate for Eros, who was lonely. He thus represents the idea that, to be healthy, love must be reciprocated by another. The name Anteros means ‘love returned’ or ‘counter love’.

In appearance, Anteros is similar to Eros, being a bow-and-arrow-clutching winged youth. Hence, the confusion of the two at Piccadilly Circus. Anteros, however, is usually depicted with butterfly wings whilst Eros’s are of the feathered type and Anteros’s hair tends to be longer. Anteros is also one of the Erotes.

Eros statue standing guard at Piccadilly Circus

The statue of Anteros fires his invisible arrow in Piccadilly Circus. (Photo: Lisa)

Plato believed Anteros represented the sensation of being filled with love for another. Divine love then fills the soul of the beloved in return and this results in the love being reciprocated. The Platonic idea, however, depicts this love as friendship rather than the carnal love of Eros.

Anteros did, though, have a more sinister side. He avenged unrequited love, penalising people who rejected the advances of those who adored them. A story tells of an altar put up to Anteros in Athens as a memorial to a Metic (or foreigner) named Timagoras by his fellow Metics. Timagoras had fallen for an Athenian called Meles. Upon hearing of Timagoras’s love, Meles jokingly commanded him to leap off a huge rock, which Timagoras did. On seeing his admirer’s dead body, Meles leaped from the rock too.

Who Was Lord Shaftesbury?

It might at first seem strange that a fountain topped by a naked pagan god should be dedicated to Lord Shaftesbury, a sternly moral, fundamentalist Christian who sought to right a great deal of what he saw as abuses in the world. But an examination of his life might lead us to see why such a statue ended up being erected in his honour. It’s all, in its own strange way, to do with love.

Born in London in 1801, Anthony Ashley-Cooper was educated at Manor House School in Chiswick before spending three years at Harrow and going on to Oxford University. The childhood of Lord Ashley – as he was known until his father died and he inherited his title – seems to have been arid and loveless, a circumstance apparently common among the British upper classes at that time.

Lord Shaftesbury, who inspired Piccadilly Circus's Eros statue

Lord Shaftesbury in 1877 – but how did this austere Christian inspire Piccadilly Circus’s Eros statue?

The biographer of Ashley, G.F.A Best, wrote, ‘He saw little of his parents and when duty or necessity compelled them to take notice of him, they were formal and frightening.’ Ashley never liked his father and often described his mother as ‘a devil’.

A source of light in these gloomy early years came from the family housekeeper, Maria Millis. The affection she gave him and her hands-on Christian faith made a deep impression on Ashley. Best states, ‘What did touch him was the reality, and homely practicality, of the love which her Christianity made her feel towards the unhappy child. She told him Bible stories; she taught him prayer.’ Ashley also seems to have had a positive relationship with his sisters.

Ashley’s misery, however, continued at school. Manor House, apparently, contained ‘a disgusting range of horrors … The place was bad, wicked, filthy; and the treatment was starvation and cruelty.’ During his teenage years, Ashley’s Christian faith deepened and two experiences during this time seem to have shaped his later preoccupations. A pauper’s funeral once passed him at the bottom of Harrow Hill: ‘The drunken pall bearers, stumbling along with a crudely made coffin and shouting snatches of bawdy songs, brought home to him the existence of a whole empire of callousness which put his own childhood miseries in context.’

To the young Ashley, then, the world seemed a cruel, vulgar, uncaring, filthy place. But his second profound experience at school suggested ways existed by which it might be improved. A pond in Harrow School’s grounds was notorious as a breeding place of mosquitos. When asked to write a Latin poem, Ashley chose the pond as his topic, hoping to make the school authorities take notice of the festering pool. He succeeded – the pond was inspected then filled in.

So Ashley began to feel a zeal for social reform. Though a patriarchal Tory who felt the middle and lower orders should know their place, he did seem to genuinely care for the plight of the wretched and disadvantaged. In terms of religion, he was a pre-millennial evangelical Anglican – meaning he believed Christ would return soon, a factor that gave his activism an urgency.

In 1826, Ashley became a Tory MP, representing Woodstock – what was known as a ‘pocket’ or ‘rotten’ borough. (A constituency with a tiny population, which the local Lord made sure would vote for his chosen candidate) Though Ashley’s principals didn’t seem to get in the way of his accepting such a corrupt appointment, he did use his position in Parliament to campaign against what he considered society’s worst abuses.

One of the first causes Ashley got involved with was the reform of Lunatic Asylums (as they were then called). During a visit to such an institution in Bethnal Green, Ashley found patients sleeping chained up and naked on beds of straw. They had to perform their bodily functions in their beds and on the weekends, these beds weren’t cleaned out. On Mondays, the patients were washed down with freezing water. 160 people had to share a towel and there was no soap. Throughout his political career, Shaftesbury campaigned to improve such conditions, backing a number of parliamentary bills. Shaftesbury wrote, ‘Beyond the circle of my own Commissioners and the lunatics that I visit, not a soul, in great or small life, not even my associates in my works of philanthropy, has any notion of the years of toil and care that under God, I have bestowed on this melancholy and awful question.’

Another of Ashley’s causes was the condition of the child labourers who toiled in Britain’s rapidly expanding industrial system. He campaigned to ensure under-18s weren’t expected to work more than 10 hours a day, introducing the Ten Hour Act in 1833. Though he had some success in reducing working hours, his goal was not achieved until 1847. A Lancashire-based campaigner for the Ten Hour Act wrote, ‘If there was one man more devoted to the interests of the factory people than another it was Lord Ashley. They might always rely on him as a ready, steadfast and willing friend.’

Ashley successfully opposed the employment of women and children underground in coal mines, a campaign resulting in the Mines and Collieries Act of 1842. Children as young as five had jobs beneath the surface; slightly older children and women pushed and hauled heavy carts of coal during gruelling 12-hour shifts. The shocking fact that these women sometimes worked bare-breasted and – possibly worse – even wore trousers was a key factor in getting an outraged Victorian public onside and the act through Parliament.

Ashley was also a champion of young chimney sweeps. These ‘climbing boys’ – some of whom had been sold by their parents – had to clamber up filthy narrow flues. They suffered burns and skin lacerations; their noses and throats filled up with soot; and they worked under the constant risk of suffocation. The boys often ended up crippled and notoriously prone to a disease associated with their occupation – cancer of the scrotum. Ashley vigorously supported a bill in 1840 aimed at outlawing the employment of these boy chimney sweeps, but it wouldn’t be until 1875 that he succeeded in getting an enforceable act passed. Ashley personally rescued a young sweep he found living behind his London house in miserable conditions and sent him to school to ‘be trained in the knowledge and love and faith of our common saviour.’

A chimney sweep with a tiny 'climbing boy'

A chimney sweep with a tiny ‘climbing boy’.

Another issue Ashley plunged into was the debate that raged around opium. In 1880, Lord Shaftesbury (he acquired his title after his father’s 1851 death) became the president of the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade, which had been formed by Quaker businessmen in 1874. This ‘trade’ basically consisted of the British pressuring Indian farmers to grow opium, which was then sold at auction with the understanding that those who bought it would smuggle it into China. The problem was that the British bought large quantities of Chinese tea, but the British Empire didn’t create any products China needed, except silver, a fact which threatened a shortage of that metal. The solution to righting the trade deficit – as the British Empire saw it – was to bully China into taking imports of Indian opium. Heavy taxes on Indian opium farmers boosted the finances of the British East India Company while opium smuggling is thought at one point to have accounted for 15% to 20% of the British Empire’s revenue. ‘Opium Wars’ were fought in 1840 and 1857 to make the Chinese accept opium imports.

All this caused tortures of conscience for the morally minded. It’s estimated that by the early 1900s, over a quarter of Chinese men were regular users of opium or addicts and China’s own opium production boomed in response to this demand. It also disturbed the likes of Lord Shaftesbury that many Chinese associated Christianity with opium as some early missionaries had arrived on opium ships.

Some felt Britain itself was threatened by the worldwide opium explosion. Lurid newspaper reports had whites lured into East London opium dens run by Chinese immigrants. Novels – like The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens – dwelled on the seedy nature of opium smoking. Such fears were, however, exaggerated – there were plenty of British opium addicts, but they tended to take the substance in ‘medicinal’ concoctions such as laudanum. Lord Shaftesbury’s successor as president of the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade, Sir Joseph Pease, unsuccessfully tried to pass a motion in the House of Commons in 1891 calling the trade ‘morally indefensible’ and insisting government support for it be withdrawn. Pease’s motion wasn’t adopted until 1906 and the opium trade between India and China didn’t end until 1913.

A Victorian image of whites supposedly corrupted in a Chinese opium den

‘The Asian Vice’ by Henri Vollet, inspired by common anxieties about whites being corrupted in Chinese-run opium dens

Lord Shaftesbury died on 1st October 1885 at the age of 84. His funeral service took place in Westminster Abbey and many poor people lined his coffin’s route, including costermongers, boot blacks, crossing sweepers, factory workers and flower girls, with many waiting hours to see the cortege pass. Though Lord Shaftesbury had been an upholder of the system that had ultimately caused the oppression of such people, he seems to have genuinely done the best he could to reform its grimmest aspects. Such concerns led to Shaftesbury being termed ‘the poor man’s earl’.

A biographer of Lord Shaftesbury, Georgina Battiscombe, stated, ‘No man has in fact ever done more to lessen the extent of human misery or to add to the sum total of human happiness.’ According to the influential Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon, Shaftesbury was ‘the best man of the age … far above all the other servants of God in my knowledge … a man most true in his personal piety … fulfilling both the first and second commandments of the law in fervent love to God and hearty love to man.’

So how did this serious, intense, deeply Christian aristocrat come to be commemorated by what – however mistakenly – many consider to be a statue symbolising fleshy love and romantic lust? Let’s find out in the next section.

Eros Is Erected at Piccadilly Circus – Outrage, Theft and Sculptors Fleeing the Law

Not long after Lord Shaftesbury’s death, people began to discuss the possibility of a memorial. Such was Shaftesbury’s popularity, the idea quickly caught on and – less than a year after the Earl had passed away – the sculptor Alfred Gilbert was commissioned to devise a fitting tribute.

Though the memorial was commissioned swiftly, the creation of ‘Eros’ would prove a lengthy process. Gilbert seems to have considered the duty of commemorating the great man such a weighty one it would take him five years even to come up with a concept.

He finally hit on the notion of a bronze fountain, ornately decorated with nautical themes. The fountain – no doubt reflecting Shaftesbury’s concern for the public good – would be of the drinking variety. The bronze base would support a spectacular dome of water upon which a god would majestically float.

This stately deity, Gilbert explained, would be Anteros and the fountain would be named The God of Selfless Love, thereby honouring Shaftesbury’s lifelong philanthropy. Gilbert felt Anteros symbolised ‘reflective and mature love, as opposed to Eros or Cupid, the frivolous tyrant.’

The model Gilbert chose to pose as the winged youth was his own studio assistant, a 16-year-old Anglo-Italian called Angelo Colarossi. Angelo – who, as an imitator of a wing-sporting divinity, was perhaps appropriately named – also served as a model, along with his father, for the apocalyptic 1892 painting by Frederick, Lord Leighton And the Sea Gave Up the Dead Which Were In It.

'And the Sea Gave Up the Dead Which Were In It' by Frederick, Lord Leighton

‘And the Sea Gave Up the Dead Which Were In It’ (1892) by Frederick, Lord Leighton. The boy also modelled for ‘Eros’.

Though the fountain itself is bronze, Anteros was cast from aluminium. Today the two metals form an interesting contrast, with the algae-like green of weathered bronze juxtaposed with the hardy aluminium’s seemingly immortal shine. ‘Eros’ was the first statue cast from aluminium in the world, with the honours being performed by George Broad and Son at the Hammersmith Foundry. Using aluminium was a vital factor in the execution of Gilbert’s grand plan – its lightness enabled ‘Eros’ to balance in his balletic posture.

‘Eros’ proved immediately controversial. Even his sculptor had been tormented by doubts, especially with regards to the monument’s location. Gilbert felt Piccadilly Circus – a cramped, strangely-shaped space in the middle of a congested confluence of roads – was  ‘an impossible site, in short, on which to place any outcome of the human brain, except possibly an underground lavatory!’

The Duke of Westminster unveiled the statue on 29th June 1893 and the complaints began straight away. Prudish Victorians were shocked by Anteros’s nudity. The sculpture isn’t totally naked – a wind-billowed bit of fabric covers what my grandmother used to refer to as ‘the possible’ – but enough of Anteros was revealed to be considered disturbing. Many simply felt the statue was too sensual a memorial for the exceedingly respectable Shaftesbury.

The location of ‘Eros’ also drew much criticism though not for the spatial and artistic problems Gilbert had griped about. Piccadilly – in the epicentre of the West End with its theatres and bars – was seen as too frivolous a setting for a monument to such an earnest man. Far worse, the neighbourhood was associated with loose and rowdy conduct and – even worse than that – with prostitution.

Anteros on the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain, Piccadilly Circus

Anteros – often mistaken for his brother Eros – on the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain, Piccadilly Circus, London. (Photo: Learn Religions)

To mollify these moral objections, the statue was renamed The Angel of Christian Charity, giving a more Christian slant to the ideal of love Anteros represented. But the statue’s new name never stuck and few have ever referred to the artwork as Anteros. Perhaps – as we shall see – appropriately for its location, the figure has always been known as Eros to Londoners.

Not everybody, though, disliked the new monument. The Magazine of Art praised Eros as ‘a striking contrast to the dull ugliness of the generality of our street sculpture, a work which, while beautifying one of our hitherto desolate open spaces, should do much towards the elevation of public taste … and serve freedom for the metropolis from any further additions to the old order of monumental monstrosities.’

Despite such encouragement, the memorial’s early life didn’t go well. The fountain’s base proved too small, meaning water splashed around it, muddying the space surrounding the monument. Gilbert had – in the generous spirit of Lord Shaftesbury – chained cups to the fountain for people to drink out of. The cups were soon stolen. And the memorial was a target of so much vandalism that London County Council had to pay a keeper just to watch over it.

As for Gilbert, his work on ‘Eros’ – rather than earning him money – plummeted him into debt. While he received £3,000 for creating the monument, it actually cost him £7,000 to make, with the structure’s elaborate base accounting for most of the excess. Anxious to escape his creditors, Gilbert fled the country and ended up living in Belgium for 25 years. Perhaps even more traumatically, he doubted his own artwork. Feeling his fountain was an insufficient memorial to Shaftesbury’s greatness, he argued the whole thing should be melted down, with the metal being sold off and the money used to build homeless shelters.

Alfred Gilbert, the creator of Eros at Piccadilly Circus

Alfred Gilbert – who took on the ill-fated commission to create the ‘Eros’ statue at Piccadilly Circus, London

But whatever the sentiments of Gilbert – and the statue’s many critics – Eros stayed. He’s become a tutelary deity of the busy, hedonistic West End, floating over its throngs of romantics and pleasure seekers, ready to loose an invisible arrow who knows where. But still, the spirit of his more sober brother – and, by extension, the ghost of the sober Lord Shaftesbury – are there too, urging restraint, reform and ‘moral improvement’. Let’s see how the competing divinities of Eros and Anteros – strangely embodied in the same statue – have spread their contradictory influences around Piccadilly.

Eros or Anteros – Which Deity Presides over Piccadilly Circus?

Piccadilly Circus was created in 1819 to link Regent Street with the thoroughfare of Piccadilly. This street was named after Piccadilly Hall, a house first mentioned in a source of 1626. The word ‘Piccadilly’ comes from the fact the house was owned by one Robert Baker, a tailor well-known for his piccadills or piccadillies – terms used for various collars and ruffs. ‘Circus’ comes from the Latin word for ‘circle’, referring to the layout the road junction once had. Piccadilly Circus was, though, first known as Regent Circus South. It didn’t gain the title ‘Piccadilly Circus’ until the mid-1880s, when Shaftesbury Avenue – named after the charitable Lord – was constructed and linked to it. Ironically, these very alternations caused Piccadilly Circus to lose its rotund shape.

Eros at Piccadilly Circus, in the days before neon adverts and motorised transport

Eros at Piccadilly Circus, in the days before neon adverts and motorised transport

It’s perhaps unsurprising that Eros and Anteros have competed for mastery over Piccadilly Circus. Control of this axis – which, though slightly awkward, the capital still manages to rotate around – could be seen as quite a prize. There’s a sense that Piccadilly Circus is somehow the centre of all things, that all roads meet there, that it’s the hub of London, of England, and was even – in colonial days – the nexus of the whole British Empire.

The Baedeker Guide to London (maybe already plumping in Eros’s favour) declared it as ‘for the pleasure seeker, the centre of London’. The phrase ‘it’s like Piccadilly Circus’ is a well-known expression to describe anywhere bustling and crowded. A 1930s guidebook characterised the Circus as ‘a centre of gaiety … where thousands and thousands of people and almost as many cars struggle in vain for freedom.’ The pioneering nuclear physicist Lord Rutherford, in 1932, compared the journey of a neutron into the nucleus of an atom as ‘like an invisible man passing through Piccadilly Circus. His path can be traced only by the people he has pushed aside.’ In Sam Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners (1956), a character from Trinidad feels the ‘Circus have magnet for him, that Circus represent Life, that Circus is the beginning and ending of the world.’

It might even be said Piccadilly Circus is a symbolic focal point of the global capitalist system, with the famously gaudy lights of advertisements curving around the building opposite Eros. The first illuminated ad – made up of incandescent light bulbs – was for Perrier water in 1908. Such incandescent arrangements were replaced with neon signs, some of which – such as a large Guinness clock – boasted moving parts. A Coca-Cola sign was up by 1954, and Coke has remained a presence at the Circus ever since. Other brands to have twinkled over Eros include Bovril, Nescafe, Foster’s, McDonald’s and Samsung. The neon lights were eventually replaced with digital projections then LED displays, but Piccadilly’s flashing commerciality has long given the impression the Circus is a pivot around which the world’s economic hubbub revolves.

Early lights at Piccadilly Circus with incandescent bulbs

Early illuminations at Piccadilly Circus

So which deity does, in fact, preside over this vital interchange, this emblematic centre? Let’s dig back into (fairly) recent history and try to make up our minds.

The Case for Eros

Much of the bustle and business around the ‘Eros’ statue has long been associated with the satisfaction of lusts so we could say it’s fitting that this deity teeters above the West End. Dostoyevsky visited London in 1862 and wrote of the neighbourhood: ‘At night, prostitutes crowd several streets in this quarter by the thousands … here are sparkling expensive clothes and near rags and extreme differences in age all gathered together’ as well as ‘mothers who were bringing their young daughters into the business. Little girls around 12-years-of-age take you by the hand and ask you to go with them.’ In the 1830s, it was estimated that London contained 80,000 prostitutes, of which 8,000 would die each year. By the mid-19th century, around £8 million per year was thought to be spent on prostitution in the capital, equivalent to over £1 billion in modern money.

‘Every ten yards,’ a German visitor wrote, ‘one is beset, even by children of 12-years-old, who by the manner of their address save one the trouble of asking whether they know what they want. They attach themselves to you like limpets … often they seize hold of you after a fashion of which I can give you the best notion by the fact that I say nothing about it.’

Eros at Piccadilly Circus, probably in the 1930s

Eros at Piccadilly Circus, probably in the 1930s

Prostitution was common in many parts of Central London, with the streets around Covent Garden and the Strand well-known for this activity. Piccadilly, though, seems to have served as a symbolic central point, a emblematic vortex of this trade. Around the turn of the 20th century, the American novelist Theodore Dreiser wrote of the capital’s prostitutes: ‘There were regular places they haunted … Piccadilly being the best.’ By this time, of course, Eros had been erected to watch over Piccadilly’s fleshy pursuits.

Eros’s influence was evident during World War I. Soldiers returning from the front meant the sex industry in the area boomed. The newspaper Weekly Dispatch mentioned one young officer who – when walking to Piccadilly Circus down Regent Street – was propositioned 16 times, including by teenagers and children. Levels of prostitution remained high between the wars, with pimps, prostitutes and their clients frequenting the bars and restaurants around Piccadilly Circus. Not that such habits were new – in 1896, the Trocadero restaurant had a policy that ‘if a lady alone should gain admittance she must immediately be surrounded by screens.’

World War II, unsurprisingly, led to another boost in behaviour that would have had Lord Shaftesbury’s eyebrows shooting up. Though the Eros statue was removed at the War’s outbreak to protect it from damage, it seems the god’s spirit still imbued Piccadilly. London was full of servicemen – including the, by local standards, well-paid American GIs – and this caused rates of prostitution to double. Such activities were aided by the difficulty of policing blacked-out streets. There was a sense that – as the controversial London author Thomas Burke had written – ‘the street is more private than the home.’ All these escapades were, of course, appropriate to Eros’s realm – the god some Ancient Greeks had seen as a ‘son of Night’.

American servicemen at Piccadilly Circus

American servicemen outside Piccadilly Circus Tube Station

The prostitutes – known as ‘Piccadilly Commandos’ – who swarmed around the American soldiers were so numerous and determined they caused alarm in the British establishment, with some even seeing them as endangering Anglo-American relations. In September 1943, Admiral Sir Edward Evans – the Head of Civil Defence in London – wrote to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, complaining of ‘vicious debauchery’ and claiming that ‘American soldiers are encouraged by these young sluts, many of whom should be serving in the forces.’

Not all the women drawn to the GIs were, however, prostitutes. World War II saw a general loosening of sexual morals, much of which happened around Eros’s plinth. After long shifts doing war work in the factories, young women headed to the West End to have fun. Official documents lament the antics of these girls ‘freed of parental control’. The female ‘hordes’ who crowded around West End hotels and troop hostels, it was feared, could create an embarrassing image of Britain abroad and supply the Nazis with ideas for propaganda.

The GIs themselves were seen as far from blameless. A police superintendent stated, ‘They congregate around Piccadilly Circus and Coventry Street, many of them the worse for drink and quarrelsome, until the early hours of the morning. They are easy prey for the innumerable prostitutes that frequent the neighbourhood.’

An American soldier flirts at Piccadilly Circus

An American soldier flirts at Piccadilly Circus – note the flower seller. Could she be the daughter of one of the flower girls who watched Lord Shaftesbury’s cortege?

The senior American military surgeon based in Britain, Brigadier Paul Hawley, recorded that 30% of all doses of VD among American soldiers in the UK were picked up in London. Though some sources refer to the prostitutes themselves as ‘Piccadilly Commandos’, others claim this name was given to American soldiers who’d acquired the clap around where the Eros statue had so recently stood. Burning arrows, indeed. Though Eros had traditionally been a protector of warriors, he doesn’t seen to have shielded these American troops from such ailments. 

The official anxiety over sexual immorality in London’s West End was dealt with in a thoroughly British way. A committee of Whitehall bureaucrats was set up to produce a report. If the committee ever arrived at any conclusions, no one knows what they were.

Eros returned to Piccadilly Circus in 1947 and, in the Post-War world, the area maintained its connections with the sex industry. In 1955, the American biologist and sexologist Alfred Charles Kinsey visited London. Kinsey – whose books Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female (1953) had shocked suburban America – counted around 1,000 prostitutes on the streets of the West End.

Piccadilly’s reputation as a centre of prostitution doesn’t seem to have declined until the turn of the 1960s. In 1959, the Street Offences Act made it illegal to loiter or solicit for the purposes of prostitution. The act pushed working girls off the street, and away from Piccadilly, into the clubs, massage parlours and walk-ups of nearby Soho. This change, some argued, made it easier for unscrupulous pimps and seedy entrepreneurs to exploit sex workers and rip off clients.

A postcard from the 1960s, showing Eros at Piccadilly Circus

A postcard from the 1960s, showing Eros at Piccadilly Circus

Though the sex trade has largely been banished from Piccadilly Circus, the bustling district is still popular with those hoping to find either romance or something more casual. Websites still recommend Eros’s domain as a place where such visitors to London might stumble upon success.

In Ancient Greece, Eros wasn’t just famous for kindling love and lust between the sexes. He could also spark same-sex attraction and so it’s not surprising that Piccadilly Circus was once the centre of the capital’s gay life. Gays seem to have, especially, gravitated towards the Circus after Leicester Square was ‘cleaned up’ in the 1920s. Next to Piccadilly Circus was the Café Royal, upon which Thomas Burke commented, ‘Here and there may be seen queer creatures … an hermaphroditic creature with side-whiskers and painted eyelashes … male dancers who walk like fugitives from the City of the Plain. Hard-features ambassadors from Lesbos and Sodom.’

In his book Queer London, Matt Houlbrook argues that Piccadilly Circus was the focus of London’s gay scene until the 1950s, with notable venues including the lesbian Lilly Pond, on the corner of Coventry Street, the Regent’s Palace Hotel, the Criterion (also known as the ‘Witches’ Cauldron’ or ‘Bargain Basement’) and the Trocadero.

Piccadilly Circus at night, in 1962

Piccadilly Circus at night, in 1962

Lord Shaftesbury campaigned vigorously against the opium trade – so it would have probably distressed him to know that his memorial would overlook the most notorious spot for opioid consumption in Britain. The actress Sheila Hancock (born 1933) recalled the difficulties of entering Piccadilly’s subterranean Criterion Theatre: ‘The first hazard was climbing over the recumbent drug addicts who used the stage door to inject the heroin prescription they got from the all-night Boots in Piccadilly Circus. (It became 24-hours in 1925 and was next door to the Criterion.)’

Once accessed, the Criterion was ‘a gloomy catacomb where only the mice were healthy on their diet of theatrical greasepaint, which they shared with the cockroaches. There were no windows, so the outside was banished once you’d descended into hell. We actors had to resort to oxygen inhalers on matinee days to keep us bubblingly energetic for our merry romp.’

Though the law later changed, doctors in the 1960s could prescribe heroin to addicts. There were around 200 known addicts in Britain and the majority got their prescriptions from the 24-hour Boots chemist on Piccadilly Circus. (The shop is still there though it no longer – as far as I know – dispenses opioids.) In the run-up to midnight, a queue of addicts formed, all clutching their prescription slips for the next day. The heroin was of top-notch pharmaceutical grade and came in tablets called ‘jacks’ (which is where the phrase ‘jacking up’ comes from). Fresh syringes and needles were handed out with each prescription. So, for a certain time, Boots the chemists at Piccadilly Circus – right beneath the monument erected to a passionate opponent of the opium trade – was Britain’s biggest heroin dealer.

24-hour Boots Chemist at Piccadilly Circus, London

The 24-hour Boots chemist at Piccadilly Circus, London – this humble shop was once Britain’s biggest heroin dealer.

The Case for – and against – Anteros

In spite of the lust and hedonism the statue of Eros has come to symbolise, there’s been another spirit at work around Piccadilly Circus – a spirit promoting a more sober and ‘responsible’ notion of love, expressed in a concern for the ‘betterment’ of society and the restraint of certain human impulses. The attempts to reign in the prostitution trade detailed above could fit into this pattern.

There have been plans to reform, renovate and even destroy Piccadilly Circus. Following the death of Edward VII in 1910, there were calls to clear away the Circus and replace it with a more orderly, rectangular open space named King Edward VII Square. Eros – that embodiment of disorder and desire – would be taken down and a statue of the king astride his horse put up. (We might query, though, whether a depiction of Edward, a notorious womaniser, would have set a better example than the Greek god of fiery love.) The planned square would also substitute the Circus’s shady bars and subterranean theatres with a Shakespeare Memorial Theatre and National Opera House. The arrival of the First World War – and then the Second – meant this neatening-up of the Circus’s congested and lively chaos never took place.

The 1950s saw renewed efforts to deal with the awkwardly asymmetrical Circus and the tumultuous life that swirled around Eros. A plan was hatched to build a huge office block on the site of the Café Monico, which would be just one of a ring of office towers, including a 132-metre edifice on the site of the Criterion Theatre. Concern about traffic jams led to the suggestion that several lanes of traffic could hurtle through the area while pedestrians would be elevated onto concrete walkways 60 feet up in the air. This plan was viewed favourably throughout the 1960s and a short film was even made, Goodbye Piccadilly, to preserve memories of what many assumed would soon be vanquished.

While these changes were never enacted, by 1972 a new plan had appeared – three octagonal towers would rise on the graves of the Trocadero, Criterion and Monico buildings. The chairman of Westminster Council’s planning department said he hoped demolition could start as soon as possible, sweeping away what was ‘little more than a down-at-heel, neon-lit slum.’

Such sentiments were, however, opposed by many in London, who viewed their ‘neon-lit slum’ with fondness. The Observer wrote, ‘Piccadilly Circus, more than anywhere else in the country, is a place for the people. It is not, first of all, a traffic junction or an office centre. It is somewhere people go to wander about, gawp and gossip, and generally amuse themselves. Those who have drawn up successive plans for its redevelopment have failed to understand its real nature, and, one after the other, their efforts have been laughed to scorn.’

Indeed, Eros has survived, as has the disorderly and disreputable Circus he rules over. That’s not to say that the neighbourhood and its local deity have seen no changes. In 1922, Eros had to be moved when construction began on Piccadilly Circus’s London Underground station. Eros was exiled to Embankment Gardens until the work was complete. He returned in 1931, but when World War II started he was moved again, for his own safety. Like many young Londoners, he spent the War outside the capital, in his case in Egham, Surrey.

Eros is removed and the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain covered in World War II

Eros was removed and the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain covered in World War II.

When the god came back in 1947, he was re-sited somewhat. Eros now pointed his invisible arrow down Shaftesbury Avenue. This encouraged urban legends to grow up that the statute had been designed with a bow but not an arrow as a pun on the word ‘Shaftesbury’: as in the idea the arrow – or ‘shaft’ – had been ‘buried’ in that road. (There have also been – inevitably, given the history of the area – more ribald puns about the ‘burying of shafts’.) Another idea claims Eros’s bow is directed at Shaftesbury’s family home and last resting place in Wimborne St Giles, Dorset. But Alfred Gilbert couldn’t have had these intentions when he designed Eros – the archer originally took aim down Lower Regent Street, in the direction of the Houses of Parliament. In the early 1980s, Eros was again taken down, this time for restoration, before being returned in 1985.

Eros presides over Piccadilly Circus in 1994

Eros presides over Piccadilly Circus in 1994 – note the old Routemaster bus. (Photo: Colin Smith)

It’s clear that the spirit of Eros has triumphed over his critics and also over his more sensible brother, but – although Eros is loved by many – he still hasn’t gained total acceptance. The attempts to vandalise his statue – which started soon after Gilbert put it up – have continued, as if some people are disturbed at a deep level by what the god represents. Damage to the statue was discovered during its 1980s restoration and the statute was also vandalised in 1990. It was again taken away for repairs and didn’t return till 1994. In 2012, a tourist even broke Eros’s bowstring and a new one had to be fitted. Vandalism seems prevalent around the festive period. In 2013-14, a ‘snow globe’ was erected around the statue, filled with blowing ‘snow flakes’. Though primarily a visual spectacle, the globe had the added effect of keeping Eros safe from vandals. In 2014-15, a giant box for Christmas presents placed around the monument fulfilled a similar function.

Piccadilly Circus in modern times, still reigned over by Eros

Piccadilly Circus in modern times, still reigned over by Eros. (Image: Vermilion Studios)

Though reforms – ranging from the provision of public transport to the shaking off of the area’s reputation for prostitution – have lessened the passionate chaos Eros presides over, it’s likely this mischievous deity will be viewed with affection by most Londoners and visitors to the capital for some time to come. The statue has survived criticisms, wars, attempted redevelopments, vandalism and even the disapproval of its own creator. It’s as if this god has claimed his territory and doesn’t intend to be expelled from it.

(This article’s main image – showing Anteros, commonly known as Eros, at Piccadilly Circus, London – is courtesy of Juan Pablo Garnham. Is it perhaps from the time Eros’s bowstring was broken?)