340-year wait for a Royal Mile statue of a woman ends in controversy

Plus: Theatre performers, travelling teachers and late-life tattoos: the unique personalities behind Edinburgh’s isolated older people

Sketches of Stoddart’s Elsie Inglis statue. Images: City of Edinburgh Council.

The equestrian statue of King Charles II in Parliament Square is generally accepted to be the first erected on the Royal Mile.

Built in 1685, it was commissioned by the Edinburgh Town Council, as a symbol of the city’s loyalty to the Crown, following the Restoration of the monarchy.

It would be 340 years before the city agreed to a statue of a woman on the street and when they did so it was with crowds of protesters chanting outside. Yesterday, a statute of Dr Elsie Inglis was approved, and she will now join Adam Smith, David Hume, Robert Fergusson, King Charles II and others in being celebrated in stone on one of the world’s most famous streets.

Once again, there is a royal connection, but this time it has seen the memorial mired in controversy. A public competition to find a design for the Elsie Inglis statue was abruptly shut down in order to hand the job to the King’s sculptor, Dr Alexander Stoddart.

The first statue of a woman will be created by a man amid fierce criticism that his design overlooks what many see as her greatest legacy, the transformation of maternity care for women in Edinburgh.

Yesterday, artist and campaigner Natasha Phoenix made a powerful appeal to the council’s development management sub-committee, urging it to throw out the plans in favour of a design chosen in a “transparent and inclusive“ process.

“It risks leaving us with a statue that offends rather than inspires,” she told councillors, objecting to the design and the way the public competition to find a sculpture was shut down. Much of the criticism centres on the military-style uniform in which Stoddart’s design portrays Inglis, as a reference to the military hospitals she ran, with no representation of her role in pioneering health care for women.