The Edward Onslow Ford Monument, Abbey Road, London.



Every year, many thousands of people make a pilgrimage to Abbey Road in London in order to visit the EMI studio of the same name and walk across the Zebra Crossing made famous by the cover of the eponymous Beatles record.

Few of them, it seems quite certain, notice the monument that stands less than a hundred yards from the studio, at the junction of Abbey Road and Grove End, yet the man that the monument commemorates was, in his day, every bit as famous as the Beatles were in theirs.


Edward Onslow Ford did not invent the concept of artist as celebrity but he carried it to new heights. Born in (then) fashionable Islington in 1852, he studied at Antwerp and in Munich, before returning to London to launch a career in sculpture that was as meteoric as that of the 'Fab Four'.


Although his first public venture, a bust of his wife which he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1875, was received favourably, it was his later work that excited comment.

Never less than technically proficient, he soon acheived an enviable reputation for producing striking likenesses. Many of his early works were scultpures of his artistic contemporaries such as Arthur Hacker and Frederick Bramwell but his fame spread rapidly and his list of sitters expanded with equal speed.

Blessed with an amiable disposition, Ford was popular with his colleagues, an unusual situation in the hot house environment of late nineteenth century British art circles.

He was especially well liked by younger artists who found him accessible and helpful.


By the later years of the nineteenth century, Ford was very much the man to go to, if a striking likeness was required, and he produced work on the grandiloquent scale that was so popular among the great and the good of the British Empire.

Among his output was the statue of Rowland Hill which graces the portals of the Royal Exchange and the enormous piece depicting General Gordon on a Camel, which stands in Chatham.  Other pieces of his work can be found all over Britain.


Ford died at the relatively young age of 49. There seems to have been genuine and general sadness at his passing and the move to erect a memorial to him was met with considerable enthusiasm, so much so that the monument was unveiled little more than two years after his death.

On one side, the memorial boasts a copy of Ford's own 'Muse' (designed for the Shelley monument in University College Chapel, Oxford) above an embossed inscription to Ford.

The reverse side displays a bust of Ford by A. C. Lacchesi. The monument itself was designed by the architect J W Simpson who produced something that one can imagine Ford, with his fondness for the pomp and circumstance of Empire, would whole heartedly approve of.