The 177 Year Old Statue With a Cone Permanently on its Head

The traffic cone on the head of the Duke of Wellington statue in Glasgow is now embraced by authorities

Photo by the author

The British are no strangers to making statements with statues, often with good humour. During the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, one statue of a slave trader was pulled down and dropped into the harbour in Bristol. Last time I walked past the plinth it once stood on, someone was placing a large wheelie bin there instead. As he got down, he said to me with a big grin, “It’s better than what was there before.”

But there’s one statue that’s always displaying a touch of British humour, in particular Scottish, who do it brilliantly, and that’s the statue of the Duke of Wellington in Glasgow. The statue has, at almost all times, a traffic cone on its head. When I last walked past it, his horse had one, too.

The statement being made by the cone isn’t political as much as a statement that says “This is Glasgow, and we do things our way.”

It’s not uncommon to see traffic cones on the heads of statues around the U.K., especially after a Friday or Saturday night or student event at a nearby club. A cone on the head of a statue in Edinburgh even caused the BBC to embarrassingly mix up the cities. But what made the Glasgow statue different is the fact that every time it was removed, someone replaced it. Every single time.

A wheelie bin replaces the statue of Edward Colston, slave trader, in Bristol (pic by author)

The cone-placing apparently dates back to the 1980s, and due to damage and the possibility of injury (and an alleged £10,000/year bill for fetching the cones back down), the local council hatched a plan to end the silly practice. In November 2013, the idea was to double the height of the plinth and make the climb impossible. But the Glasgow public was having none of it, and when the Scottish know what they want, they know what they want.

A Facebook group called “Keep the Cone” shot to 72,000 likes in a day. A petition quickly garnered over 10,000 signatures. The people of Glasgow had spoken, and they liked the cone where it was. It had become a…