A striding woman in platform shoes claims London's empty plinth

A woman strides across Trafalgar Square on legs cast in polished brown and blue. Platform shoes planted wide. For once, the fourth plinth is doing exactly what it was never quite meant to do.

Tschabalala Self unveiled her sculpture Lady in Blue on the plinth in September 2026. It is the latest work to occupy the stone pedestal at the north west corner of the square, a site with an odd history of absence.

British authorities built the fourth plinth in 1841, meaning to put an equestrian statue on it. The money never came through. For most of the 19th and 20th centuries it stood empty, a pedestal without a subject in the middle of one of London's grandest public spaces.

Everything shifted in 1999. The Fourth Plinth Programme began commissioning temporary artworks for the space, and Self's piece now joins a run of contemporary sculpture that has turned an empty pedestal into one of Britain's most closely watched public art commissions.

Self's figure is unmistakably confident. She is caught mid stride, weight forward, lifted above the square's usual eye line by platform shoes. The surfaces are polished, and the palette is built from brown tones set against a blue drawn from lapis lazuli, the semi precious stone long prized for pigment and jewellery.

Self has said the design draws on Futurist sculpture, with its emphasis on movement and speed, alongside forms and figuration from African art. The combination gives the work a double register. It is classical in its stillness, modern in its implied motion.

Speakers at the unveiling urged support for diversity, equality and tolerance, according to press reports of the event. On a plinth that spent 158 years holding nothing at all, a woman now stands mid step, one foot already ahead of the other.