Statue of Robert Raikes
The Statue of Robert Raikes stands in Victoria Embankment Gardens, a narrow but verdant strip of parkland that runs along the north bank of the Thames in central London. It commemorates Robert Raikes (1736–1811), the Gloucester-born newspaper proprietor who is credited with founding the Sunday School movement in England in 1780. Though Sunday Schools had antecedents elsewhere, it was Raikes who popularised and publicised the idea through his newspaper, the Gloucester Journal, transforming what began as an effort to provide basic literacy and religious instruction to poor working children on their one day off from factories and workshops into a nationwide philanthropic movement. At its peak, the Sunday School movement is estimated to have provided elementary education to millions of children across Britain and beyond, making Raikes one of the more consequential social reformers of the late eighteenth century, even if his name is less widely known today than his impact merits.
The statue itself was unveiled in 1880, exactly a century after Raikes established his first Sunday Schools in Gloucester. It was created by the sculptor Sir Thomas Brock, who would later become famous for the Victoria Memorial outside Buckingham Palace. The bronze figure depicts Raikes in Georgian dress, standing with a warm, avuncular posture and surrounded by two small children — a boy and a girl — who lean against him, representing the working-class children his movement sought to uplift. The composition is deliberately intimate and humane rather than triumphalist, emphasising Raikes's role as educator and benefactor rather than as a grand statesman or military figure. The whole ensemble sits atop a stone pedestal with inscriptions commemorating his life and the centenary of the Sunday School movement.
In person, the statue occupies a quiet corner of Victoria Embankment Gardens that rewards those who seek it out. The gardens themselves are a pleasantly sheltered space, partially enclosed by the buildings of the Embankment and by mature trees that filter the light and muffle some of the considerable noise from the traffic on the Embankment road beyond. On a fine day the gardens attract office workers eating lunch, tourists resting their feet, and the occasional pigeon strutting with metropolitan indifference. The bronze of the statue has developed the characteristic blue-green patina of aged outdoor bronze, giving Raikes and his young companions a weathered dignity. The detail in Brock's sculpting is visible up close — the folds of the coat, the expressions of the children — and it repays careful examination.
Victoria Embankment Gardens are rich with statuary and monuments, and the Raikes statue is one of a series of memorials to Victorian-era figures and causes that populate the gardens. Nearby one can find monuments to figures including Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the engineer Bazalgette (whose great Thames Embankment scheme created the gardens themselves), and various others. The Thames is just beyond the Embankment wall, though the river itself is not directly visible from the gardens. The area is bookended by Hungerford Bridge to the west and Waterloo Bridge to the east, and is within easy walking distance of Somerset House, the Strand, Covent Garden, and the South Bank via Waterloo Bridge.
For visitors, the gardens are freely accessible at all times, though they are gated and may be locked in the evening and at night. The nearest London Underground station is Embankment on the District, Circle, Bakerloo, and Northern lines, which is just a short walk away. Temple station on the District and Circle lines is also close. The area is well served by bus routes along the Strand. There is no charge to enter the gardens or view the statue. The best time to visit is on a weekday morning or early afternoon in good weather, when the gardens are lively but not overcrowded, and the light falls well on the bronze. Weekends and summer afternoons can be busier with tourists. The gardens are flat and largely accessible, though some paths may have uneven surfaces.
One of the more poignant and largely overlooked aspects of the Raikes statue is how few people who pass through Victoria Embankment Gardens today pause to consider the scale of what this relatively obscure Georgian newspaper editor set in motion. The Sunday School movement he championed was arguably one of the first mass literacy programmes in British history, reaching children who had no access to formal schooling and providing them with rudimentary reading skills at a time when state education was decades away. The centenary of Raikes's first Sunday Schools was marked with considerable ceremony across Britain and in other countries where the movement had spread, including the United States, and the 1880 unveiling of this statue was a significant event. It is a measure of how thoroughly the Sunday School tradition has faded from mainstream cultural memory that the man who did so much to create it stands relatively unrecognised on his Embankment pedestal, quietly accompanied by his two bronze children, watched mostly by pigeons and the occasional curious passer-by who stops to read the inscription.