A season of programmes to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar
Programme Details
11am听Friday听14 October 2005
London 's Trafalgar Square is not the only Trafalgar Square and the column is just one of many erected. Nick Utechin searches out the stories behind these other monuments.
We all have a picture of Trafalgar Square in London - a grand piazza busy with tourists and, at its heart, Nelson's Column. But London 's Trafalgar Square is not the only Trafalgar Square and the column, designed by William Railton, is just one of many in the United Kingdom , and beyond its shores, erected to honour our greatest seaman.
In fact Londoners were late off the mark. Its Nelson's Column dates from 1843, nearly forty years after the Battle of Trafalgar and Nelson's death. Some local communities were much quicker in their commemorations. In this bi-centennial year Nick Utechin goes on a Trafalgar Trail searching out the stories behind other squares (where is the Trafalgar Square that is not a square?) and other columns, trying to find which of the many columns can claim seniority despite its obscurity (could the first Nelson's column now stand forlorn and neglected somewhere off the A1 in Northumberland?).
He talks to local people from Great Yarmouth to Gosport , from the London Borough of Merton to the Caribbean about the pride they take in their particular associations with Nelson and finds that in Dublin the only part remaining of the naval hero is his head thanks to some IRA activity in the 1960s.
