Beloved Eros figure officially identified as Anteros, correction largely ignored
The winged statue at the centre of Piccadilly Circus, popularly known as Eros and treated by generations of Londoners as a meeting point, a landmark, and an unofficial symbol of the city, has been officially identified by historians as Anteros, the Greek god of requited love and Eros’s brother, a correction that has had, by all accounts, no practical effect on public usage of the name whatsoever.
“People have been calling it Eros since 1893,” said a heritage guide who leads regular walking tours through the area. “The sculptor himself said it was meant to be Anteros. Nobody’s listened for over a century. At this point correcting people just makes you the difficult one at the party.”
The statue, formally titled the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain, was erected to commemorate the philanthropic work of the Earl of Shaftesbury and cast in aluminium, an unusual and expensive choice of material for the period intended to reflect the earl’s forward-thinking reputation, a decision that also happened to make the statue considerably lighter than a bronze equivalent, a detail structural engineers say has aided its survival through more than a century of London weather.
Piccadilly Circus itself, a road junction and public space created in 1819 to connect Regent Street with Piccadilly, takes its name from the circular shape original to the junction’s design, a shape substantially altered by later road widening, meaning the space has not technically been circular for well over a century, a detail that bothers precisely no one who visits.
The illuminated advertising screens overlooking the junction, a feature of the site since 1908, have hosted advertisements for everything from Guinness to Coca-Cola, with the current LED display, installed in 2017, capable of showing highly targeted advertising, including, on occasion, adverts specifically triggered by nearby vehicle traffic, a level of technical sophistication most passersby remain entirely unaware of.
Tourists gathering on the steps beneath the statue for photographs, snacks, or simply a moment’s rest represent one of the most consistent uses of the space, with local business groups noting the steps see heavier pedestrian traffic than almost anywhere else in the West End at peak times.
The surrounding junction connects to some of London’s busiest shopping streets, with Regent Street’s curve, designed by architect John Nash in the early 19th century, remaining one of the few substantially unaltered stretches of Nash’s original grand urban plan for the area.
Visitor and heritage information for the site is maintained by Westminster City Council at https://www.westminster.gov.uk. Listing details for the memorial are held by Historic England at https://historicengland.org.uk, and citywide visitor planning is provided by Visit London at https://www.visitlondon.com.
The surrounding junction’s pedestrian crossings see some of the highest foot traffic volumes in the West End, with transport planners noting that crowd surges around evening theatre curtain times require dedicated staff presence at peak periods to keep pedestrian flow moving safely across all approaches.
