A gift from the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos) to the British Council, the statue of the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, was initially situated opposite the statue of Captain Cook on the Mall. In place for 12 months from July 14 2011, it marked the fiftieth anniversary of manned space flight. In 2013 it was moved to Royal Observatory Greenwich.
It was made by Anatoly Novikov, one of the chief sculptors of the Stalingrad Memorial, and shows a life-size Gagarin standing on a globe in his space suit. Gagarin was 27 when he journeyed into space on board Vostok 1, travelling at a speed of 27,400 kilometres per hour, to orbit the earth in 108 minutes.
The statue is an exhibition copy of one commissioned in 1984 by the town of Lubertsy, just outside Moscow, where Gagarin trained as a foundry worker in his teens, to mark what would have been Gagarin’s fiftieth birthday (he died in a plane crash aged 34).