It is one of the most photographed objects on the Thames. Every tourist walking east from the Tower stops and frames it against the bridge. For fifty years, nobody knew who she was.
The woman in Girl with a Dolphin, the bronze that flies over the riverside just east of Tower Bridge, is Virginia Wade. She posed for it in 1973, four years before she won Wimbledon, and she said nothing about it until 2023.
Fifty years of not mentioning it
David Wynne sculpted her when she was 28 and already one of the best tennis players in the world, but some way off the title that would make her a household name. When she won the singles at Wimbledon in 1977, in the Queen’s Silver Jubilee year and in front of the Queen herself, there had been an anonymous bronze of her arcing over the Thames for four years. Nobody made the connection, because nobody was told.
Wade confirmed it publicly in 2023, on the sculpture’s fiftieth anniversary. Her account is unbothered and rather wonderful: we did not go around saying it was me, she told the Times, and of the sitting itself, it was so professional. She also made a comparison that is hard to argue with. There are statues of her as a tennis player. Of this one, she said, it is just so gorgeous.
Before 2023 the internet had one candidate name for the model, posted as an anonymous comment on a London website in 2009 and never corroborated by anyone. For fourteen years that was the entire evidence base.
The sculptor was a zoologist who swam with his subjects
Wynne read zoology at Trinity College, Cambridge, and never went to art school. He is usually described as self-taught, though he took brief informal instruction from the Austrian sculptor Georg Ehrlich, and Jacob Epstein encouraged him early. His tutor at Cambridge is said to have let him off lectures on the grounds that the world would get more out of him as a sculptor than as a zoologist, which turned out to be correct.
The zoology never left him. He made his name in 1961 with Guy the Gorilla, now standing in Crystal Palace Park and Grade II listed in its own right. He lived with grizzlies in the Rockies to get the bears right. For the dolphins he spent long stretches underwater watching them in California and at London’s dolphinarium, which is why the animal here reads as an actual bottlenose rather than the smiling cartoon most sculptors settle for.
He also sculpted the Beatles in 1964, having sculpted the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi two years earlier, and George Harrison credited him with the tip-off that first sent the band to hear the Maharishi speak in London. Pattie Boyd and Alexis Mardas have both been credited with the same introduction, so treat it as one claim among several rather than settled fact. He was appointed OBE in 1994. He was never knighted, whatever half the plaques on the internet tell you.
The boy in Chelsea came second
Wynne made a companion piece two years later: Boy with a Dolphin, on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea opposite Albert Bridge, unveiled on 13 October 1975. People routinely assume the boy came first and the girl was the follow-up. It is the other way round.
The model for the Chelsea sculpture was Wynne’s own son, Roland, known as Roly, who was about eleven when he posed. He went on to co-found the space-rock band Ozric Tentacles with his brother Ed at the Stonehenge Free Festival in 1983, and played bass with them until 1992. He died in 1999, aged 35. An inscription was added to the front of the Chelsea sculpture afterwards, naming him and recording that he posed for it, which turned a piece of public art into a memorial twenty-four years after it went up.
So the pair are not quite the matched set they look. One is a Wimbledon champion who kept the secret for half a century. The other is the sculptor’s son.
It is a fountain, and it is cleverer than it looks
Girl with a Dolphin was built as a fountain, though you can stand in front of it on plenty of days and find the basin dry. Ours usually is when we walk past.
The trick everyone notices and nobody can explain is the weightlessness. The girl is diving down, hair streaming; the dolphin is coming up to meet her; they connect at one point and the whole thing appears to hang in the air. The folklore says it is balanced on the dolphin’s nose. It is not, and no source anywhere supports that. What Wynne actually used is a double cantilever, which Tower Hamlets council’s own walking leaflet describes rather nicely as giving the illusion of the figures flying unsupported.
Reported height is around seventeen feet, though we have never found an independently measured figure, so take that as the number in circulation rather than gospel.
Nobody has ever protected it
Here is the part that surprised us. Wynne’s gorilla is listed. Wendy Taylor’s Timepiece, the steel sundial two hundred metres away at St Katharine Docks and made in the same year, is Grade II listed. Girl with a Dolphin, far and away the most famous of the three, has no listing on the public record at all.
Its funding is undocumented too. Nobody has ever established who paid for it or who unveiled it, which is unusual for a sculpture this prominent. The one thread worth pulling: Timepiece was paid for by the J. Lyons Group, the company that built the hotel behind the dolphin and opened it in September 1973, weeks before the sculpture appeared. That is a strong hint and not a fact, and we would love to be proved right.
The building itself, incidentally, was voted the second most hated in London in a BBC poll in 2006. Fifty years on, the brutalist slab is still an acquired taste and the bronze outside it is beloved. Public art rarely scores a win that clean.
Seeing it
- Where: the riverside walk outside The Tower Hotel, St Katharine’s Way, London E1W 1LD, on the north bank immediately east of Tower Bridge
- Nearest station: Tower Hill on the District and Circle lines, or Tower Gateway on the DLR, both about five minutes
- Cost: free, and it is on open riverside so there is no closing time
- Best angle: stand to the west of it and shoot east so the bridge fills the gap under the dolphin’s tail; go at first light and you get the sun behind the towers
Make a morning of it and carry on east along the dock. Wapping has some of the oldest pubs in London picks up from here, and there are half a dozen riverside restaurants within ten minutes if you want to end the walk properly.
The London x London Take: This is the best piece of public sculpture in London that almost nobody stops to read about, and the Virginia Wade story makes it better rather than smaller. Go and look at it properly instead of photographing it over your shoulder on the way to the Tower. Stand underneath and find the single point where the two figures meet, and then try to work out why it does not fall over. If you want more in this vein, our hidden gems in London and our round-up of quirky and unusual things to do in London both start in roughly the same place: the bits of London everyone walks past.
