STATUES, MONUMENTS & PLAQUES

Walking along Bedford’s streets, if you look out for them, you can see commemorative plaques – some blue, some brown, older ones in bronze, even some carved on pavement slabs – hinting at people and events in the town’s fascinating history. The older ones tend to record significant events such as the rebuilding of the town bridge in 1813, the ending of its toll charges in 1835 or its widening in 1938-40.

John Bunyan

Statue by Joseph Boehm was completed in 1874. It was unveiled on 10 June at St Peter’s Green, Bedford, by Lady Augusta Stanley, before a crowd of 10,000.

John Bunyan, the town’s world-famous religious author of the 1600s, is recorded at numerous places. At St John House in St John’s Street, where he was ‘born again’, a joint plaque records that he came under the influence of the Protestant minister John Gifford. His adult baptism by immersion in the river is marked at Duckmill Weir. The site of the cottage where he lived with his second wife and daughter (when not imprisoned for illegal preaching) is to be found in St Cuthbert Street. In Silver Street, a pavement plaque close to the ‘Reflections of Bedford’ sculpture marks the site where he suffered his 12 years of imprisonment in the County Gaol.

The Meeting

“The Meeting” or “The Kids’ Statue” is a bronze statue by sculptor John Mills of a group of schoolchildren outside the Harpur Centre.