Eleanor Rigby Statue on Stanley Street, Liverpool

The Eleanor Rigby statue is a bronze seated woman on a bench on Stanley Street in Liverpool, a short walk from Mathew Street and the Cavern Club. Entertainer Tommy Steele made it as a tribute to the Beatles, named after their 1966 song, and unveiled it on 3 December 1982. Liverpool City Council and the Liverpool Echo paid for it.

A statue for three pence

Tommy Steele was appearing in a show in Liverpool in 1981 when he offered the city council a sculpture as a tribute to the Beatles. He asked three pence for the job, half a sixpence, a joke on his own musical and film Half a Sixpence. The council said yes, reasoning that it would help tourism, and put in £4,000. The Liverpool Echo paid the rest.

Steele spent nine months on it and unveiled it himself on 3 December 1982. The original plaque behind the bench dedicated the work to the Beatles, recorded Steele's gift to the city and the Echo's sponsorship of the casting, and was dated December 1982. That plaque has since been replaced.

What the bronze shows

The figure is 128 cm tall, 120 cm wide and 96 cm deep. A woman sits with a handbag on her lap. A shopping bag stands at her right with a milk bottle poking out, and a copy of the Liverpool Echo lies at her left. On the newspaper are a sparrow and a piece of bread, and she is looking down at the bird, so the sparrow is the detail to find.

Some of the statue can't be seen at all. Steele sealed five objects inside the bronze, each meant to stand for a part of life: a four-leaf clover for luck, a page from the Bible, football boots for sport, a comic for fun and adventure, and a sonnet for love.

Taken away in 2023, back on a new bench

In January 2023 Liverpool City Council removed the statue after its bench was damaged. The council first thought someone had done it on purpose, then said CCTV footage showed an accident. The statue went back on Stanley Street in April 2023 on a newly made bench. Photos from before 2023 therefore show the old seat.

Not the Woolton gravestone

The statue is not a grave or a portrait of a real woman. Paul McCartney has described Eleanor Rigby as a character he invented, with the first name possibly taken from the actress Eleanor Bron and the surname from a shop in Bristol, Rigby & Evens. In the 1980s a gravestone for an Eleanor Rigby, who lived from 1895 to 1939, was found in the churchyard of St Peter's in Woolton, the church where Lennon and McCartney first met in 1957. McCartney said he had no memory of seeing it. That grave is in the suburbs; the statue is in the city centre.

Close to Mathew Street

Stanley Street runs into the Cavern Quarter. Going by map coordinates, the Liverpool Beatles Museum is about 60 m from the statue, Arthur Dooley's Four Lads Who Shook the World about 90 m, the Cavern Club about 120 m and the John Lennon statue on Mathew Street about 130 m.