John Lennon Imagine Statue on Carnaby Street, London

The John Lennon statue on Carnaby Street is Imagine, a life-size bronze of Lennon on a bench by Lawrence Holofcener, made in 2009. It stands at the top end of the street, outside the Liberty London store. The sculptor's widow, Julia Holofcener, installed it with Shaftesbury on 9 October 2021, Lennon's 81st birthday.

Who the man on the bench is

Nothing on the statue or next to it says it is John Lennon, as the Plaques of London survey points out. The figure sits on a bench with his legs crossed, arms spread wide and head tipped back toward the sky. American-British sculptor Lawrence Holofcener cast it in bronze in 2009 and called it Imagine, after Lennon's song, because he wanted the work to be about world peace as much as about the music.

Holofcener died in 2017 at 91. His best-known London piece is Allies on Bond Street, which shows Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill talking on a bench; Princess Margaret unveiled it in 1995. Imagine uses the same idea of a figure sharing a public seat, and photographs of the Carnaby Street statue often show people sitting beside Lennon.

Why Carnaby Street, and when

The statue arrived on 9 October 2021, which would have been Lennon's 81st birthday. Julia Holofcener, the sculptor's widow, brought it to Carnaby Street together with the property company Shaftesbury. The announcement gave the Beatles' 1960s links to the area as the reason. The band bought clothes at boutiques such as Lord John, and nearby clubs included the Bag O'Nails, where Paul McCartney met Linda Eastman.

The exact spot may have changed in the first week. The announcement placed the statue outside Liberty at the top end of the street. A news photo caption from 15 October 2021 says it had been moved from its first position in the middle of Carnaby Street, but doesn't say where to.

Is it still there?

It was there in August 2025, the most recent dated photo we found. The 2021 announcement didn't call the installation permanent or temporary and gave no end date. It is still in place years later, though: there are stock photos from February 2024, Wikimedia Commons photos from November 2024 and August 2025, and OpenStreetMap mapped the statue in November 2024 and updated its position in March 2025. No source found says whether the arrangement is formally permanent, so treat that as unknown.

Two other Beatles-related plaques are close by. The HMV plaque at 363 Oxford Street, where the Beatles' Decca audition tape was cut to disc in 1962, is about 630 m away in a straight line. The blue plaque at 34 Montagu Square, marking the flat Lennon shared with Yoko Ono in 1968, is about 1.5 km away.