Eamonn Forde On The Harrods Princess Di & Dodi Statue

Each year, Eamonn Forde would make a Christmas pilgrimage to "London's greatest tourist attraction", the statue to Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed at Harrods. In this month's Low Culture Essay, he mourns its loss, and reflects on the nature of its art

Oh my god, it was beautiful. For a short period of time, the Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed statue (Opens in a new window) (plus the bonus shrine) in Harrods was unquestionably London’s Greatest Tourist Attraction. It was free, but not enough people knew about it. Now it is gone and the public will never again gaze upon its pulsating, overpowering, discombobulating majesty. The Capital feels depleted as a result.

The Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed statue arrived fully formed in a flash of glory – that also somehow rode in on a cloud of rage – in September 2005. Fittingly, it was utterly unexpected, uncontrollable and unpredictable. This came eight years after the car crash in Paris that killed Diana and Dodi. Eight is not any sort of significant anniversary anywhere or for anything. That was the first and biggest clue that this was a piece of sculpture that was never going to play by the rules. Calendars are irrelevant in this instance. They cannot help you navigate the hows and whys.

The statue was there to right what Mohamed Al Fayed, father of Dodi and the owner of Harrods at the time, saw as a series of terrible and unconscionable wrongs. As a physical manifestation of grief and exasperation, it was as disquieting as it is powerful. We can only now talk of it in the past tense. Something so overpoweringly present should never dissolve into history.