The author's bronze sculpture stands on the site in front of the headquarters of the BBC, Britain's largest broadcaster. It opened in 2017 and was designed by Martin Jennings, who received the Marsh Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture from the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association the following year. This was the first time that the prize was awarded to the same sculptor two years in a row.
Despite this recognition, the statue was not free from criticism. Printed on the wall behind the sculpture is an unused sentence for a preface to another Orwell classic, “Animal Farm”: “If freedom means anything, it means the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear. And some critics had something to say about Martin Jennings.
British architecture critic Gavin Stamp said the statue could compete and deserved to win the ugliest new building of the year in Private Eye magazine's satirical Sir Hugh Casson Award.
Stamp said in his review that Orwell deserved better, not this portrait of him “with a cigarette in his hand, dressed in a rumpled suit and standing like a vaudeville performer about to tell a joke.” There is There is no reference here to Orwell's ambivalent relationship with Orwell the BBC”. The use of the sculpture on a pedestal was also criticized by some critics.
The author defended himself against the attacks on the grounds that smoking was part of the writer's identity and that it was unthinkable not to depict him with a cigarette. As for the base, Jennings said aesthetic decisions need to be made. “It's on a big cliff of a stone wall and you have to fit it into that space. It couldn’t have been at ground level,” the author argues.