Shelley is the town’s icon

Shelley Memorial supporter Gerard Kavanagh explains why the project is so important to Horsham

When I first moved to Horsham, I have to say that I liked Shelley Fountain because it was quite unusual and dramatic. The fact that it was so unusual meant you had to read the plaque to understand what it was representing, and so I discovered that Shelley was born in Broadbridge Heath/Horsham (1792).

This to me was great news.

Shelley was one of the greatest of the romantic poets, whose huge body of work is astonishing, especially considering that he was only twenty-nine when he died. He was a lyric poet without rival and, for the time, a very rare individual who was unwilling to accept the injustices and deprivation forced on the working people by the ruling classes of the time. So much so that a lot of his writings were not published in his lifetime, or only published in expurgated form, due to the risk of prosecution for political and religious libel!

He would sit very well with the great writers of the modern era.

Sadly, after the removal of the fountain, there was no monument to him.

Any other town in Europe with such an iconic artist would have a huge monument in his memory; it is almost as if Horsham is ashamed of its most famous son. This is wrong and we need a monument now.