The Duke and The Cone

(from "City of Saints, City of Cones", 2022)

The Duke of Wellington Statue is a significant monument in Glasgow’s Urban Civil Religion. Urban Civil Religion is the concept that a city has it’s own traditions, mythologies, and sacred sites, or in other words, the city can be understood as a religion in itself. The statue, located in front of Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art, is one of the more notable monuments in Glasgow (McKenzie 1999). While this site is a statue of a mytho-historical individual, the figure that is being represented is not the focus of what makes this monument a part of the Glaswegian Civil Religion. Rather, the adornment of the orange traffic cone on the head of the statue is what makes the Duke of Wellington statue sacred in the civil religious context (from here on the monument is referred to as “The Duke”). There is currently no academic literature about the significance of The Duke, and as such, I hope to contribute a theoretical analysis on the site and argue why it is relevant to the study of Glaswegian Civil Religion and should be regarded as a location of sociological importance in general.

In this chapter, I trace the mytho-historical origins and history of The Duke, argue how this statue is a civil religious sacred space, and discuss the symbolic importance of the traffic cone. First, I describe the history of the monument and argue how the statue has been the subject of historical contestation. I detail some interpretations as to what the cone means symbolically and why this trajectory is worth consideration. Secondly, I describe how the act of coning became a ritual in the Glaswegian Civil Religion. Sennett (2012) argues that urban rituals and collaborative efforts are responsible for constructing an urban identity, and I discuss how the embodied act of coning, or putting the pylon on the Duke’s head, is a cooperative ritual that adds to the statue’s sacridity. The coning of the Duke is a makeshift form of sacred space within Glasgow's Civil Religion, and consequently representative of a Lefebvrian claiming of right to the city. Lastly, I describe how The Duke has become an epicenter for a symbolic network representing stature and the traffic cone throughout Glasgow. Ultimately, I use the framework of Civil Religion as a way to describe why the Duke of Wellington statue and the pylon have become such enduring symbols of Glasgow.

The history of how the statute and the cone became associated is essential for understanding why it is a civil religious sacred site. The statue was originally erected in the year 1844 to commemorate Arthur Wellesley (Mackenzie 2005). Arthur Wellesley, better known as The Duke of Wellington, is a figure who is regarded as one of the greatest figures in British Military history due to his defeating Napoleon in the battle of Waterloo and for serving as a Victorian-era prime minister (Mackenzie 2005). Like the other sites I examine, the actual details of the monuments may not be known by the public, that is to say, the historic figure of the Duke of Wellington may not be well acknowledged and falls into the invisibility of monuments (Koerner 2016). As a personal example, I was unaware of the historic figure until working on this dissertation. I did, however, know of the famous statue with the cone.

Starting in the 1980s, traffic cones began appearing on the head of The Duke (Mackenzie 2005; Fawcett 2017). The histo-mythology is that after a night out drinking, pranksters took a traffic cone and put it on the statue’s head (Chalmers 2017). The cone and the statue became synonymous with one another and it was soon evident that a sense of local civic duty was instilled to ensure that The Duke always had a pylon on its head The relationship between this communal prank and the city council was strained from the beginning as “city council maintenance staffers suddenly found themselves engaged in a never-ending war with pranksters, who, without fail, would always replace the vanished cone with a new one.” (Fawcett 2017). From an early point, this action became embedded as a tradition meant to repeat previous coning efforts, resulting in a ritualized prank, embedding itself as a local tradition based on disruption and humor.

In 2013, the city council attempted to dissuade the coning shenanigans by altering the physical features of the statue(Fawcett 2017). The council released a plan that would increase the height of The Duke’s plinth in order for it to be impractical for participants to successfully cone The Duke (Fawcett 2017; McDonald 2017). The city council cited that this was because the cone was an act of vandalism and that climbing The Duke would damage the statue (McDonald 2017). Despite these claims, Glasgwegians “suspect that officials really dislike the cone because they are afraid it reflects poorly on the city’s image and evokes memories of its industrial past” (Fawcett 2017). The proposal was met with public outrage and seen as a slight to the beloved tradition (Fawcett 2017). As a result, the “Keep the Cone'' movement began(McDonald 2017). The “The Keep the Cone” Facebook page was put up and the movement’s goal was to prevent the city council from altering the statue. The page posited that:

“Putting a cone on the head of The Duke is not damaging, is not vandalism and does not create a depressing image of our beloved Glasgow—but is instead a testament to our world-renowned Scottish humor” (Keep the Cone, nd.).

This claim suggests that the coning is more than just an act of defacement or silly prank, but rather connected the act to a national humor-based value and a subtle disregard for authority (Keep the Cone nd.). The Facebook group ended up being exceptionally well received, quickly gaining 77,000 members, and the public backlash to the statute’s modification resulted in the City Council withdrawing its plan (McDonald 2017). It is relevant that the Keep the Cone movement is a grass-root organization rather than coming from the government or another officially reconized institution. This cause-and-effect mobilization is directly related to what the people wanted rather than what the city council wanted. The cone remains on the head of the Duke today and is an enduring symbol of contemporary Glasgow. Understanding the history of The Duke is relevant to the discussion of Civil Religion as I describe how it is a civil religious site and symbol.

The coning of the Duke can be interpreted in several ways. I offer my own interpretations of the symbolic significance of this action and how this resulted in The Duke becoming a sacred space in Glasgow’s Civil Religion. The embodied act of coning turns two materials that are typically invisible from public consciousness, into a statue that is noticed and often the subject of photographs. Monuments, as mentioned earlier, tend to be invisible to the average person who is not explicitly engaging with history (Koerner 2016), and traffic cones are recognized as ubiquitous but inconspicuous objects that appear continually in day-to-day life (Morrison 2018). The banal object of the traffic cone makes the monument, which would typically go as unseen, seen and relevant because it subverts the normal usage of both artifacts through defacement (Taussig 1999). The Duke of Wellington monument is widely acknowledged not because it represents the Duke of Wellington but rather because there is a traffic cone on its head.

The cone can further be interpreted through the lens of history from below (Bhattacharya 1984). History is often conceptualized through institutional structures and the story of people in power (e.g. The Duke of Wellington) and ignores the working classes (Bhattacharya 1984). Coning implicates the Duke of Wellington’s history with another, a history of the people. The ubiquity of the cone can be viewed as an inclusive symbol because of its banality, and therefore people can connect to the pylon. This historicity through humor is telling. Power structures were upset by the coning of The Duke, whereas The Keep the Cone Page found the act of defacement humorous and not harmful; this is because the average person in 21st century Glasgow does not care about the Duke of Wellington and the history he represents, but can find humor in subverting the standard usage of monuments and traffic cones. The celebration of the cone can be read as a refusal of the certain history represented by The Duke, and the continual coning is an action of refusing this history. This competition is a renegotiation of different historicities or how different groups record and decide what counts as history (Stuart 2016). The story of the Duke of Wellington is the story of conquest, of military might. Coning subverts the Duke’s history of grandeur by using one of the most banal and ubiquitous objects (Morrison 2018) to turn this history on its head.

Further the coning represents a type of defacement aimed at established historical narratives. As Taussig suggests “when defacement achieves its goal by antagonizing authority and bringing repression down upon itself, the artist then protests in the name of freedom of expression” (1999:29). Taussig’s defacement paradox is emblematic of the story of The Duke, the conflict between the city council and the pranksters resulted in the cone being much more than a prank, but rather an open declaration of how an urban population wants to express their own sense of self and determine how they want monuments to look, a renegotiation of space. This act of defacement and consequent space claiming is best articulated through the lens of the right to the city, which I elaborate on later in this chapter.

The story of The Duke speaks to a story of ritual cooperation in order to redefine space. This ritual is understood as a ritual of the Glaswegian Civil Religion. Throughout the narrative of the cone, there became a sense of civic duty to place a cone on the Duke’s head, as every time the cone was removed it was imperative that someone re-cones The Duke to maintain the status quo (Fawcett 2017). This action can be thought of as a rhythm in the city, a type of ritual cycle that is repeated to establish territory (Bandak 2014); the refrains of de-coning and coning develop an urban rhythm. When the cone is removed, it is someone’s responsibility to put it up again. The fact the coning has persisted for five decades is evidence of this ritual performance. Sennett suggests that “ritual makes expressive cooperation work..[it] enables expressive cooperation in religion, in the workplace, in politics and in community life” (2012:17). Further, rituals establish a sense of connection with a city’s history and create a sense of belonging (Sennett 2012). This is to say that the coning ritual, even if one is not doing the coning, is contributing to a sense of Glaswegian identity and belonging. Gamba and Cattacin (2021:2) argue that “urban rituals can be produced by institutional and non-institutional agents and are often linked to culture, art, and creativity”. Viewing the cone as a creative and identity-affirming ritual shows how it is linked to a Glaswegian Civil Religion. Gamba and Cattacin continue, arguing that “The symbolic production that rituals foster is an example of how a ritual narrative…can trigger an identity, and especially a process of belonging” (2021:3). The coning of The Duke is not only symbolic in what it represents, but the ritualized embodied action of coning, and ensuring that there is a cone on the head, speaks to a Glaswegian Civil Religion and establishes a space that is linked to itself, space uniquely produced by the Glaswegian denizens rather than through power structures. While monuments of the Duke of Wellington exist all over the United Kingdom, only one of them is known for always having a cone on its head, and therefore the ritualized action of coning is linked to a Glaswegian sense of identity.

The Coned Duke is consequently a sacred space in a Glaswegian Civil Religion. Kong (1993:216) claims that “sacred space is ordinary space ritually made extraordinary”, and as I argued earlier, the coning is urban ritual behavior, and the cone makes the normal statue “extraordinary” by the mere fact that most statues do not have pylon crowns . To continue how the coning produces sacred space, I elaborate on the work of Henri Lefebvre. Lefebvre’s spatial visions of lived space, or the space that it represented through images and symbols, is a necessary tool for understanding The Duke. Lived spaces represent “complex symbolisms…linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life” (Lefebvre 1991:33), which embodies the impish nature of the coning practice. The Duke can further be understood as a makeshift sacred space (Jones 2019) because it is using symbols to produce new meaning over space, and this newly produced space is sacred within the Glaswegian context contingent on its connection to the coning ritual. The Duke is a paradoxical example of this because it is a sacred space made sacred by the act of desecrating the space as it is intended to be. The Duke being regarded as a sacred space is reinforced by how The Keep The Cone campaign changed the city council’s plan as well as how a cone is never absent from the Duke’s head for more than brief periods. This ritualized behavior and development of a unique symbolic space is evident in Glaswegians claiming a right to the city.

The right to the city is a concept that describes how, through repeated symbolic action, individuals can produce space and claim an urban space as their own by symbolically altering spaces produced by hegemonic forces (Lefebvre 1996; Harvey 2008, 2012). Street art, for example, is recognized as making the right to the city claims as it is the embodied practice of individuals putting their own marks onto space, which otherwise is controlled by institutions with power (Zieleniec 2016). Coning The Duke embodies Glaswegian claiming the right to the city as it is changing space through the means of collective actions rather than space being produced by political or commercial agents (Harvey 2012). Harvey (2008:23) argues that the concept of the right to the city reflects “the freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves”, such that producing one’s own space reflects the values of the people in the city. This language is mirrored on the Keep The Cone page where it is argued that the cone represents the “right to exert our freedom of expression; our right to be artistically creative in a peaceful, non-destructive manner”. The Duke and the narrative surrounding the Duke are necessary examples of Glaswegians engaging in the right to the city; the people who have coned The Duke are responsible for subverting controlled space and shaping the city to how they wish to see it, effectively developing a new syncretic monument by the mere act of addition. Not only is the ritual coning developing sacred space in the civil religious context, but it also is claiming a right to the city. The right to the city claim is so strong here, that a major symbol of Glasgow is produced through individuals and their embodied actions. The historical trajectory of the cone and The Duke is a narrative that shows how, through repeated ritualized traditions, urban space can be altered as a means to conceal and disrupt historical trajectories.

The Duke and consequently traffic cones are contemporary Glaswegian symbols. Replications of the image of The Duke are repeated all over the city in various forms (Fawcett 2017). The symbol of the pylon became associated with Glasgow, as Fawcett (2017) reports “the Duke and his cone became so famous that local businesses, organizations, and media outlets began adopting the figure as an unofficial mascot”. The Duke is replicated all over Glasgow, from tour buses to postcards, drawn on the walls of restaurants and bars, being the symbol for local businesses or in advertisements, and even artistically styled on the walls of the University of Glasgow swimming pool. A traffic cone is even the current icon for Glasgow’s subreddit (reddit.com/glasgow), marking the city’s virtual community through this well-acknowledged symbol. In short, The Duke and the traffic cone are used in various ways as symbolic shorthand to represent an idiosyncratic Glaswegian urban identity. Repeating symbols within an urban context is responsible for constructing a mental image of a city and a reference to how a city identifies itself (Lynch 1960), and therefore The Duke is responsible for the contemporary image of Glasgow. The Duke is the spatial epicenter of the conic symbolic network.

In recent years, coning has increasingly been linked to greater-scale national and global events through artistically modifying the cone. Notable examples of this phenomenon include EU flag-stylized traffic cones on Brexit day when the United Kingdom officially left the European Union (Armstrong 2020) and a cone stylized with the Ukraine Flag after Ukraine had been invaded by Russian forces in 2022 (BBC News 2022). The meanings behind these cone modifications are clear; they represent the people of Glasgow’s inferred symbolic alignment with these global events. While a cone does not speak for all people in the city, it is a symbolic representation of the people of Glasgow and their will. As it is a symbol in the Glaswegian Civil Religion, The Duke has been used to convey to the world how Glasgow stands with global events, and I predict that this trend will become increasingly common as time goes on.

The Cone and the Duke define the Glaswegian Civil Religion in several ways. If a Civil Religion is the beliefs, rituals, and symbols of a society (Bellah 1967), then The Duke is a concrete embodiment of a Glaswegian Civil Religion; the civic duty of coning is the ritual, and the cone imagery dispersed through the city is the symbol, and humor and subtle disregard for authority are the stated beliefs. The Duke is an example of how, through grassroots movements and civic participation, people can control how they want the city and the monuments in the city to be seen, an effective case of denizens claiming their city. The Duke is one of the core spaces in the Glaswegian Civil Religion, perhaps due to, not in spite of, its comical nature.

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