A statue of the peace campaigner Brian Haw, who spent 10 years camped outside the Palace of Westminster, is to be installed in south London after a campaign backed by Sir Mark Rylance and Brian Eno.
The 72cm-tall bronze maquette will be placed on a plinth opposite the big guns of the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth. It shows Haw towards the end of his life, in his early 60s, when he moved around on crutches – propped up yet defiant.
Haw, who died in 2011 of lung cancer, was a fixture in Westminster from 2001, when he began protesting about UK and US foreign policy. The carpenter, and father of seven, left his home in Redditch and headed to London to protest about the economic sanctions against Iraq.
His father had been one of the first British soldiers to enter Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the end of the second world war. After spending time at an evangelical college in Nottingham, Haw began preaching world peace, visiting Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and travelling to the killing fields of Cambodia. He came to be regarded as a hero by peace campaigners around the world.
Haw’s camp, which at one point stretched all along one side of Parliament Square and included battered teddy bears and harrowing photos of refugee children, was recreated for an exhibition at Tate Britain by Mark Wallinger, who went on to win the Turner prize.
Despite being denounced as an eyesore, the camp became a tourist attraction and Haw survived countless eviction attempts, including a law specifically designed to make him leave.
He relied on donations from supporters and rarely left his protest site, except to buy food, use the public bathrooms in Westminster tube station, or to attend court appearances. In the end, it was only ill-health that led to him vacating the area.
Earlier this year, a group including the Oscar-winning actor Rylance launched an appeal to raise £50,000 to install a statue of Haw in Lambeth, asking people to donate £1 each.
The nearly £20,000 raised, along with further gifts of £5,000 from people including Rylance and the musician and producer Eno, was enough to move forward with the building works, organisers said.
At the time of the launch, Rylance described Haw as “a remarkable person in the history of London” who was a “constant voice at Westminster for longer than most prime ministers”.
He has previously told the Guardian he was artistic director at the Globe when he began stopping by Haw’s camp on his way back to the theatre. He said: “I remember him telling me that he would get kicked sometimes, in the night-time, in his tent.”
Eno told the BBC: “As media-pecked MPs anxious not to lose the whip allowed themselves to be corralled into supporting unnecessary wars, Brian Haw was right there to remind them what conscience and steadfastness really means.”
The sculptor of the marquette, Amanda Ward, took photographs of Haw from every angle. It echoes Ivor Roberts-Jones’s 1973 statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square, which shows the leader in a military greatcoat, resting on a walking stick.
The campaign for a permanent memorial to Haw also attracted patrons including the actors Vanessa Redgrave and Sir Ian McKellen, the politician Tony Benn, the film director Ken Loach and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament veteran Bruce Kent.
