An English City Dressed a Statue as Santa for Years. Then it Vanished.

At six feet, the statue was taller than the man ever was. Carved roughly from limestone, his large shoulders hunched under a bright red jacket, the likeness of the man known as the Old General had held its perch in Nottingham, England, for nearly a century, suspended in a display window above the front door of the local pub.

From there, the statue had watched the world change around him. He was placed there at the start of Nottingham’s 19th-century industrial heyday, but by the mid-2010s the English Midlands city, once powered by coal mining and manufacturing, had reinvented itself.

Modern flats dotted the streets. New offices and corporations had moved in. And the pub that housed the Old General statue and shared its name, in the center of the working-class Hyson Green neighborhood, had closed.

A clipped article from The Nottingham Post showing Steve Oliver dressing the Old General as Santa Claus.Credit…via Steve Oliver

Still, through ups and downs, and as economic headwinds shuttered many local watering holes, the statue endured. Every Christmas, for as long as anyone could remember, residents dressed him as Santa Claus, filling his glass display window with twinkling lights and draping his stone shoulders in red velvet. To many longtime residents of Nottingham, the Old General’s robing signaled the start of the Christmas season.

“It is a landmark,” said Steve Oliver, a Nottingham native. “Something that’s ingrained in people’s memories.”