Whom does this monument represent?

That's a statue of George Orwell, sculpted by the British sculptor Martin Jennings, was unveiled on 7 November 2017 outside Broadcasting House, the headquarters of the BBC. The wall behind the statue is inscribed with the following phrase: "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear". These are words from his proposed preface to Animal Farm and a rallying cry for the idea of free speech in an open society.

Martin Jennings is a British sculptor, born in 1957, who works in the figurative tradition, in bronze and stone. His statue of John Betjeman at St Pancras railway station was unveiled in 2007 and the statue of Philip Larkin at Hull Paragon Interchange station was presented in 2010. In 2014 Jennings completed a bronze statue of Charles Dickens, that was unveiled in Guildhall Square in Portsmouth, the city of the author's birth.

In June 2016 two statues by Jennings were installed. The first paid tribute to the women who worked in the armaments industry during the Second World War and was sited in front of Sheffield's City Hall. For Women of Steel Jennings was given the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association's 2017 Marsh Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture. The second commemorated Crimean War nurse Mary Seacole and was sited in front of St Thomas' Hospital in London. Both of these were unveiled at a time when the paucity of monuments to women across the country was being publicly discussed.