Smash hit

“It’s very important this is a stage and all the world can come to it."

He added: “I think in the heart of every citizen of the world there is a desire to make your views known to a wider public.”

Entry will be via a website, and successful applicants will be chosen through a lottery. Those occupying the plinth can make their own performance art. “The rule is you can take anything you can carry with you,” Gormley said.

Nylon netting will be installed around the plinth to prevent anyone from falling or jumping off. The artist is still weighing up methods of getting people on and off the plinth, and may use a crane to pluck them from the ground - “although that may

be offputting to the paraplegic”.

As soon as one person leaves, the next will take the podium.

“The transition is very, very important - it’s rather like the linking of hands around Greenham Common, it’s the idea of continuing inhabitation,” Gormley explained.

There will be some limits to what they can say or do - two policemen will be on duty in the Square and anyone caught inciting violence or endangering life will be hauled off.

Setting out his reasons for entering the competition, Gormley said: “The plinth is a rather old fashioned way of separating life from art and I wanted the opposite, for life to occupy the space of art.

“Trafalgar Square was a place of valediction and military celebration, a certain idea of national identity. It is also a place of national conscience, where resistance to the established order is most felt.

“At first I thought this was a kind of insult to contemporary art - that the best we can get is an unused cast-off from the 19th century as our site. But I now realise there is a way of activating and using the plinth itself as it’s own articulator, and that’s why I proposed this.

“If it doesn’t really inspire people’s imagination, people won’t respond to it.”

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