Amy Winehouse statue, Camden Stable Market

A bronze statue of Amy Winehouse stands in the Stable Market area of Camden Market, unveiled on September 14, 2014 — what would have been her thirty-first birthday — and created by sculptor Scott Eaton. The figure shows her in performance: microphone in hand, weight shifted onto one hip, hair in the beehive that became as much a part of her visual identity as her voice. It is life-size and positioned at roughly the height at which she would have stood, so that visitors encounter it without the distance of a plinth.

Camden was Winehouse's neighbourhood — the market, the pubs, the canal, the particular energy of a part of London that has always mixed bohemian aspiration with working-class permanence. She lived nearby, performed at local venues, was photographed on these streets repeatedly in the years of her fame and the years of her difficulty. The area absorbed her presence in the way that places absorb the people who make them their home over years: gradually and then completely, so that it is now difficult to think of Camden without thinking of her.

The statue is one of the more visited memorials in London, drawing fans from across the world who come specifically to see it. The Stable Market setting — a Victorian stable block converted into a market of independent stalls and food vendors — gives it an appropriate informality, embedded in the commercial and social life of the area rather than isolated on a formal plinth. Visitors leave flowers, sunglasses, small objects. She is thirty-two feet from a stall selling vintage clothing and twenty feet from a food vendor, which is exactly where she would have been comfortable.