The Maiwand Lion is a sculpture in the Forbury Gardens, a public park in Reading town centre.
The statue is a war memorial, and was named after the Battle of Maiwand. It was erected in 1886 to commemorate the deaths of 328 men from the 66th Berkshire Regiment during the campaign in Afghanistan between 1878 and 1880. It is known locally as the Forbury Lion.
The regiment lost approximately 258 men out of 500 (reports of the number vary) at the battle of Maiwand, having faced an Afghan army ten times smaller than the British contingent.
The statue itself is made of cast iron, weighing 16 tons and stands 9½ metres long (31′). On the plinth below the lion, there is a record of the names of the dead soldiers.
The sculptor was George Blackall Simonds, a member of a Reading brewing family from Simonds’ Brewery. The statue took 2 years to design and complete and is one of the world’s largest cast iron statues.
There is a rumour that Simonds’ committed suicide on discoverng that the lion’s legs were incorrectly and mirror that of a domestic cat. However, the status is anatomically correct.
Simonds’ also created sculptors of Queen Victoria (1887) and a statue of George Palmer (1891).