In the competition to design an iconic Angel of the South, Mark Wallinger's 164ft white horse of Kent has caught the popular imagination. Such is the expectation that it will greet Eurostar passengers heading into Ebbsfleet that there ought to be a steward's inquiry if the judges award the prize to anything else.

What Wallinger's horse and its more abstract competitors have in common is gargantuan scale. Perhaps it is inevitable that in an age of skyscrapers we have come to expect big statements from our public art. This is especially so when the aim is to create some sort of British totem.

All this may seem far removed from most Victorian and 20th-century civic sculpture where, no matter the height of the plinths, the actual statues are usually only a little more than lifesize. Yet, such modesty was becoming after a brief vogue in the Regency period where conceptual art went far larger than anything dreamt up by today's generation of artists.

For sheer wackiness, it would be hard to improve upon the 1834 plan intended for the south side of Leicester Square. The idea was to preserve Sir Isaac Newton's home within a 40ft pyramid. This pharaonic mausoleum was to be topped off with a giant sphere, visible for miles around. Unsurprisingly, it never left the drawing board.

Two years previously a committee of MPs and assorted dukes had intended to celebrate the passage of the 1832 Reform Act with “a stupendous column, exceeding in dimensions Cleopatra's Needle, or Pompey's Pillar and symbolical of the beauty, strength and unaffected grandeur of the British Constitution”.

Engaged to produce the design, the Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick came up with a 1,000ft tapered column made of cast iron and painted in gold. Foreshadowing the Eiffel Tower by 55 years, it would even have been 200ft higher than the Canary Wharf tower.

Trevithick proposed conveying the public to the top by a steam-powered elevator. “By closing the valve in the piston it would ascend to the top with the passengers floating on air,” he calculated, “the same as a regulating blast-piston, or the upper plank of a smith's bellows.” The public was saved this unsettling sensation by Trevithick's untimely death the following year.

Perhaps the concept closest to Wallinger's Anglo-Saxon horse came from John Flaxman in 1799. Assisted in his drawings by William Blake, he designed a 230ft statue of Britannia to top Greenwich Hill. This Colossus of Greenwich, resembling a cross between a Nordic goddess and the Statue of Liberty, would not only have loomed menacingly over the Royal Naval College but would also have been visible to every ship passing up the Thames Estuary.

For our less self-confident age, the traveller to Britain may find more poignancy in the giant riderless stallion.

Times Recommends

• Nerdy cafés no longer maid in heaven
• Cameron will not break marriage vow
• Avatar will make the case on climate