Central London has reached staturation point. There is no more room for effigies of the famous dead.

They are spilling off their plinths and on to the pavements: Oscar Wilde lounging beside the National Gallery, Churchill and Roosevelt gassing in bronze on a bench at the top of Bond Street.

Westminster City Council has reached the conclusion that it is awash with statues, and hasn’t got room for any more. With lifeless memorials to just about everyone who ever mattered, with the exceptions of Marx, Lenin and Saddam Hussein, the council plans to tighten its planning regulations in the hope that promoters of graven images will go somewhere else to raise their sculpted tributes.

They are not against commemoration as such, they say, but they would prefer to see trees and gardens.

Westminster has been filling up with statues for the best part of 400 years, and now has more than 300 of them, from Charles I and Oliver Cromwell to Captain Cook, Queen Victoria and Eros. The council is proposing to establish a “saturation zone” centred on Whitehall, where almost half its memorials are located.

Officials have also identified a “stress area” centred on Victoria Street and Grosvenor Gardens where, they say, the number of statues is approaching its acceptable limit.

Under present regulations anyone wishing to raise a statue in those areas would have to wait at least ten years after the death of the individual, or the date of a particular event, before the council would even consider granting planning permission. Now they propose to refuse all applications unless there is what they describe as an exceptionally good reason, such as a large-scale disaster.

What this appears to mean is that if the tower of Big Ben topples and kills the entire Labour front bench during Question Time, a memorial may be permitted, but if Ken Livingstone serves a record term as Mayor of London and finally rids it of traffic, it won’t.

It depends, of course, on who you are. The council’s proposal to close Westminster to all new statues comes only days after they granted planning permission for a new statue of the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother next to her husband, King George VI, in the Mall, and shortly after their decision to allow an effigy of Nelson Mandela in Parliament Square.

What Westminster would like is simpler memorials, such as the modest plaque in St James’s Square commemorating WPC Yvonne Fletcher, who was shot dead during the Libyan Embassy siege in 1984.

Councillor Robert Davis, of Westminster’s planning department, said yesterday: “Westminster is extremely proud of its statues and their fascinating history and heritage. But unless there are exceptional circumstances it is not always possible to accommodate all new statues and monuments in Westminster on the same scale as in the past.With each new memorial the number of suitable sites diminishes and some parts of the city, such as Whitehall, have reached saturation point. To tackle this we are proposing to limit the number of statues in Westminster, which we hope will encourage a greater and fairer distribution.”

In 21st century Britain the planting of trees or memorial gardens could regarded as a more appropriate way to commemorate people and events, Mr Davis said.

But then there are memorials and memorials. Peter Pan takes up very little room in Kensington Gardens, while the Queen Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace is a massive roundabout. And we would not be without neat little Eros in Piccadilly Circus, London’s first aluminium statue, nor discreet Achilles in Hyde Park, the capital’s oldest nude.

But there will always be ways round a statue ban. Apply to the authorities at those twin sanctuaries to statuary, the Palace of Westminster and the Abbey. The antimemorial police can’t touch you in there.

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