Liverpool is putting The Vivienne on Stanley Street, and the street needs her more than she needs the plinth

Liverpool is to honour The Vivienne with a permanent life-size statue at the junction of Victoria Street and Stanley Street, planted at the entrance to the country's first officially recognised gay quarter and facing back into it, watching the doors that James Lee Williams walked through at sixteen and never really left. The news was broken as an exclusive by Attitude on Tuesday morning, and the project is being led by House of The Vivienne CIC, the community interest company set up by James's family after his death in January 2025, working with the Liverpool LGBTQ+ platform Proudly Said. Liverpool BID Company has put in the initial funding to get the thing off the ground, and the rest, roughly £100,000, now has to come from the community, the businesses of the quarter and anyone anywhere who ever screamed at a lip sync and felt briefly and completely at home.

There is a particular kind of British civic tribute that involves a bronze figure looking nobly into the middle distance while nobody stops to consider why it is there, and the people behind this one appear to have decided against it. The ambition, as described by the campaign, is a statue you can gather around, sit near and have a catch up with, positioned as a permanent guardian angel at the threshold of the district rather than a monument to be admired from a respectful distance and then walked past. Chanel Williams, James's sister and a director of House of The Vivienne CIC, put the reasoning plainly, saying that James gave everything to Liverpool and Liverpool gave everything back to him, that the city saw him and accepted him and helped him become The Vivienne, and that a permanent statue in the Pride Quarter is the right way to make sure nobody forgets that, and to remind anyone who is struggling that they do not have to do it alone.

The biography is well known by now and still worth setting down, because the statue is not really about the television. James moved from North Wales to Liverpool at sixteen and went straight into the city's drag scene, working Garlands, GBar and Superstar Boudoir, long before anyone outside the postcode had heard of The Vivienne. She won the first series of RuPaul's Drag Race UK in 2019, went on to All Stars, and became the first drag performer to reach the final of Dancing on Ice, which is the sort of sentence that sounds like a novelty until you remember what it required from a British audience in the middle of a culture war. She took the Attitude Inspiration Award in 2022. Her last social media post before she died was a plug for Sahir House's fundraising campaign, which tells you roughly everything about the order of her priorities.

James died on 5 January 2025 at the age of 32. The family disclosed in March that the cause was cardiac arrest brought on by the effects of ketamine, and an inquest in June returned a conclusion of misadventure following cardio-respiratory arrest. He had spoken openly on Drag Race about addiction, had come through a long period of sobriety and had relapsed without telling the people closest to him. Chanel has said he kept it from the family to protect them, and has asked publicly the question that sits underneath the entire campaign, which is whether her brother would have asked for help if the shame attached to asking had not been so total. House of The Vivienne CIC exists to answer that question in the only way anybody can now, by making it easier for the next person.

The policy has not moved, so the community has

The family took the obvious route first. They campaigned for ketamine to be reclassified from Class B to Class A, met ministers, went on daytime television, and in January 2025 the government asked the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs for an updated assessment. The ACMD reported back on 28 January 2026 and recommended that ketamine stay in Class B, a decision that was explicitly not unanimous and that came with a long list of recommendations about treatment, training, harm reduction and intelligence gathering, on the argument that reclassification on its own would not shift prevalence. The evidence for that argument is not nothing. Ketamine was moved from Class C to Class B in 2014 and use roughly doubled afterwards, peaking at an estimated 299,000 users in England and Wales in 2022 to 2023, and the drug and alcohol charity WithYou welcomed the decision on the grounds that the threat of punishment deters people from seeking help rather than deterring use. The government said it would consider the report and respond as a matter of priority. That was six months ago.

So a family who lost a son and a brother asked the state for one specific thing, were told by the state's own experts that the thing would not work, and were left holding a public health crisis among people in their teens and twenties with no legislative response and no timetable for one. What they have done with that is quietly remarkable. They have gone and built the thing they can build, which is a permanent physical statement in the middle of a city centre that addiction is not a moral failure and that the person it took was loved, funny, brilliant and worth a hundred grand of other people's money.

A statue is cheap, a district is not

The second half of this story is about the ground the statue will stand on. Liverpool became the first city in Britain to formally recognise its gay quarter in August 2011, later putting rainbow street signs across the Stanley Street area, and rebranding it as the Pride Quarter in 2021 with a straight face and a marketing budget. Since then the quarter has done what LGBTQ+ nightlife has done everywhere, which is contract. Garlands, the club where James worked and one of the defining venues of the city's queer history, is gone. John Hyland of Proudly Said, who is leading the statue project, spent this June writing an open letter to local politicians, co-signed by the managers of the remaining venues, warning that the quarter is disappearing in front of everyone and risks becoming a memory with a plaque on it. The council leader replied warmly. Warm replies are not licensing policy, business rate relief or planning protection.

Hyland has been direct about what the statue is meant to do, describing The Vivienne as having been the Pride Quarter itself, someone who made everyone who came through any of those doors feel like they belonged, and framing the monument as Liverpool acknowledging what the community already knows while also serving as a first statement of intent that the quarter will get the investment, attention and future it deserves. Bill Addy, chief executive of Liverpool BID Company, has backed it as a statement about the kind of city Liverpool is. Both men are, in effect, using a dead drag queen's enormous public affection as leverage on a regeneration argument that has been losing on its own merits for a decade, and they are entirely right to do it.

The Attitude Magazine Foundation has committed £5,000, structured as £2,500 now to start the campaign and £2,500 as it approaches target, which is a sensible way to fund something that will live or die on momentum. The images circulating are AI visualisations rather than a sculptor's maquette, because no sculptor has been commissioned yet, which is the honest position for a campaign that has not raised the money to commission one. That is what the fundraiser is for.

Liverpool is a city that puts up statues of the people it loves, and it loves the ones who left and came back more than almost anyone. James chose Liverpool at sixteen and Liverpool is choosing him back, permanently, on the corner where the quarter begins. The correct response is to pay for it, and then to make sure there is still a Stanley Street for her to look at.

The community fundraising campaign is live via Proudly Said at proudlysaid.co.uk.