Victory Square
Victory Square is a broad public square in London, the chief city of Airstrip One, dominated by a fluted column topped by a statue of Big Brother and watched over by telescreens on every side. It is also the site of St Martin's, a former church now turned into a propaganda museum, and it becomes the setting for the first successful rendezvous between Winston Smith and Julia, a meeting carried out under the eyes of the Party in the camouflage of a crowd.
Landmarks and the Museum Church
At the centre of the square, an enormous fluted column carries a statue of Big Brother, whose gaze is directed southward towards the skies where, according to Party history, he vanquished the Eurasian aeroplanes (or, a few years earlier, the Eastasian aeroplanes) in the Battle of Airstrip One. In the street before the column stands the equestrian statue of a man on horseback that is supposed to represent Oliver Cromwell. Telescreens surround the pediment of the monument, so that the open space is never free of surveillance.
On the north side of the square stands St Martin's, a building with a kind of triangular porch, pillars and a big flight of steps, still known as St Martin's-in-the-Fields although the fields have long since vanished. Once a church, it is now a museum used for propaganda displays: scale models of rocket bombs and Floating Fortresses, waxwork tableaux illustrating enemy atrocities. Winston knows the place well, and identifies it with a particular pleasure because its bells, when it had bells, had chimed 'You owe me three farthings' from the old rhyme 'Oranges and lemons'.
The Rendezvous
It is in Victory Square that Julia chooses to meet Winston. In the canteen she tells him 'Victory Square, near the monument', at nineteen hours; the square is full of telescreens, but a crowd makes it safe, and she instructs him not to come up to her until he sees her among a lot of people. Winston is there before the appointed time; at five minutes past the hour she has still not appeared, and he is seized by the fear that she has changed her mind. He walks to the north side, identifying St Martin's, and then sees her standing at the base of the monument, reading or pretending to read a poster that spirals up the column. He cannot safely approach until more people have accumulated.
The crowd arrives in the form of a convoy of Eurasian prisoners passing through the square. Everyone runs; Julia nips round the lions at the base of the monument and joins the rush, and Winston shoves, butts and squirms through a dense mass of people, finally driving his shoulder between an enormous prole and his equally enormous wife to stand shoulder to shoulder with her. Trucks pass with wooden-faced guards and prisoners wearing leg-irons, and in the cover of the din and the rumbling she murmurs the route to the hiding-place: a half-hour railway journey from Paddington, a gate with the top bar missing, a path across a field, a grass-grown lane, a track between bushes, a dead tree with moss. In the last truck an aged prisoner stands with wrists crossed; as the crowd still hems them in, Julia's hand finds Winston's and gives it a fleeting squeeze. In the seconds that follow he learns every detail of her hand - the long fingers, the shapely nails, the work-hardened palm with its row of callouses - but never once turns to look at her eyes.
A Public Space of the Party
Victory Square condenses the paradoxes of life under the Party: a place apparently open and monumental, but ringed by telescreens; a site of official memory - Big Brother's statue, the renamed and converted St Martin's - that is also a source of buried fragments of the past, such as the rhyme of the bells. Its crowd is both a danger and a protection; the passing prisoners are a public spectacle that supplies the cover for a private conspiracy. The rendezvous in the square is the first successful act of communication between Winston and Julia, and its success depends on exactly the faceless, collective movement the Party itself has created.
