For public authorities, works of art can be embarrassing gifts. Too often they attract graffiti and derision rather than admiration. None more so than Richmond's notorious Bulbous Betty'.

This statue by Alan Howes presides over the calm waters of a pool at the top of the Terrace Gardens, eliciting little more then polite puzzlement among passing pedestrians - neatly caught in this painting by Ron Berryman.

She seems wonderfully oblivious of the extraordinary furore she provoked on her arrival there in 1952.

The setting is appropriate, as her true title is Aphrodite', echoing perhaps Botticelli's painting of her birth off the coast of Cyprus.

The style, however, is that of the modernist idiom of the 1950s and it excited a sense of outrage among some of the councillors and even more of the citizens of Richmond.

Controversy raged in the letters columns of the Richmond and Twickenham Times, Bulbous Betty' being only one of a number of derisory nicknames suggested in a heated correspondence that the editor brought to a close after no fewer than 84 letters.

She was described as being an insult to human form and schoolchildren were forbidden to look at her. One letter declared the the sculpture is as disturbing to gentlemen, as Father Thames is to maidens'.

How she survived what eventually became a matter for national debate is wittily explored in Ron Berryman's article in the latest Journal of the Richmond Local History Society.

Richmond Local History Journal no 29 , May 2008, price £4.95, is available from local bookshops, or by post (p & p £1.50) from John Leach, 9 Gordon Avenue, East Sheen. SW14 8DZ.