The man who fell to earth has come to rest on the Mall in London. Half a century after the Russian Yuri Gagarin became the first human to see our small blue globe from outer space, his daughter Elena Gagarina unveiled his statue on the spot where cheering crowds gathered to greet the hero on 14 July 1961.
The statue shows Gagarin standing on the globe in his spacesuit, and was cast from the original mould by the artist Anatoly Novikov, for a statue commissioned in the small Russian town of Lyubertsy where Gagarin trained as a foundry worker. It has come to London as a gift from the Russian Space Agency, Roscosmos, and stands opposite the statue of another great explorer, Captain Cook, outside the British Council's offices where there is also an exhibition of extraordinary objects and images which have never left Russia before, including space food, a flight seat for a dog, and Gagarin's anti-gravity training harness and seat.
"It is a great event, important not only for my family and my country, but for all the people – 50 years ago a new era began," Gagarina said.
In his own account of the 108 minutes in April 1961 when his Vostok 1 space capsule orbited the earth in April 1961, Gagarin recalled his eventual safe return, parachuting down close to the capsule into a field near the village of Smelovka – the fact that they feared he would not survive landing inside the capsule was concealed at the time.
"Stepping on to firm ground again, I saw a woman and a little girl looking curiously at me. I was still in my orange spacesuit, and they were frightened. "I'm a friend," I shouted, taking off my helmet. "Have you come from outer space?" the woman asked. "As a matter of fact, I have."
He came to England as part of a triumphant world tour, and the handsome, charming cosmonaut was greeted everywhere with the rapture now given only to pop stars, footballers and newly married princesses.
He never forgot his visit, and the warmth of the crowds who greeted him, Gagarina said. "He knew from newspapers and literature they are very closed but he felt when he came to Great Britain that everybody liked him very much and they expressed their joy so that he was astonished."
The government scrambled to keep up with the rapture of the crowds: the three-day visit was extended twice so that Gagarin could lunch with the Queen at Buckingham Palace – passing the spot where the statue now stands, in a Rolls Royce with the number plate YG1 – and to meet the prime minister, Harold Macmillan.
In Manchester huge crowds waited for hours in the rain. Gagarin asked for the top of the car to be opened, saying "If all those people are getting wet to welcome me, surely the least I can do is get wet, too." In London, an American correspondent reported with undisguised shock, the crowds were as large and as enthusiastic as those a month earlier for President John F Kennedy.
Gagarin's visit seemed a time of optimism and joy, the thawing at last of the cold war – but Nato allies sharply condemned the semi-official welcome given to Gagarin, and within a month the new Iron Curtain was rising, the Berlin Wall.
His celebrity grounded him, too precious to Soviet propaganda to be allowed into space again. Gagarina vividly remembers her handsome, happy, physical-fitness-fanatic father, but he was hardly ever there: "He was so busy he was at home perhaps one evening a month." He died just seven years later when a Mig fighter in which he was training, hoping to get back into the space programme, crashed.
Yesterday a small but passionate crowd gathered for the unveiling, including Britain's first astronaut, Helen Sharman, children from the Russian International Theatre School, Prince Michael of Kent who so eerily resembles his cousins of the last of the Russian imperial family – and Lea Georgiades, who came wearing her Lenin badge three hours before the ceremony to be sure of getting a good place. She was a teenager in 1961, and remembers the impact of his visit: "He was modest, clever, charming and handsome – we just thought he was a hero." She would have liked to be an astronomer, she said wistfully, but her grammar school had never heard of such a career for a girl and so she became a teacher who inspired her pupils to look to the stars for hope for the world.
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