It stands in the enclosed garden of Tate House, a residential development for the elderly on the Cranbrook Estate in the London district of Bethnal Green.

[1] One version tells of an English knight, Simon de Montford, who is blinded at the Battle of Evesham in 1265.

Seeking to conceal his identity, he begs alms at Bethnal Green, while his beautiful daughter Besse is wooed by four suitors, three of whom are discouraged by her father's seeming inability to provide a dowry.

The fourth recognises Besse's innate nobility and marries her anyway, whereupon he receives a dowry from her still-wealthy father.

[4] The sculpture of the Blind Beggar was commissioned by Bethnal Green Council in 1957, and was awarded to the then 27 year-old sculptor Elisabeth Frink.