Drop the S and -ry

This statue is in the Ancoats area of Manchester, right outside someone's house! I have trawled the internet to know more about it but all I could find is that it has been there for "quite some time" and that it "never looks weathered or dirty".

The book/paper they are reading says:
The dawn of the morn for glory,
The hush of the night for peace,
In the garden at eve' says the story,
God walks and his smile brings release.

Unfortunately, someone was right by the window inside their house this morning so I had to step to the side so it didn't look like I was taking a picture of them in their pyjamas!   

Running parallel to this road is Anita Street, two rows of Victorian terraces that were built to try to combat Manchester's 19th Century housing crisis.

The internet reliably informs me:

As the numerous mills were built in Ancoats, a new neighbourhood grew around them, "a dark, tight network of badly-constructed back-to-back terraces, hordes of weavers and mill-workers crammed in to filthy rooms and cellars with their families, all there to service the needs of surrounding factories".

In 1845, Friedrich Engels said "The east and north-east sides of Manchester were the only ones on which middle-class people had not built, because for most of the year the westerly winds drove thick factory smoke across them, ‘that the working people alone may breathe’."

Research estimated that between 3,000 and 4,000 people were dying unnecessarily within the 25-street network of back-to-back houses and in the late 19th Century, the slum clearances began in earnest.

In their place, the council decided to try something new, an 800-person block of tenements (with communal laundries, ventilated food stores but only a toilet for every two apartments). Three years later, Sanitary Street was born - two rows of tenement homes, each with their own toilet and sink. 

In the 1960's, the S and -ry was dropped and it was renamed Anita Street.

Quote for today:
No innovation in the past 200 years has done more to save lives and improve health than the sanitation revolution triggered by invention of the toilet. But it did not go far enough. It only reached one-third of the world.
-Sylvia Matthews Burwell