I visited the Origo installation in the Barbican Sculpture Court before the weather turned fearsomely hot and it was such a magical experience I shall be going again and recommending it to friends. It was not at all what I expected from the rather detached, technical descriptions of its construction that I had read beforehand.
Here are some of the images from my visit. You can tell it was last week because there are actually clouds in the sky!
As promised last week, I’m going to write a little more about my journey ‘west’ to Fitzrovia.
Firstly, I’m grateful to the Fitzrovia Neighbourhood Association for the explanation on their website as to where the name Fitzrovia originated. Here is an extract: Biographer Paul Willetts describes the name Fitzrovia as a “retrospective label applied to a district of central London where, between roughly 1925 and 1950, the pubs, restaurants, cafés, and drinking clubs provided a fashionable rendezvous for a diverse range of writers with a taste for bohemian life. The label, which had passed into common usage by the early 1960s, acknowledged the one-time status of the Fitzroy Tavern, at 16 Charlotte Street, as the area’s pre-eminent venue. Together with Rathbone Place, Charlotte Street forms the crooked spine of Fitzrovia.” You can read more on their very informative and interesting website.
Where is Fitzrovia? A screenshot from the Association website …
I wrote about the beautiful Fitzrovia Chapel in last week’s blog and here are some more aspects of the area that I found interesting.
The area was often under threat of redevelopment, so the former leader of the Greater London Council, Horace Cutler, is depicted as a vampire. He was also famous at the time for his bow ties …
The mural started to deteriorate significantly over the years but has now been restored. You can read more about the work here.
The best view is from Whitfield Gardens …
I am indebted to the brilliant blog Ian Visits for the background to this area. There’s much more on his website.
Sitting to the north of the park is a church. The original Congregational Chapel opened in 1756 with a graveyard space to the south. Thanks to being a bit too popular, the original building was demolished and rebuilt in 1890. However, that chapel was destroyed on Palm Sunday 1945 by the last V-2 rocket to fall on London.The current chapel was built in 1957, and was taken over by the American International Church in 1972.
The original church’s graveyard had closed to burials in 1856. It was later bought by the London County Council in 1894, possibly in a deal aligned with the rebuilding of the chapel.
Although former graveyards that are turned into public parks are often lined with graves, the only noticeable one is the very easy to trip over grave for John and Mary Procter, and (in the top left of this picture) a stone plaque marking the decision of local cheese shop owners, Robert and Esther Procter to donate some land here for the public …
Nearby (but now long lost) was the grave of this man, Olaudah Equiano …
Born in about 1745, a free man in part of present day Nigeria, at the age of about eleven, Equiano was captured and enslaved. His ownership changed hands several times until one of his owners allowed him to buy his freedom in 1766. He subsequently travelled widely before settling in London where he became one of the leading lights of the campaign to end slavery …
Equiano was a shrewd businessman and his ‘Interesting Narrative’was also a major success (it went through nine editions in his lifetime alone) and, when he died in 1797, he left a sum equivalent to about £80,000 at today’s prices to his surviving daughter (his will can be viewed at The National Archives in Kew).
Just across the road is the magnificent frontage of Heal & Son …
I love the panels displaying the goods and services available …
You can read a fascinating history of the store here. For example, after John Heal the founder died in 1833 his widow renamed the business Fanny Heal & Son!
All Saints Margaret Street is the most well-known church in the area. It is built in the high-Victorian gothic style and is Grade I listed …
The 1841 specification for a ‘Model Church on a large and splendid scale’ specified that:
It must be in the Gothic style of the late 13th and early 14th centuries
It must be honestly built of solid materials
Its ornament should decorate its construction
Its artist should be ‘a single, pious and laborious artist alone, pondering deeply over his duty to do his best for the service of God’s Holy Religion
Above all the church must be built so that the ‘Rubricks and Canons of the Church of England may be consistently observed, and the Sacraments rubrically and decently administered’.
My images of this splendid building will give you an idea whether expectations were met.
You can read more about the church’s history and architecture here.
Closer to home, and just across the footbridge between the Barbican Highwalk and Moorfields, Post-it Man is back – and he doesn’t look very happy …
Finally, there are two things happening at the Barbican Centre at the moment that you may like to visit.
Sculpture is going to feature highly in my next book so I’ve been out in the recent lovely weather revisiting some old favourites. I know they have featured in previous blogs but I hope you won’t mind me sharing them again.
First up is the Royal Fusiliers War Memorial, a work by Albert Toft. Unveiled by the Lord Mayor in 1922, the inscriptions read …
To the glorious memory of the 22,000 Royal Fusiliers who fell in the Great War 1914-1919 (and added later) To the Royal Fusiliers who fell in the World war 1939-1945 and those fusiliers killed in subsequent campaigns.
Toft’s soldier stands confidently as he surveys the terrain, his foot resting on a rock, his rifle bayoneted, his left hand clenched in determination. At the boundary of the City, he looks defiantly towards Westminster. The general consensus on the internet is that the model for the sculpture was a Sergeant Cox, who served throughout the First World War.
Behind him is the magnificent, red terracotta, Gothic-style building by J.W. Waterhouse, which once housed the headquarters of the Prudential Insurance Company. The entrance incorporates a sculpture of Prudence carrying one of the attributes of this Virtue, a hand mirror …
Every now and then I have to travel to King’s Cross St Pancras and when I do I occasionally like to make my way up to the Upper Level (where Eurostar terminates). From there I admire the stunning architecture and one of my favourite statues, a bronze by Martin Jennings of the poet John Betjeman, the man who did most to save the station from demolition …
Apart from the magnificent shed roof you can admire Tracey Emin’s message …
It’s a hot pink neon sculpture, the largest she has ever created …
She made this sweet comment …
I cannot think of anything more romantic than being met by someone I love at a train station and as they put their arms around me, I hear them say ‘I want my time with you‘.
On City Road I encountered these remarkably lifelike characters and their dog …
Always nice to visit St Michael Cornhill. Look to the left on entering and you’ll see the noteworthy Churchwarden’s pew …
The carving shows St Michael thrusting a lance into the mouth of a truly evil-looking devil. It’s a work by the eminent wood carver William Gibbs Rogers (1792-1875) …
The Platt Family cherub endeavours to keep his feet warm …
In Paternoster Square is a 1975 bronze sculpture by Elisabeth Frink which I particularly like – a ‘naked’ shepherd with a crook in his left hand walks behind a small flock of five sheep …
Dame Elisabeth was, anecdotally, very fond of putting large testicles on her sculptures of both men and animals. In fact, her Catalogue Raisonné informs us that she ‘drew testicles on man and beast better than anyone’ and saw them with ‘a fresh, matter-of-fact delight’. It was reported in 1975, however, that the nude figure had been emasculated ‘to avoid any embarrassment in an ecclesiastical setting’. The sculpture is called, appropriately, Paternoster.
This is Alma Boyes’s The Cordwainer …
Here on Watling Street (EC4N 1SR) you are in the Ward of Cordwainer which in medieval times was the centre of shoe-making in the City of London. The finest leather from Cordoba in Spain was used which gave rise to the name of the craftsmen and the Ward.
The magnificent Minotaur by Michael Ayrton. After an itinerant life, he now looks rather wonderful in his more recent location in St Alphage Gardens …
St Stephen Walbrook is another great Wren church. The earliest monument in the Church is to John Lilburne (d.1678), citizen and grocer, of the Lilburn family of Sunderland, and his wife Isabella …
And how about its memento mori, a sculpture of a woman dancing with Death, who is a skeleton wearing a long skirt …
I love visiting St Olave Hart Street. It’s tiny and wonderfully atmospheric, being one of the few surviving Medieval buildings in London. It was badly damaged during the War but many of its treasures had been removed to safety and others have been beautifully restored.
I first visited with my camera some years ago when I was writing about Samuel Pepys and I was immediately captivated by this sculpture of his wife Elizabeth. She died of typhoid fever at the age of 29 and, despite his dalliances with other women, Pepys was devastated by her death at such a young age. He commissioned this bust in white marble from the sculptor John Bushnell …
She is shown with her gaze directed towards the location of the Navy Office Pew where her husband would have sat, her mouth open as if in conversation.
His pew was in the gallery he had had built on the south wall of the church with an added outside stairway from the Royal Navy Offices so that he could go to church without getting soaked by the rain. The gallery is now gone but a memorial to Pepys marks the location of the stairway’s door …
Pepys never married again and arranged to be buried in St Olave’s next to Christine. Now they face one another across the aisle for eternity.
On a more lighthearted vein, walk east from the Memorial on the north side of the road and you’ll find this chap frantically trying to hail a taxi …
Taxi! by the American Sculptor J Seward Johnson is cast bronze and is now interestingly weathered. If you think the baggy trousers, moustache and side parting are erring on the retro, that’s because this particular office worker was transferred from New York in 2014. It was sculpted in 1983 and originally stood on Park Avenue and 47th Street.
Prince Albert at Holborn …
Here is a close up of the Prince taken from the north …
Still a very handsome chap despite the bald patch. The statue was sited to show off his profile ‘from the new street leading to the market’.
Another handsome chap. Since the weather was so nice, I took the opportunity to capture this profile of the one-time Dean of St Paul’s John Donne …
John Donne 1572 – 1631 by Nigel Boonham (2012)
Not quite so handsome – the only statue I know of where the subject has an obvious squint …
The inscription reads: A champion of English freedom, John Wilkes 1727-1797, Member of Parliament, Lord Mayor.
In my local church, St Giles-without-Cripplegate, there is this touching memorial to Sir William Staines, a contemporary of Wilkes …
And here is the man himself …
Staines had extremely humble beginnings working as a bricklayer’s labourer, but eventually accumulated a large fortune which he generously used for philanthropic purposes. He seemed to recall his own earlier penury when he ensured that the houses he built for ‘aged and indigent’ folk would have ‘nothing to distinguish them from the other dwelling-houses … to denote the poverty of the inhabitant’.
British History Online records an encounter he had with the notorious Wilkes who referred rather rudely to Staines’ original occupation …
The alderman was an illiterate man, and was a sort of butt amongst his brethren. At one of the Old Bailey dinners, after a sumptuous repast of turtle and venison, Sir William was eating a great quantity of butter with his cheese. “Why, brother,” said Wilkes, “you lay it on witha trowel!”
Sir William’s family vault outside the church …
So good it survived the Second World War bombing, although I’m afraid the remains of its 15 occupants (including eight ‘infants’) did not.
Every now and then someone puts breadcrumbs out for the pigeons on the Barbican Terrace and this time two ducks decided to have a snack too. I didn’t think their beaks would be suitable for this task but obviously they were …
A weird brand name …
It oviously sparked my curiosity and I Googled it. Bet you do too.
And finally …
One minute you’re being cuddled, next minute you’re a ‘Bulky Household Item’ put out for recycling. Life for a soft toy is very precarious.
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