Symbols & Secrets – Page 111 – Walking the City of London

In Art

If you haven’t yet visited the Guildhall Art Gallery I do strongly recommend it (EC2V 5AE). Established in 1886 it contains works dating from 1670 to the present. A visitor described it as ‘free and fabulous’ and I wholeheartedly agree.

Here is one of my favourite pictures, William Logsdail’s painting entitled The Ninth of November 1888 …

It is, of course, the Lord Mayor’s procession, but in this picture he is nowhere to be seen and the artist has concentrated on the liveried beadles (who he actually painted in his studio)…

… and the people in the crowd …

There is a minstrel in blackface with his banjo and, although I have studied this picture dozens of times, I have only just noticed the little boy next to him nicking an orange from the old lady’s basket. On the right of the picture the man in the brown hat, next to the soldier with the very pale face, is Logsdail’s friend the painter Sir James Whitehead. It’s a sobering thought that, not far away in the East End that afternoon, police were discovering the body of Mary Kelly, believed to be the last of Jack the Ripper’s victims.

Up the stairs at the far end of the gallery, in a space specially designed for it, you look down on the action-packed painting by John Singleton Copley: Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar 1782 …

A Spanish attack on Gibraltar was foiled when the Spanish battering ships, also known as floating batteries, were attacked by the British using shot heated up to red hot temperatures (sailors nicknamed them ‘hot potatoes’). Fire spread among the Spanish vessels and, as the battle turned in Britain’s favour, an officer called Roger Curtis set out with gunboats on a brave rescue mission which saved almost 350 people.

Look at the painstaking detail in the faces of the officers and Governor General Augustus Eliot, who is portrayed riding to the edge of the battlements to direct the rescue …

The officers were dispersed after the Gibraltar action and poor Copley had to travel all over Europe to track them down and paint them – a task that took him seven years at considerable expense. He recouped some of his cash in 1791 by exhibiting the picture in a tent in Green Park and charging people a shilling to see it (about £10 in today’s value).

Here is a facsimile of an admission ticket …

And now some more contemporary pieces of art.

In the entrance hall to the London Mithraeum at 12 Walbrook (EC4N 8AA) your eyes are drawn immediately to this stunning tapestry by Isabel Nolan: Another View from Nowhen …

You can just pop in to look at the tapestry but I hope you will also book a time slot to go downstairs and visit the beautifully restored and exhibited Temple of Mithras. You can read all about it and see some pictures in my blog The Romans in London: Mithras, Walbrook and the Games.

In September 2017 Banksy paid a clandestine visit to the City to coincide with a retrospective of the work of American graffiti artist-turned-painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. The first work, a Ferris wheel with people queuing for tickets, is captioned as follows on Banksy’s website:

Major new Basquiat opens at the Barbican – a place that is normally very keen to clean any graffiti from its walls …

The three-pointed crown is a symbol often used in the artist’s own work.

The painting on the other side of the road references a Basquiat picture showing a New Yorker being searched by the police …

Steps have been taken to protect both paintings and you can see them at the junction of Beech Street and Golden Lane (EC1Y 0QT).

And finally, I often smile as I walk along Whitecross Street and see this jolly illustration of the street’s shops portrayed on street furniture …

… along with this cheerful picture inviting you to nip around the corner and dine at the lovely, friendly Baracca Restaurant, highly recommended …

The Bank of England, the Lothbury Ladies and more doors

By The City Gent

On 29th November 2018

In Architecture, City Symbols, Commerce

I really like the exterior of the bank of England, Soane’s curtain wall speaking as it does of security and confidence.

Before I write about the doors, however, there are the four ladies to admire. Carved by Sir Charles Wheeler between 1932 and 1937, and nicknamed the Lothbury Ladies, they are located against the ends of the upper pavilion blocks.

The eastern pair stand in front of cornucopias and piles of money …

According to the splendid Ornamental Passions website, from which these pictures are taken, Wheeler was slightly queasy about these images of prosperity given that this was a time of financial crisis (Britain having just been forced off the gold standard). He thought sheaves of corn might be more suitable and wrote to the architect Sir Herbert Baker suggesting this. Baker ‘clearly told him not to be silly’.

The ladies on the western side are each hold a standing naked child between their legs, one male …

… and one female …

They ‘represent the hope of the future of the renewed Bank and its ideals’.

I wrote about the main Threadneedle Street doors in an earlier blog but you will encounter more as you walk around the building. These are the Goods Yard Doors in Lothbury which contain symbols of work – in the tympanum between the two lions rampant are a hammer and anvil, a monkey wrench and a rivet.

The roundels in the door are surrounded by rope motifs, the upper ones containing half-length nude male figures also symbolising work. The one on the left is carrying a load on his back …

… the one on the right is bent over a vice

The lower roundels contain curled up lions …

People have obviously been stroking his head.

These are the daunting, even menacing, Lothbury Court or Bullion Doors …

Loops of chains hang from a ring in the lion’s mouth and the doors themselves are decorated with huge double-warded keys, the handle of each containing a caduceus. These are the only sliding doors at the bank and Herbert Baker sent a Wheeler a sketch with the rather rude comment …

We already have too many prancing lions and a bullion door must be a more forbidding thing, simple in expression and to a big scale.

And finally, here are the doors on Princes Street with, yes, more ‘prancing lions’ …

I love their curly tails, and above them a smiling male sun and lady moon.

Incidentally, the main doors are magnificent and this is a link to the blog where I write about them in more detail …

Some of my favourite City sculptures

By The City Gent

On 22nd November 2018

In Architecture, Sculpture

In a grim courtyard outside the gruesome Baynard House on Queen Victoria Street (EC4V 4BQ) is the quite extraordinary sculpture The Seven Ages of Man by Richard Kindersley (1980) …

At first the infant – mewing and puking in the nurse’s arms …then the whining schoolboy creeping like a snail unwillingly to school … then the lover … then a soldier full of strange oaths …

… and then the justice full of wise saws … then the sixth age …the big manly voice turning again toward childish treble, pipes and whistles in his sound … then second childishness and mere oblivion, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

(Jacques in Shakespeare’s As You Like It Act II Scene vii)

In my local church, St Giles-without-Cripplegate (EC2Y 8DA), there are a set of busts that I have always admired that are on loan from the Cripplegate Foundation. They were presented by J Passmore Edwards (1823-1911), the journalist and lifelong champion of the working classes. His bequests can still be seen today throughout the country and included 24 libraries and numerous schools and convalescence homes.

Oliver Cromwell married Elizabeth Bourchier here in 1620. His bust portrays him ‘warts and all’ just as he preferred …

John Milton, the poet and polemicist, was buried here in 1674. By 1652 he had gone completely blind, probably from glaucoma, as is obvious from this representation …

All the Passmore-Edwards busts in the church are by George Frampton (1860-1928).

Miraculously, the church tower survived World War II bombing. It dates from the 1394 rebuilding of the church and at the base there is some of the original stone from 1090. The unusual upper part of the tower dates from the 17th century and overall provides an interesting contrast with the soaring 20th century Barbican development …

What could be more fun than this chap frantically hailing a taxi …

Taxi! by the American Sculptor J Seward Johnson is cast bronze and dates from 1983. You can find it on the Embankment at the south end of John Carpenter Street (EC4Y 0JP).

It is difficult to grasp nowadays just how much Medieval London was dominated by the Church, but its traces are still very evident today in, for example, the names of streets and surviving districts. Before the Dissolution under Henry VIII more than thirty monasteries, convents, priories and hospitals squeezed into the City’s ‘square mile’ or huddled outside against the still-surviving Roman wall.

This statue of a friar writing in a book with a quill pen is a reminder that the house of the Augustinian Friars stood in what is now Austin Friars (EC2N 2HA) …

Sculptor: T Metcalfe (1989).

These two beautifully carved characters recall the presence here of the Friars of the Holy Cross, also known as the Crutched Friars, after which this street is named (EC3N 2AE) …

Sculptor: Michael Black Architects: Chapman Taylor Partners (1984-85).

The materials are Swedish red granite with heads, hands and feet in off-white Bardiglio marble. They stand on steps, the friar holding the staff and bag representing the active life with his companion holding a scroll representing the contemplative life. Both staff and scroll are made of bronze.

And finally to this great architect, his statue in a niche on the wall of the Bank of England facing Lothbury (EC2R 7HG) …

Sir John Soane Sculptor: William Reid Dick (1930-37).

Sir John wears a long cloak and holds in his left hand a roll of drawings and a set square with the back of the niche discretely decorated with the motifs he habitually used in his buildings. He built his reputation on the work he did as architect of the Bank from 1788 to 1833. Much was lost in later reconstruction, but you can get an idea of what his work was like if you visit the fascinating Bank of England Museum (I have written about it here).

The house where Sir John once lived in Lincoln’s Inn Fields is now a museum and I tell visitors to London it’s a must-see experience. Click here to view the website.

Some of my favourite City Art

The Bank of England, the Lothbury Ladies and more doors

Some of my favourite City sculptures