Over the years Coventry has had a bit of a hard time. Bombed heavily during World War II, the Modernist post-war reconstruction which was groundbreaking in its day has few fans left. However, in Broadgate - the dead centre (as it were), a building with a facade that only its mother could love has a special treat for keen-eyed visitors.

Above the Lady Godiva News kiosk (oh yes) there are two doorways with black eagles on them, signifying Coventry rising from the ashes, and a triangular window above. On the hour, Coventry's most famous heroine Lady Godiva comes rolling out of one door on her horse, buck naked of course with only long hair to cover her modesty. As soon as she appears, famous voyeur Peeping Tom pops out of the window above to get a good eyeful. She rides from one doorway to the next as bells alert goggle-eyed onlookers. In a flash it’s all over.

Both Lady Godiva and Peeping Tom are local heroes. Lady Godiva has another statue in the centre of Broadgate and she looms large in Coventry’s history. Another Peeping Tom statue watches the shoppers in Cathedral Lane shopping centre and the bizarrely-titled Peeping Tom News, a sibling of Lady Godiva News, lurks round the back of the clock.

The legend goes that Lady Godiva, an Anglo-Saxon noblewoman who was the wife of Leofric, Earl of Mercia, threatened to ride naked in protest at her husband’s decision to raise taxes. He ordered the populace not to look and everyone obeyed apart from local tailor Peeping Tom, who was cheeky enough to catch a quick eyeful. He paid a high price for his moment of pleasure and was blinded.

It’s not entirely clear why this hasn’t become one of Britain’s top tourist attractions. After all it is free and contains nudity. Mechanical clocks were at one time an essential feature of any self-respecting shopping centre. If you can’t manage a peep at Coventry’s, Masquerade author Kit Williams designed ones in Cheltenham, Telford and Milton Keynes or you could catch the magnificent Roland Emett’s The Aqua Horological Tintinnabulator in the Victoria Centre, Nottingham.

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Posted by Anne on January 23, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (1)

The village of Bedfont in Middlesex is not the kind of place you'd purposefully go and visit. Lying in the shadow of Heathrow airport, it's one of many suburbs you pass through in a hurry to catch your plane. But tucked away on the village green lies the parish church of St Mary the Virgin, which boasts a very impressive display of topiary.

Either side of the church gate are two towering yew trees that have been shaped to form two peacocks and an arch. These birds sit on top of a pile of leafy pillows which in turn rest on a topiary inscription: 1704 and 1990. The whole structure towers over the path to the church and at night it is floodlit magnificently.

The church itself dates from 1150 but it is thought that the trees were first cut into peacocks in 1704. Several periods of dilapidation and restoration followed with the most recent restoration being in 1990, remedying the neglect of the post-war years.

Such is the presence of these mighty birds in the village, that they are represented on the local district council crest and Bedfont Green F.C. are known affectionately as "The Peacocks". In 1827 Thomas Hood published a lengthy poem about them called "The Two Peacocks of Bedfont":

Each Sabbath morning, at the hour of prayer, Behold two maidens, up the quiet green Shining, far distant, in the summer air That flaunts their dewy robes and breathes between Their downy plumes,--sailing as if they were Two far-off ships,--until they brush between The churchyard's humble walls, and watch and wait On either side of the wide open'd gate ….

Worth missing a plane for.

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Posted by Jasia on May 30, 2009 | Permalink

The South Bank Lion stands proudly at the south-west corner of Westminster Bridge. Created in 1837 by W. F. Woodington, he's been about a bit, starting off as one of a pair on the Red Lion Brewery. When this was demolished in 1949 to make way for the Royal Festival Hall, King George VI took a shine to him and he was moved to Waterloo Station. But he wasn't there for long either. It was extended in 1966 and he ended up in his final resting place on Westminster Bridge near County Hall.

He also had a bit of a facelift on the way. When they were guardians of the Red Lion Brewery, both lions were red. The other one, which ended up on the Rowland Hill Memorial Gate at Twickenham Stadium, is now painted gold but the South Bank lion has been restored to show us what he's made of - Coade Stone.

Coade stone is a rather peculiar thing, not being a stone at all. Instead it’s a durable ceramic material which is resistant to the elements, explaining why our friend looks so sprightly today. Created by Eleanor Coade and first sold in 1769, it was easily produced in moulds, widely used, and hugely successful. Mrs Coade's Artificial Stone Company on Westminster Bridge Road catered for the high end of society, with its wares ending up in all kinds of high falutin' places, even Buckingham Palace.

However, Coade Stone's star waned as quickly as it appeared and in 1833 the company was declared bankrupt. Portland cement became a cheaper, more viable alternative and Coade stone was rarely used after 1840. According to records there are around 650 examples left, all over the world, with the South Bank Lion one of the finest. So for those of you crossing Westminster Bridge, this is no ordinary statue, this is one very special lion.

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Posted by Anne on December 20, 2008 | Permalink

It’s certainly not unusual for buildings to be deemed a danger to public safety. Dodgy slates, subsiding walls or loose panes of glass often result in blocked pavements, stripy warning tape and cheek sucking workmen looking skywards. In the history of remedial construction however there must be precious few examples of an erection being declared unsafe due to the threat of falling penises. Yet in 1930’s London, number 429 Strand, a building dogged by controversy ever since its completion, was irrevocably altered, some would say vandalised, in the name of health and safety.

A stroll along the Strand today would most likely involve a head down battle against the tide of humanity. The street still contains some classic features, including Charing Cross Station and the Savoy hotel, but as a vehicle choked city thoroughfare, it’s not the best place in the capital to admire the view. In 1908 the scene would have been very different. Locals, spared the high doses of CO2, gathered in large crowds at what is now number 429, to view the recently completed headquarters of the British Medical Foundation. The focus of their attention was the series eighteen seven foot high nude sculptures entitled the Ages of Man which adorned the outside of the building. The nakedness of the figures enraged conservative writers of the time and the Evening Standard spearheaded a campaign against art works they considered to be morally retrograde. Father Bernhard Vaughn, a member of the National Vigilance Society raged in the paper that:

“As a Christian in a Christian City, I claim the right to say that I object most emphatically to such indecent statuary being thrust upon my view.”

While the good Father was clearly opposed to any sort of thrusting filth, the vehemence of the morally indignant he represented soon generated a wider public interest. So when the Evening Standard suggested that the statues were the sort that “…no careful father would wish his daughter, or no discriminating young man, his fiancée, to see”, Londoners flocked to the Strand eager to consume their quota of outrage.

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Posted by Maurice on February 20, 2007 | Permalink

Eddie Izzard once said of Stonehenge "no one's built a henge like that ever since." As far as a Google search can tell me, he never visited Nebraska. This Americanized henge lies in the middle of a field, mostly isolated but with a few houses in view. A recreation of Stonehenge that used monstrous land cruisers that crossed the highways in the 50's, 60's and 70's as megaliths make up the monument. Cadillacs, Fords and Chevys all have been used, stuck in the earth and painted grey. Creator Jim Reinders was influenced by his time in England, and his automotive monument was built as a memorial to his father on the family's farmland.

The small, nearby town of Alliance has little to see and only a few places to stay, so a visit takes planning. Carhenge signs can be found before coming into town, but missing them can mean incomplete direction, and for us a turn took us far off course. Take care in planning your route. Once there you will find the site has an abandoned and boarded up visitor center and a message board covered with broken plexiglas and faded newspaper articles. Besides the main monument, additional sculptures include a large fish made from car parts, a representation of Summer/Fall/Winter/Spring in the "Ford Seasons", and a car for signing your name, the "Autograph."

But the main purpose for visiting is is to walk the well-worn foot trails that lead to Carhenge. Dragging a pile of large rock many miles made sense to the Druids but here in the states we make our monuments mobile, until they are parked for all time.

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Posted by Robert on November 30, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Seeing the Apollo Pavilion today, it’s hard to imagine how it ever seemed like a good idea. Designed by artist Victor Pasmore and built between 1963 and 1970 in Peterlee, a new town in County Durham, it’s an abstract concrete er, thing - half architecture, half sculpture. At eighty-two feet wide, it's a hulking great brute, spectacularly out-of-scale to everything around it. It’s not so much ugly as inappropriate. Loathed by many, but loved by a dedicated few, it is at once a symbol of the idealism of modernism and the new town movement, and the epitome of where it went horribly wrong.

When Peterlee was founded in 1948, Modernist hero Berthold Lubetkin was brought in as master planner but when his proposals for high-rise living proved unsuitable for mining terrain he left, disillusioned, and become a farmer. Abstract artist Victor Pasmore who was then Master of Painting at Kings College in Newcastle-upon-Tyne stepped into the breach. He designed “The Pivvy” as it's known locally as a bridge and focal point in a problematic area of the Sunny Blunts housing estate where a lake divides the housing estate and the road. Aspirations were high, and it was named The Apollo Pavilion after the moon mission which was reaching for the stars around the same time

Pasmore described it as 'an architecture and sculpture of purely abstract form through which to walk, in which to linger and on which to play, a free and anonymous monument which, because of its independence, can lift the activity and psychology of an urban housing community on to a universal plane.’ Well, he was half-right. People lingered and played alright, but not in a good way. Almost immediately it became a haven for vandals and teeny-tipplers. To add insult to injury, a local government spat ensued when the Peterlee Development Corporation that commissioned the £33,000 work was wound up and the Easington District Council which inherited it refused to touch it with a bargepole, or more usefully a paintbrush.

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Posted by Anne on November 08, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (3)

I must have driven past the turning for the A4180 a couple of hundred times before finally flicking the indicators and directing my car away from the terminally busy lanes of the A40. Previously my desire to either get to, or escape from, the congested delights of London had always persuaded me to speed past the west and east bound road signs which point towards Yeading and Ruislip respectively. Yet, delightful as these towns may well be, it was the words Polish War Memorial, emblazoned in white capitals across the top of the metal rectangle which always tempted me to deviate off course. I was intrigued as to what sort of a monument would warrant such a grandiose notice and always imagined that the post-war government in Warsaw had commissioned some brutal piece of communist commemoration to sit in capitalist Britain. So, cruising up the slip road, I twisted my neck searching for a memorial of Soviet proportions, all shards of concrete and square jawed figures, striking determined poses.

When I drew up alongside the monument I realised that my socialist fantasy had gotten the better of me. The structure which remembers the 2,165 Polish airmen killed during WWII is the work not of bureaucrats but rather surviving comrades who sought to build the memorial soon after the armistice in 1945. The Polish air force association commissioned Miecystam Lubelski, a craftsman recently released form a Nazi labour camp, to construct the memorial and his plan exudes gravitas through simple design. A set of small iron gates lead to a needle of Portland stone fronted by a shallow pond and flanked by two low walls. On top of the central column is a bronze eagle, symbol of the Polish air force, and to the rear a sunken half moon walkway is inscribed with the names of the fallen as well the insignia of long disbanded squadrons. Despite its proximity to a busy roundabout, and given that the dead end approach road is used as a car park, the memorial manages to radiate a serenity which succeeds in blocking out the distractions which surround it.

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Posted by Maurice on October 26, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (5)

As you travel along the A66 on the edge of Darlington you'll see a train on one side of the road. Nothing unusual there except that this one isn't going anywhere. Designed by leading contemporary artist and sculptor David Mach, Train is made from 185,000 local "Accrington Nori" bricks and commemorates Darlington's illustrious heritage as "home of the railways". (The Stockton-Darlington Railway which opened in 1825 was Britain's first permanent steam locomotive railway). Mach describes his train as "as much a piece of architecture as a sculpture". 60 metres long and 6 metres high, it is a perfect rendering of the 1938 classic locomotive "Mallard", complete with plume of billowing smoke.

Creating a large scale, life-like whole out of thousands of commonplace objects is Mach's trademark. Apart from Train he has made a number of artworks worldwide such as The Temple at Tyre out of car tyres and his Big Heids beside the M8 near Glasgow out of steel piping. He puts his interest in mass-production down to a job in a bottling plant he had as a young man back home in Fife. But even though the constituent parts may be common, the end result is far from throwaway and his work is usually thoughtfully designed and painstakingly constructed with sensitivity to the local area and its long-term future.

To create the train a 5 metre long maquette was built - "a substantial piece of sculpture in itself" according to Mach. This was then scanned and produced in drawing form, then redrawn on computer. The construction was "a painful, boring process" involving a team of architects, engineers, bricklayers, quantity surveyors, mortar experts and the artist himself, there to make sure that each brick was in exactly the right place. The team of 34 took 21 weeks to build it and thoughtfully included 20 special "bat" bricks to encourage our nocturnal friends to nest there.

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Posted by Anne on August 06, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (3)

It’s amazing what people can get accustomed to. Locals living in Headington, a quiet suburb on the eastern edge of Oxford, don’t seem to notice the 25 foot long headless shark embedded in the roof space of an otherwise undistinguished terraced house. The head turning and furrowed brows are now the preserve of outsiders who gaze quizzically at the fibreglass fish then look skywards as if the beast has crashed down from the heavens. But this fishy protrusion is not in place by accident and from the time it was craned into position on 9th of August 1986 the shark swam into a wave of controversy.

The owner of the house with the new finned extension was Bill Heine, an American expat who had commissioned sculptor John Buckley to create the piece. If Bill’s desire was to generate publicity he very quickly achieved his goal as pictures of the shark went from Oxford to Fleet Street and then around the world. Camera crews and the curious followed all questioning the motives behind the eccentric project. Bill replied that the shark, actually named ‘untitled’, was a comment on Cold War politics having been installed on the 41st anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. He told journalists,

“The shark was to express someone feeling totally impotent and ripping a hole in their roof out of a sense of impotence and anger and desperation….It is saying something about CND, nuclear, power, Chernobyl and Nagasaki. “

For many locals and council officials this artistic explanation did not provide Heine with the freedom to lower the tone and possibly the house prices in the area. At first the shark was hunted on the grounds that it posed a danger to public safety, but engineering reports on the girders supporting the structure suggested otherwise. The council decided they needed a ’bigger boat’ so used failure to comply with section 22 of the Town and Country Planning Act as grounds for removal. While the debates on the future of the shark became mired in council committees local people slotted into pro and anti camps. The shark was either a harmless bit of fun or an unlawful eyesore. Heine proved adept at stalling for time and in 1991 appealed to Michael Heseltine, then secretary of state for the environment, for clemency. In 1992 Heseltine’s inspector Peter Macdonald ruled in favour of the sculpture and the shark was free to remain a fish out of water.

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Posted by Maurice on July 26, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (8)

Crosby beach has some strange visitors - 100 figures by Angel of the North creator Antony Gormley. Based on a cast of the artist's body, the sculptures are made out of cast iron and stand staring at the horizon. On a busy beach at first they are hard to spot, arranged over 3 kilometres of shore, stretching almost 1 km out to sea. We could only see 10 or 15 at the most and only 3 were fully visible from head to toe. The rest were partially submerged with some only head and shoulders above the water, not waving but drowning.

Up close the figures have been worn by the elements, giving them a wonderful texture. Each one has a tag on its wrist with a number. Despite the fact that each figure is 650 kilos of high-grade British art they seem pretty approachable and local residents have obviously adopted them as their own. The one that we could get to most easily was surrounded by children and as photos from the Another Place Flickr pool show they are sometimes adorned with sunhats, motorbike helmets and even a Santa outfit. They're also a handy place to leave your flip-flops if you're heading in for a paddle (but please, no swimming on this beach - it's too dangerous).

We saw it on a beautiful sunny late afternoon but I can imagine that other viewings will offer up different things depending on the weather and the tide. The figures looked beautiful against a blue sky but they look like they would rise to the challenge of a cold, rainy winter's day. It’s a truly beautiful, unique spectacle, in harmony with its surroundings - simple and elegant. And you can take from it as much or as little as you want. Amid the bustle of the beach, the solidity and stolidity of these figures gave me an enormous sense of peace.

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Posted by Anne on June 18, 2006 | Permalink

If you can't decide whether to go for a walk or visit an art gallery you could always do both and visit Glenkiln Sculpture Park near Dumfries. It was established in 1951 by Sir William Keswick who owned the land and wanted to exhibit sculpture in a natural setting. He was a friend of Henry Moore's so there are four sculptures by him plus one each by Jacob Epstein and Auguste Rodin.

There are no signs to or in the park (someone suggested this is because the statues had been vandalised in the past) so finding all the sculptures becomes a bit of a treasure hunt. 4 you can see from the road - Henry Moore's King and Queen, a Moore cross, Rodin's John the Baptist beside a small car park, then Moore's Standing Figure. The other two - Epstein's The Visitation and Moore's Two Piece Reclining Figure are further off the beaten track up a hill beside the reservoir. The setting is perfect as the sculptures look solid and rugged enough to withstand a gale, and the green of the tarnished bronze stands out against the hills. Anytime I've been it's been virtually deserted which is just as well as the road is single track with few passing places. It's a lovely place for quiet contemplation and would be ideal for a good walk or a cycle. Just make sure you take a picnic.

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Posted by Anne on May 02, 2006 | Permalink