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portrait at Balmoral which he failed to complete.
Oh and his proposal of marriage was rejected by the
Duchess of Bedford, the woman who invented the
concept of afternoon tea. That couldn’t have helped.
Landseer is the man who made the lions of Trafalgar
Square.
Asking the painter Landseer to make sculptures was
a bit like asking the sculptor Michelangelo to paint the
ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Both men took their time
about it. Landseer took so long, almost a decade, that it
became a popular joke in the music halls. Legend
says that the delay was caused because he was waiting
for a lion to die at London Zoo so that he had a model
to work from. Some even say that said dead lion rotted
away before Landseer finished the paws, which
consequently were based on his landlady’s cat and are
quite wrong. Doubtful but fun – all cities need fairy
stories. There is some evidence that Landseer had
indeed used a zoo corpse for his 1849 work
The Desert
which features a dead lion and which later formed the
basis of the design on tins of Lyle’s Golden Syrup in
which a colony of bees have been attracted to a dead
lion and the motto reads
out of the strong came forth
sweetness
. How odd. Please can I have a tin of the
sweet stuff with the dead lion and the bees on the tin?
Trafalgar Square was laid out for the express purpose
of displaying statues and public art but it didn’t take
long for it to attract demonstrators who know a good
rallying point when they see one. The famous
fountains weren’t added for decoration – they were a
ruse to break up the space for demonstrations. The
original fountains of Aberdeen granite by Charles
Barry are now in Canada with the current ones added
in the 1930s by Edwin Landseer’s godson – Edwin
Landseer Lutyens. The fountains commemorate two
Great War naval heroes Earls Jellicoe and Beattie and
if you look closely you’ll see tiny sharks in there with
the mermaids and the dolphins.
Lions are a popular public art design in London.
Lions heads sculpted by Timothy Butler for Sir Joseph
Bazalgette in the 1860s
line the river walls on both
sides of the Embankment, their mouths hold mooring
rings. The Thames Watermen would say that if the
lions drink, (because the tide is very high) London will
flood. I’ve been watching them closely of late. There’s
also a lion on Westminster Bridge and a fascinating
fellow he is, sculpted of Coade Stone or Lithodipyra,
an artificial stone able to withstand weather damage
unlike natural stones like Portland stone. Coade Stone
was produced, by Royal Appointment to King George
III and the Prince Regent, in the Lambeth factory of
Elizabeth Coade during the late 18
th
and early 19
th
centuries and became quite the thing in its day. You
can find it at St George’s Chapel in Windsor, the Royal
Naval College in Greenwich, Buckingham Palace and
The Royal Pavilion in Brighton where it didn’t
prove quite so resilient to the salty air and the nose,
fingers and eventually the rest of the arm fell off the
statue of George IV.
Contrary to popular belief the recipe for Coade
Stone was not lost when Elizabeth Coade died.
It was made by her second-cousin-once-removed for
some years after her death but ultimately became
uneconomic and was replaced by Portland cement.
Here is the recipe if you fancy a go at home:
10% of grog (also know as firesand and chamotte
this has been used by potters since the Bronze Age)
5-10% of crushed flint
5-10% of fine quartz
10% of crushed soda lime glass
60-70% of ball clay from Devon or Dorset
Bake at Gas Mark 30 (1,100° C) for four days.
So far Victoria’s generals of empire and all the
assorted lions, dragons and sharks that adorn the
capital’s streets and squares have stood the test of
time and survived the bureaucrats. But not so all
public art and not all towers. The Skylon Tower,
that space-age cigar-shaped wonder that seemed to
float just above the ground at the Festival of Britain
on London’s South Bank in 1951, was dismantled
by order of Winston Churchill who saw it as a nasty
reminder of the post-war Labour government’s
vision for a Socialist Britain. A popular joke of the
period was that, like the British economy,
It had no
visible means of support.
Will ArcelorMittal Orbit survive the test of time?
Out (and oddly) spoken art critic
Brian Sewell
believes that Britain is
littered with public art of
absolutely no merit.
Channeling the spirit of Mary
Whitehouse Mr. Sewell didn’t like the idea of the
Orbit even before the design was unveiled:
We are entering a new period of fascist gigantism.
These are monuments to egos and you couldn't
find a more monumental ego than Boris
.
Really?
I am Boris, Mayor of Mayors
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Maybe not.
You can visit ArcelorMittal Orbit with City &
Village Tours (and make your own minds up) from
14 April 2014. There are a number of itineraries
to choose from, two are described in this issue of
The Kettle
. If you have already booked a visit to the
Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park with us you can add
the ArcelorMittal Orbit at a cost of £11.00 per
person (this is senior rate, adults are £12.00).
Call us on 0208 692 1133 for more information.
