Art for all: five of London’s most powerful — and playful — public pieces

This article is part of a guide to London from FT Globetrotter

The successful contemporary public artwork is a rare beast — almost, by definition, an exception. Any piece that involves an artist trying to satisfy an audience of property developers, local councillors and members of the public is never going to have the daring, subtlety and depth that art for art’s sake offers. Hard to find, then — but not impossible.

As Covid-19 has cut off Londoners from galleries and museums, those of us thirsty for aesthetic stimulation have been scanning the silent cityscape. With London’s decades-long development boom have come dozens of desultory, moralising projects blocking pavements and clogging up shopping centres, abstract enough to suggest boldness, figurative enough not to frighten the horses. The selection here does not include any of those.

Instead, from the longstanding Fourth Plinth project in Trafalgar Square to an Olympian absurdity, here is my choice of works if your eyes, brain and spirit need a certain refreshment.

Statue of Millicent Fawcett (Gillian Wearing, 2018)

Parliament Square, Westminster, London SW1

It is astonishing (or perhaps not) that it was only three years ago when the most prominent sculpture park in London acquired not just its first statue by a woman but its first statue of a woman.

This sculpture of Fawcett, a late-19th-century/early 20th-century feminist and politician, is not just the commemoration of protest, but a contemporary act of protest itself, challenging the MPs in the nearby Houses of Parliament to match their virtuous rhetoric with action — and inspiring citizens to demand change.

Beyond its political significance, what makes Wearing’s work a cut above is the detail: the wonderful lifelike, humane textures of her clothes and her hair. No unapproachable military gleam here.

Perhaps we should have a one-down, one-up public-sculpture policy — for every slave trader or colonialist who faces calls to be toppled, we could put up a suffragist, an abolitionist or someone else neglected but needed in their place.

Directions

The Fourth Plinth (1999 — present)

Trafalgar Square, west end, london wc2

An equestrian statue of William IV was planned for this prime spot, right in the heart of London — outside the National Gallery, up the road from the Houses of Parliament — but since 1999 bold new commissions have occupied it instead. They respond to the square’s monumentality, to the militaristic sculptures on the other three plinths and to the nation’s crises and neuroses.

It has had far more hits than misses, such as Rachel Whiteread’s resin cast of the plinth itself, placed upside down on top of it; Antony Gormley’s “One & Other”, where members of the public were given an hour on the plinth to say or do whatever they wanted; and Michael Rakowitz’s recreation of an ancient Assyrian sculpture out of empty cans of Iraqi date syrup, a commentary on war and cultural vandalism.

At the moment it has Heather Phillipson’s all too aptly named “The End”, where a drone clings to a cherry atop a swirl of whipped cream, complete with massive fly, highlighting the almost apocalyptic banality (in the artist’s words) of the life and space around it.

Directions

Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle (Yinka Shonibare CBE, 2010)

National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London SE10

Shonibare’s ship was in fact commissioned for the Fourth Plinth in 2010, but don’t think of this choice as a cheat — just a second bite of the cherry. It is an exact 1:30 replica of HMS Victory, the flagship of Horatio Nelson’s navy at the battle of Trafalgar in 1805, complete with the correct number of guns and sails, except for one provocative difference.

Instead of cream canvas, this Victory is decked out in bright batik-print textiles, which Dutch merchants copied from their Indonesian colonies and exported to west Africa. With one simple substitution, Shonibare raises questions of empire, trade, capital and suffering. The fact that it’s in a bottle alludes to the desire of some to keep history — their telling of history — preserved, intact, airless.

Perhaps this Trafalgar ship sat best in Trafalgar Square, but the privilege of seeing again and again more than makes up for its shift south of the river.

Directions

Pecking Bird (Gary Hume, 2013)

Regent’s Place, corner of brock street and Hampstead Road, london nw1

Cycling across this unlovely junction, a no-man’s-land nexus between the West End, Regent’s Park and King’s Cross, I never fail to smile when I notice Hume’s bird in its tropical colours, so striking among the grey of offices and the black of tarmac.

Hume, who was associated with the Young British Artists movement of the 1990s, tends to work in gloss paint, giving the highest sheen, and birds have long been one of his motifs. He reduces them to a few colours, more design artefact than ornithological study, and their simplicity sometimes gives them a certain reserve or even mystery.

I like to think that this aluminium bird, although commissioned by a property developer, is subversively pecking away at the culture of work, property and capital which brought it into existence.

Directions

ArcelorMittal Orbit (Anish Kapoor, 2012)

Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Stratford, london e20

I know, I said I was looking for works with depth, but I think it is precisely the untrammelled nonsense of Kapoor’s design which appeals to me. The whole piece is so pointless — but it is proud of that pointlessness, it owns it.

Constructed for the Olympics, the 115-metre-high Orbit looms over the slightly more practical sports venues built for the games, including Zaha Hadid’s swooping Aquatics Centre, and looks like something a civilisation from four thousand years in the future has sent back. Its organic loops seem to have no purpose but the expression of their own energy.

It has another artistic element, however: Carsten Höller wove the world’s longest tunnel slide around the Orbit, part of his desire to evoke, in his words, “an emotional state that is a unique condition somewhere between delight and madness”, while also going “wheeeeee”.

If I ever cycle by it on my way to the shopping centre in its shadow (the real Olympic legacy), I can do nothing but puzzle and wonder — which is much more than most public art inspires.

Directions

What is your favourite piece of public art in London, and why? Tell us in the comments — a selection of answers may be published

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