Postwar civic art in UK – pictures

Simon Phipps, author of Concrete Poetry: Postwar Modernist Public Art, takes us on a tour of some of the UK’s most important publicly owned artworks

Charles Anderson, Concrete Sculpture, Bannerman High School, Baillieston, Glasgow, 1976–77

 Details of the commissioning of this work by Charles Anderson are not known. Twin blocks of in situ cast concrete, one lying horizontal and one upright, feature the swirling circular motifs that can be seen in other sculptural relief works by Anderson. It stands at the entrance to Bannerman High School and, like many public artworks of its kind, seems to have become absorbed into the anonymous landscape of the school. ‘I don’t really notice it at all,’ remarked one member of staff

Barbara Hepworth, Three Obliques, Cardiff University, 1968

 Contrary to her usual practice, Hepworth made a small-scale version of Three Obliques, to be cast in bronze, before working it as a monumental piece. As such, it deliberately invites an active engagement – ‘you can’t look at a sculpture if you are going to stand stiff as a ramrod and stare at it,’ Hepworth urged, ‘you must walk around it, bend toward it, touch it and walk away from it.’

Peter Womersley, Peter Nuffield Transplantation Surgery Unit, Western General Hospital, Edinburgh, 1968

Peter Womersley may well be one of Brutalism’s best-kept secrets. His charismatic design for the world’s first purpose-built organ transplantation unit lends emphatic presence to a pioneering medical establishment and embodies the platonic geometries and uncompromising technical rigour of high modernism. At the same time, this profoundly sculptural concrete structure has a mannerist quality that seems almost to hint at a postmodernism yet to come 

Antony Hollaway, Sculptural wall, Huyton, Liverpool 1968

Hollaway is perhaps best known as a designer of lambent abstracted stained-glass windows at Manchester Cathedral. However, he also worked with the London County Council’s Housing and Architects departments as a consultant artist, and as a researcher into new ways of using concrete. In this role, he filed and held patents for ‘extruded decorative concrete’, ‘polystyrene shuttering’, ‘resin mix extrusions’ and other innovative processes to be added to the public artist’s toolkit

Bernard Schottlander, 2MS Series, No.4 Fred Roche Gardens, Milton Keynes, 1970, Listed, grade II 

The Milton Keynes Development Corporation’s ambitious commissioning programme has gifted the new town with over 200 public artworks. These monumental works in painted welded steel were originally installed in the grounds of the corporation’s Wavendon Tower headquarters, but in 1983 were distributed around the city. 2MS Series No. 4, a quartet of orthogonal elements sliced at an angle, stands with two other Schottlander sculptures in Fred Roche Gardens

 Keith McCarter, Abstract Wall Relief, Charing Cross Station, Glasgow, 1972 

This robust relief lines a walkway leading to Glasgow’s Charing Cross Station and was one of several public art works commissioned for the R Seifert & Partners station complex. Formed from 19 pre-cast concrete blocks, each 1.3 metres wide, it features a succession of textured abstract forms that jostle and overlap, thereby creating a sense of dynamic tension along the vertical plane

Unknown artist, Halifax Elim Church, Halifax, West Yorkshire

This concrete relief decorates the Elim Pentecostal church in Halifax, mediating between the striking modern church building (an orthogonal concrete structure raised on a plinth, capped by a circular, sharply ridged roof with a conical steel-frame spire) and the more nondescript flat-roofed church hall. With its interplay of curved and angular, convex and concave, textured and smooth forms, it has the air of being attached to the building rather than integral to its construction

Edmund Nuttall Ltd, Kingsway Tunnel Vents, Liverpool, 1971

Designed to relieve congestion in the existing Birkenhead and Queensway tunnels beneath the Mersey, the Kingsway Tunnel was constructed by Liverpool civil engineers Edmund Nuttall Ltd (the firm responsible the Liver Building), and opened in 1971. The ventilation shafts standing on either bank of the Mersey are a forceful expression of technological achievement, positively flamboyant in their uncompromising modernity. Unconscious, possibly, but they also hint at the profile of city’s other ‘Mersey Funnel’, the Metropolitan Cathedral 

Gerald Laing, Callanish Wolfson Centre, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, 1974

 Often (erroneously) referred to as ‘Steelhenge’, Callanish in fact references the standing stones of the Western Isles and was designed, the artist noted, ‘to remind the scientifically-orientated student that there is a place for the contemplative – and the art student that art must make use of modern scientific materials and scales to remain relevant.’ This ring of Corten steel elements, rising stark and sheer from a lawn, was jointly funded by the University of Strathclyde and the Scottish Arts Council

LCC Architects, playground, Aintree Estate, Fulham, London, 1962–67 

 The Aintree Estate was designed by the borough’s architects’ department and constructed using the Larsen-Nielsen system of pre-cast concrete components. The landscaping at ground level included a playground area made entirely of concrete – a series of Brutalist enclosures with perforated walls that imposed a rationalist geometry on children’s play spaces. Hammersmith and Fulham now promotes the site as a potential film location.

Harry Noble, The Elephant, Coventry Sports Centre, Coventry, 1973–77

 The 1977 extension to Coventry Central Baths boasts a quirky anthropomorphic profile that echoes the elephant emblazoned on the city’s coat of arms. Designed by Harry Noble and Terence Gregory of the City Architects Department, this charismatic structure has a faceted, zinc-panelled facade and triangular glazing. Although the original baths building is grade-II listed, applications to list The Elephant have been unsuccessful to date, and it is threatened with demolition under Coventry Council’s plans to redevelop the site

John Bridgeman, Play Sculpture, Curtis Gardens, Birmingham 1960, Listed grade II

 Bridgeman’s play sculpture, the artist’s only surviving work of this kind, remains in its original location, a parkland playground designed by landscape architect Mary Mitchell. Inspired by 1950s Scandinavian artworks that invite playful engagement, its piscine form – now somewhat battered and missing the tip of its tail – is punctuated by an inviting void. It was originally finished with a pale metallic paint: a tactile antithesis to the ‘Sculpture with a capital S’ that its artist-creator abhorred

Source: Poems in steel and concrete: postwar civic art – in pictures