'Conversation pieces of memorable quality': The Queen Elizabeth II Memorial

     So late this afternoon my timeline on Twitter has been mildly a-flutter with images of the five final 'concept designs' in the competition to design a fitting memorial for the Late Queen.  It is now time for a public consultation.  I'm not quite sure how this is to work out: we are given a limited number of visuals from which to make our choice and we are also told the 'winning' design may be altered/refined in the next stage of the design process - they are merely 'Early Proposed Design Concepts' remember, so it's all a bit vague.*  There is a real possibility then that the public will not get what it 'voted' for.  It's all a bit of swizz really.  A Potemkin exercise.

     'The memorial,' we are told, 'is envisioned to be a new national landmark of outstanding quality...'  That remains to be seen.  The proposals range from the flat-out bizarre to the mediocre.  So far, at least, what seems to be attracted people's favourable attention is the image from the Foster + Partners submission of the their proposed treatment of the equestrian statue of the Queen, that would standing on the s side of the Mall opposite Marlborough Gate.  A remarkably classical design for Foster, hitherto the epitome of sleek, anonymous Modernism.

     The five finalists (each receiving an honorarium of £50,000) are (as presented on the Malcolm Reading Consultants** website - they are handling the public consultation): Foster + Partners, Heatherwick Studio, J&L Gibbons, Tom Stuart Smith, and finally WilkinsonEyre.  And while I have some sympathy for anyone who entered this competition as the 'brief' is exhausting, contradictory and in parts mutually exclusive, I have to say I find none of the five very inspiring.  Perhaps they have been set up to fail.  Some, however, are more bathetic than others i.e. Heatherwick Studio and Tom Stuart-Smith. That said the Heatherwick proposal is, at least, visually cohesive; the other proposals tend to visually incoherent with a little bit of this here and a little bit of that there - there is, for instance, that ridiculous flame sculpture in the Foster proposal.  I am reminded of the scatter gun aesthetics of the coronation. Is this really to be the aesthetic identity of the new reign? Is this really the best we can do?

     Reading the blurb I am struck with just how complex and bureaucratic the whole design process is.***  Each design team has to have a whole phalanx of consultants. I can't help but see this as a projection of a lack of cultural confidence.  All that is needed really is an excellent piece of sculpture of the Late Queen, preferably equestrian, on a suitable plinth.  It isn't rocket science. The rest including, all the bridges**** and the landscaping, the places of reflection, and the cod symbolism is essentially superfluous.  And judging my the response on Twitter/X this afternoon I am not alone in thinking this. 

   'Envisioned', I ask you.

     (07.06.25  Reread Stephen Bayley's essay for 'The Critic' this afternoon.  He rightly says that the 'compulsory' platitudes viz inclusion etc. should be dropped.  Cassandra like, he also evokes the spectre of a previous royal memorial, and to be honest one I had forgotten about, the truly dreadful Queen Elizabeth Gate, in London's Hyde Park.  Let it be a warning to us all.)

*  For instance, what will happen two those twin gates to St James's Park that stand on The Mall opposite to Marlborough Gate?  They are very French and were likely designed by Sir Aston Webb (and made by the Bromsgrove Guild) as part of his redesign of the Mall as part of the Victoria Memorial.)

**  I wonder how much they will be paid for there efforts.

***  This isn't an isolated example.  Watching the BBC coverage of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show I was surprised at how prescriptive and bureaucratic the process has become for those designing one of the main show gardens.  The risk in all of this is that designers will eventually walk away.

****  Two of the proposed bridges actually have names: from Foster 'The Bridge of Unity' and from Heatherwick 'The Togetherness Bridge'.  Not sure which is the more ghastly. 

Birmingham

      To Birmingham last week and a family wedding; and what a moving, joy filled day it was.  Beautiful weather and much happiness.  A day spent on foot for we walked from the Registrar's to the reception in bosky, rus in urbe, Edgebaston. And back. 

     We did indeed do a lot of walking that weekend, and saw a lot of the city.  The return to our hotel Friday evening along Broad St was particularly egregious - "The Road, like all main roads into a big city, achieved a kind of vast squalid importance .... it was a life line with a low opinion of life."*

     Early the next morning we traversed the city centre to the north end of Corporation St to get the bus to Lichfield.  Corporation St., it must be remembered, was Joseph Chamberlain's well meant but slightly cack-handed attempt at a 'Parisian Boulevard'.  Judging from old photographs, even when new it seemed to lack the visual cohesiveness necessary, and that cohesiveness is even less apparent today. One wonders if it could ever, at a certain level, really succeed - after all laisez-faire Birmingham was not the Second Empire.

      The northern section of the street is the legal centre of the city, what with the mediocre Crown Court and the spectacularly blood-red terracotta Victoria Law Courts by Aston Webb and Ingress Bell**. There are Barrister's chambers everywhere. But oh how that part of the city looked neglected.  The old County Court building, 1882, by John Williamson, in a fine Neo-Renaissance style and which I mistook it for a Victorian Bank (A confusion of typologies?), is empty and forsaken; the towers and pinnacles of Law Courts sprout shrubbery.***  It is not at all acceptable that a functioning public building should be such a condition. However the presence of the paraphernalia of building works does suggest (hopefully) that restoration is at hand.

     The whole thing however piqued my interest in what appeared to be an down-at-heal part of the city centre, and when I got back here I had a trawl on the internet. It revealed the whole sorry tale of the destruction of a vast area of the city in the 1950&60s.  Of an urban landscape sacked and left for dead. A whole area of the city dis-enchanted.  The damage done to Whittall St was particularly telling and deeply saddening.  Frustrating. Enraging.  It all seems a long way from the 'Civic Gospel' of late nineteenth century city.

     Sometimes I feel, as much as I actually like Birmingham, that it isn't really a city at all just a conglomeration of random buildings. A simulacrum.

* 'The Long View', Elizabeth Jane Howard's novel of 1956.

**Sir Aston Webb, you may recall from an earlier post, was architect of Birmingham University.

*** Turns out the County Court building is still a functioning law court.  Well, there you go.

  

Back in Birmingham I

   The bf and I sent part of this week visiting my family in the West Midlands.  On Wednesday we had a full day in Birmingham.  We started with a visit to the university and specifically 'The Barber Institute for the Fine Arts', which was founded in 1932 by Dame Martha Barber after the death of her husband Henry Barber, the Birmingham solicitor and property developer.  The University campus is visually a mess, but at its centre is a great hemicycle of buildings designed by Sir Aston Webb (1849-1930) in an amazingly eclectic style - part Byzantine, part Perpendicular Gothic, part Flemish.  Wholly original.  Wonderfully detailed - like all buildings of that date.  Red brick suitably enough predominates.

     Opened in 1938 the Barber is also a building is hard to nail down stylistically - part Classical, part Art Deco, part Viennese Secession.  The architect was Robert Atkinson (1883-1952).  The best things on the exterior are the strange ventilation towers.  Worth comparing too with the Aston Webb buildings to see the change in taste in little more than a generation.  The interior is full of lovely details, though everything seems curiously flat but very refined; the third dimension is somehow conspicuously lacking.  Anyway at the heart of the building is an auditorium, while wrapped around that central space is, at second floor level, an art gallery with a small(ish) permanent collection that is really very good.