Further to my post about Harlow, now designated as a sculpture town, I just came across this passage on the web:"The most lauded marriage between art and a new town occurred at Harlow, which grew rapidly from a small, scattered rural population to a thriving centre for over 70,000people. It eventually acquired a sculpture collection larger than any other British town of similar size…"
Richard Cork in E. Rosenberg and Richard Cork, Architects’ Choice: Art and Architecture in Great Britain Since 1945, (Thames and Hudson, London, 1992), p. 52.
More details can be found HERE (you will need to scroll down a little). It makes most interesting reading. It shows some pictures, explains the history and sitings of all the main sculptures in Harlow.
Rob Halfon ~ Working hard for Harlow, Hastingwood, Nazeing, Roydon & Sheering. http//roberthalfon.blogspot.com
Interesting find Rob - there are some thoughts that Harlow has the largest collection of public external artworks (excepting London) in the country.
ReplyDeleteThanks to efforts bymembers of Harlow Civic Society the fine sculpture by LYNN CHADWICK called TRIGON which stands outside M & S in Broad Walk is now freed from the street clutter that surrounded it for many years. BT had proposed to replace the 4 phone boxes close to Trigon with 2 kiosks at distance of about 6 metres away. This seemed to us and Harlow Art Trust (HAT) an acceptable solution as HAT had considered moving Trigon to another site, so hemmed was it. However when the work was carried out BT put the kiosks on the same site as the former phone boxes, thus no improvement to the site. Some months of meetings, phone calls, e-mails and letters finally convinced the authorities that we were right. The kiosks have now been moved to another location and TRIGON is free! John Curry
ReplyDeleteArt is always controversial, public art particularly so, and Harlow's public art is no exception. It ranges from the stunning and timeless to the dated and awful.
ReplyDeleteWe have some wonderful sculpture in Harlow. Henry Moore's timeless classic, the family group, a sort of icon for our pram town, is my favorite. Moore put his Welsh miner's heart and soul it after he became a father and it's much loved by the families of Harlow, including my brother and I, who remember being among the legions of children who climbed all over it during the 1950s. Sadly, the piece had to be moved from its original, open air location at Mark Hall Park to our yellow gatso of a civic centre, because, in common with so many other Harlow statues, it was vandalised.
Public sculpture, whether modern or classic in form, must be good quality art, it must have a timeless universality. It must be meaningful, worth having, carefully matched to, and the right size for, its location - and it must have public support.
Whoever decided to pay thousands for a non descript pyramid of logs outside Kingsmoor House should be made to refund the cost of that artless ego trip. Ditto whoever, many years ago, decided to waste £100,000 of public money on an irrigation system for a roundabout flower bed to enhance the prestige of our, now demolished, Town Hall and its, now relocated, public square.
I sympathise with those who constantly graffiti the horrible tower block of brass cubes at Bush fair, their work is an improvement. And whoever stole the Lion statue should be given a vote of thanks by Harlow.
Harlow's Arts' Trust has made some inspired aquisitions - Rubenstein's city and screen, Soukop's donkey, Rea's Kore, the meat porters, all of those lovely hands and cats all over Harlow and more besides. Yet its also made some howlers. Why will the trust not learn that it is far better to have just a few exceptional pieces than to half fill our town with rubbish?
Where art's concerned, less really is Moore...
If Moore's iconic Family Group is the best of Harlow's art, that dreadful 'Solo Flight' monstrosity shown in your picture has to be the worst. These two pieces surely illustrate all that's right and all that's wrong about Harlow's public art.
ReplyDelete'Solo Flight' is iconic in its own way: in its sheer dreadfulness and the terrible choice of location. There it sits, under the Stansted flight path, a shining, mud splattered, resource squandered totem of out of control consumerism and runaway aviationism, artistically coated in brown goo by children who use it as a climbing frame and slide. If it really is a bird, as some claim, and not a plane, then it must be a predatory pterodactyl.
Your picture shows the least objectionable view of this piece. Every day I wince as I drive past this oppressive sculpture which dominates, obscures and spoils both a lovely raised stretch of green space along First Avenue and the view of one of Harlow's truly wonderful works of art: the 900 year old church of St Mary at Latton.
Solo Flight is an imbalanced, over sized, ill conceived, meaningless, stainless steel carbuncle. Contrast it with the stunning Pisces, which is also stainless steel, yet beautifully balanced and conceived and the perfect size for its inspired location in the middle of the town park's Water Garden.
Solo Flight was originally located in the Harvey Centre - even they got rid of it.Why did we ever agree to allow them to foist it on us? Please, Harlow Council, relocate this stainless steel pterodactyl to a more a more suitable site: a pedestal at our civic dump would be the perfect location.
Another favourite among Harlow's stunning public art collection is the lovely bust of Sir Freddie Gibberd, Harlow's Master planner, in the Gibberd Garden at Marsh Lane, Harlow.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.thegibberdgarden.co.uk/home.htm
My father, a member of Harlow Art Society who knew Sir Freddie, said he was a lovely man. I believe he was the only modern architect who lived in the town he designed.
Sir Freddie is much loved and respected for his ground breaking designs for Harlow and its countryside. He protected as much of Harlow's countryside heritage and green spaces as he possibly could in order to humanise our town and to make it attractive but also to make it sustainable.
Sir Freddie grasped what so many greedy modern planners and politicians have failed to - to our cost - that a district packed with as many watercourses as ours is could not be sustainably built to relatively high density unless large green space flood buffers were integrated into the design.
This was clearly one of the main reasons Sir Freddie made Harlow's green wedge coridors integral to Harlow's design. If you look at the location of these green coridors, they are almost all located around Harlow's watercourses - streams and ponds.
The green corridors acted as natural soakaways, drawing off the increased amount of stormwater runoff from Harlow's highly impermeable concrete design into Harlow's streams.
Since Sir Freddie's death, Harlow's green corridors have been increasingly eroded by a succession of politicians and planners who packed unsutainably high density development into Harlow at any cost - in particular at Church Langley and New Hall.
The effect was to increase stormwater runoff from these estates while decreasing the volume of soakaways. As a result, a number of Harlow's neighbourhoods, especially those around New Hall, which never flooded in Sir Freddie's day, are now frequently hit by flooding.
John Curry, Well done for your hard work and perseverance in getting the horrible clutter around the Trigon cleared. We can actually see the Trigon now! That part of the High was such a horrible mess and now looks a 100% better thanks to you.
ReplyDeleteOn the subject of clutter in Harlow: why are so many of Harlow's roads being dug up for various road, pipe and cable works over and over again? Much of Old Harlow, Potter Street and First Avenue has been like one large earthworks and building site for many months.
The mess, noise pollution and disruption might be less intolerable if any of these sites were ever actually completed and done with. However, no sooner is a road resurfaced than it's dug up all over again a few months later and the whole disruptive process started again. Some of our roads have been dug up and resurfaced two or three times in the space of a year.
It's like being propelled back to the early days of Harlow 50 - 60 years ago, then we lived in a sea of mud on the building sites that were all over Harlow. The pioneers of Harlow were told then that once this building work was finished we would never have to put up with that scale of mess and disruption again. We were also promised that this construction work would produce homes for our children and our children's children.
That's two broken political promises. Little wonder that we don't believe politicians now when they claim that the huge and unsustainable expansion of Harlow is for the benefit of our children. No one but Londoners can afford most of these new homes under construction while thousands of Harlow's young adults who can't afford these new homes are compelled to live with their parents.
The only people who seem to benefit from turning Harlow once again into an overspill town for London are Londoners and our politicians.
Re: holes in roads, have you seen the following from Boris Johnson?
ReplyDelete"It all started one Sunday many months ago. I was required to drive across London for an official event. The journey was hell. I came across hole after hole, unmanned, impenetrable. I was so furious at the delay that I summoned my transport officials the next morning and demanded to know what was going on. They scurried away, and soon returned with a large map of London, a constellation of dots spread across it. The dots, they explained, represented each roadwork site that they didn't previously know about that weekend. They were as flabbergasted as I was.
The problem, they said, was that under existing rules, any utility company can roll up, start digging and ask questions later. At no stage are they required to ask permission. Yes, they have to notify us, but this is often done with about three days notice. Or none at all, as was the case that weekend. How could they be allowed to get away with this?
Emboldened by my righteous anger, I summoned every Chief Executive of all the utility companies into my office to demand an explanation. Sensing the Mayoral fuse was short, they readily acknowledged that, as a New Labour minister would say, more could be done.
Flowing from that showdown overlooking the Thames, this week I was able to announce that indeed, more will be done. Thames Water get the most brownie points for agreeing to start 'plating' some of their sites. This means cars can literally drive over holes dug in the road when they're not being worked on. All the companies have signed up to a Code of Conduct, agreeing to do things like putting up signs explaining who they are and who to shout at, and work out of peak hours where possible.
The most technocratic, but easily the most significant promise was to start preparing for a permit scheme. Once the Government gets it act together and approves a formal permit scheme, the companies will be ready to implement it from day one. This will mean that every time they so much as look at a shovel, they will need to get our sign off first.
The code is self policing, so as much as I would like dish out eye watering fines, I can't. But the companies have approached this in good faith, and they know the eyes of Londoners are on them. I will be holding them to account on their promises, and I need your help. If you come across an enigmatic hole, and there is no sign or no explanation as to why it seems to have been abandoned get in touch and report it."
Why can't we do that in Harlow?