What price a prancing steed? Is £2 million enough to ensure that mortals thundering through the Garden of England on today’s iron horse see the proud equine symbol of Kent towering like a colossus over Ebbsfleet? Actually, unlike Invicta, it won’t be prancing: Eurostar passengers will simply have to think, when we talk of horses, that they see them printing their proud hoofs i’ th’ receiving earth. Mark Wallinger’s stallion will be static, white and monumental. It will be 33 times life-size, visible from 20 miles away, anchored on concrete foundations and constructed of concrete-sprayed wire-mesh panels, stained to resemble horse flesh.
That, at least, was the conception when the sculpture won the competition three years ago to give southern England a landmark as iconic as Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North. But time, money and a global crash have taken their toll. The maintenance costs, which include scrubbing its flanks and fetlocks of graffiti, have risen from £2 million a year to £12 million. Even to those committed to sculpture on a monumental scale, that seems a lot. Will this horse even leave the stable?
It would be perverse if Wallinger’s stallion had to be destroyed but Anish Kapoor’s tower of twisted metal rose unscathed across the Thames in Stratford. Surely our descendants would rather be watched over by a noble steed than a jumble of gigantic coat-hangers? It is time for patrons to gallop to the rescue, if the horse of Ebbsfleet is not to go the way of other landscape-changing works that were never eventually built. Leonardo failed to erect a giant bronze horse for the Duke of Milan. Tatlin never saw his revolutionary tower go up in Russia. This horse must be built, not hobbled.