Statues are about heroes. David Ogilvy, the heroic adman, explained their singularity: you will never, he said, find a statue of a committee. Not quite true: we have Rodin’s Burghers of Calais outside Parliament.
But statues are something else as well: “a mark of civilization”, according to Arthur Byron in his delightful guide to London Statues of 1981. So it is not surprising if they excite notions of propriety. The original and controversial design of a Prince seated classically dressed in the Albert Memorial made mid-Victorians fearful of an inappropriate vista up the royal toga.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel was a true hero, and the Brunel Statue Group is now proposing a memorial. He was a genius: a visionary engineer, booster and self-promoter. Brunel fought against convention, avoided the obvious, never sought consensus, yearned for novelty and was almost wantonly creative. Consequently, he had as many failures as successes. He just failed better.
Alas, what is proposed is, in my view, a pitiably low-brow, conceptually one-dimensional effort of literality in openwork metal designed by Kevin Boys, a blacksmith based at Surrey Docks Farm in Rotherhithe. If planning permission is granted, this 20m-tall horror will be erected, schematic stove pipe hat, tailcoat and all, in Rotherhithe, near the mouth of the amazing Thames Tunnel that Brunel designed and engineered with his father.
There is often a time lapse with statuary: Mozart got a statue in Pimlico 200 years after he lived there. Lawrence Bradshaw’s Marx popped up in Highgate Cemetery only in 1956. There is, in any case, already a Brunel statue, by Marochetti, on Victoria Embankment. It has a plinth by the great Norman Shaw.
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The proposed Brunel statue is so artless, anachronistic and maladroit, that Hugh Merrell (publisher of The Statues of London, 2009) said: “It’s like some joke sculpture you see outside the Frankfurt Trade Fair. We’re talking about Brunel, for God’s sake!”
It is, of course, an exercise in public art, one of the cons and delusions of contemporary urban life. Just as Soviet socialist realism could never be socialist and realist at the same time, so public art is neither public nor art. Public art is crapola foisted on the incurious by the credulous. It’s the same as military intelligence: a term that contains a jarring internal contradiction.
And yet we have ever more of it, spreading like an untreatable aesthetic virus. The otherwise magnificent St Pancras is marred by the gross and crude clinching couple, a conceit so sentimental it brings vulgarity into disrepute. The same perpetrator, Paul Day, made the Battle of Britain Memorial on the Embankment. Flyboys in goggles, a foreshortened Spitfire! Wince-making bathos. Right now, replacing Antony Gormley’s weary stunt, Trafalgar Square’s notorious fourth plinth accommodates a witlessly “realistic” statue of Sir Keith Park, the RAF commander who led the defence of London during the Battle of Britain. Park’s heroism is not in question, but bad public art needs interrogation.
Consider then, the better stuff: Barbara Hepworth in Battersea Park and on the façade of John Lewis in Oxford Street. Even Oscar Nemon’s Freud near Swiss Cottage Library has a certain old-Vienna charm. But surely statues are as much a thing of the past as heroes themselves?
Brunel made an art form of originality. He believed imaginative solutions to practical problems brought beautiful results. He looked forward, not back. We are much in need of his inspiration today. But inspiration is not the same as slavish adoration. A Brunel statue that would not dignify a motorway rest area is a real travesty of a real hero.
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An engineering visionary
Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859) built 1,200 miles of railway, more than 100 bridges, including five suspension bridges, and three ships In the 1820s he and his engineer father, Marc, worked on designs for the Thames Tunnel at Rotherhithe. It opened in 1843.
In 1830 Brunel won a competition to design a new bridge over the Avon at Bristol — the Clifton Bridge.
At the age of 26 he was made engineer for the new Great Western Railway, and embarked on an ambitious programme of tunnels, viaducts and bridges.
The Royal Albert Bridge over the Tamar is often seen as his greatest achievement.
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He pushed the boundaries of naval architecture with the SS Great Western and SS Great Britain.
Finally he designed the SS Great Eastern, the biggest ship of its time. He died just after its maiden voyage in 1859.
Sources: Brunel University; Design Museum