Statue of Edward VI (Scheemakers)
The statue of Edward VI by Peter Scheemakers at St Thomas' Hospital, London is one of two statues of the king at the hospital. Both commemorate Edward's re-founding of the hospital in 1551, it was moved to its current location inside the North Wing of the hospital in the 20th century. It was designated a Grade II* listed structure in 1979. Edward VI was his third queen, Jane Seymour. Born on 12 October 1537, he succeed his father at the age of nine in 1547 but never attained his majority, dying aged 15 in 1553. During the Reformation St Thomas', as a religious foundation, was deprived of its revenues and estates and was closed in 1540. In 1551, Edward granted a charter for the hospital's refounding; the origin of St Thomas' Hospital was the sick house attached to the Church of St Mary Overie in Southwark, founded in the 12th century. By the late 17th century, the hospital was in a dilapidated state and Sir Robert Clayton employed the architect, St Thomas' governor, Thomas Cartwright to undertake complete rebuilding.
The new buildings, of red brick and in a classical style were completed just after Clayton's death, in 1709. Following the complete reconstruction of the hospital in 1872, on a site further up the River Thames at Lambeth, the statue was moved to the new site and has been repositioned subsequently; the sculptor Peter Scheemakers came from a family of sculptors. Of Flemish origin, both his father and his two sons worked in the profession, he came to London some time before 1720 and made his reputation with the bust of William Shakespeare in Westminister Abbey in 1740. His statue of Edward VI predates that work. In bronze, the effigy shows the king in period dress; the inscription on the plinth records. Treasurer of the hospital; the sculpture was designated a Grade II* listed structure in 1979. Cherry, Bridget.
Statue of the Viscount Alanbrooke, London
The statue of Alan Brooke, 1st Viscount Alanbrooke by Ivor Roberts-Jones was unveiled in Whitehall, London in 1993. Media related to Statue of Alan Brooke, 1st Viscount Alanbrooke, London at Wikimedia Commons Plaque: Alanbrooke statue at London Remembers The Field Marshall Viscount Alanbrooke at Waymarking
Poplar, London
Poplar is a district in East London and the administrative centre of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, is a part of the East End and the Port of London. It was a suburb of the metropolitan area of London until 1965 when it was expanded, it is identified as a major district centre in the London Plan. Poplar district centre is Chrisp Street Market, which forms a significant commercial and retail centre surrounded by extensive residential development and includes Poplar Baths and Trinity Buoy Wharf, it has two localities and South Bromley. A part of the Canary Wharf commercial estate is in Poplar. Part of the ancient parish of Stepney, Poplar became a civil parish in 1817. In 1855, Poplar joined with neighbouring Bromley and Bow to form the Poplar District of the Metropolis; the district became the Metropolitan Borough of Poplar in 1900, in 1965 merged with the Metropolitan Boroughs of Stepney and Bethnal Green to form the new London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Architecturally it is a mixture of 18th- and 19th-century terraced houses and 20th-century council estates.
Notable examples include the Lansbury Estate and the Balfron Tower, more recent developments include West India Quay. Poplar was part of the parish of Stepney and was first recorded in either 1327 or 1350, it took its name from the Black Poplar trees. Black Poplar is a rare and exceptionally large tree that grows well in the wet conditions which the Thames and Lea brought to much of the neighbourhood. A specimen persisted in the area until at least 1986 when the naturalist Oliver Rackham noted "Nearby, in the midst of railway dereliction, a single Black Poplar now struggles for life". In 1654, as the population of the hamlet began to grow, the East India Company ceded a piece of land upon which to build a chapel and this became the nucleus of the settlement. St Matthias Old Church is located on opposite Tower Hamlets College. In 1921, the Metropolitan Borough of Poplar was the location of the Poplar Rates Rebellion, led by then-Mayor George Lansbury, elected as leader of the Labour Party; as part of the 1951 Festival of Britain, a new council housing estate was built to the north of the East India Dock Road and named the Lansbury Estate after him.
This estate includes Chrisp Street Market, commended by Lewis Mumford. The same era saw the construction of the Robin Hood Gardens housing complex – designed by architects Peter and Alison Smithson – and the brutalist Balfron Tower, Carradale House and Glenkerry House – designed by Ernő Goldfinger. Other notable buildings in Poplar include Poplar Baths, which reopened in 2016 having closed in 1988, after the efforts of local campaigners. After West India Dock and Canary Wharf closed in 1980, the British Government adopted policies to redevelop of the southern Poplar as well as northern Millwall, including the creation of the London Docklands Development Corporation in 1981 and the granting of Urban Enterprise Zone status to the Isle of Dogs in 1982. In 1998, following ballots of the residents, Tower Hamlets Council transferred parts of the Lansbury estate and six other Council housing estates within Poplar to Poplar HARCA, a new housing association set up for the purpose of regenerating the area.
The following year, tenants on further estates voted to remain with the Council. However, after a lengthy consultation of all Council estates in Tower Hamlets begun in 2002, most estates in Poplar did transfer to Poplar HARCA, East End Homes and other landlords between 2005 and 2007. Although many people associate wartime bombing with The Blitz during World War II, the first airborne terror campaign in Britain took place during the First World War. Air raids in World War I took many lives. German raids on Britain, for example, caused 3,409 injuries. Air raids provided an unprecedented means of striking at resources vital to an enemy's war effort. Many of the novel features of the war in the air between 1914 and 1918—the lighting restrictions and blackouts, the air raid warnings and the improvised shelters—became central aspects of the Second World War less than 30 years later; the East End of London was one of the most targeted places. Poplar, in particular, was struck badly by some of the air raids during the First World War.
These were at night by Zeppelins which bombed the area indiscriminately, leading to the death of innocent civilians. The first daylight bombing attack on London by a fixed-wing aircraft took place on 13 June 1917. Fourteen German Gotha G bombers led by Hauptmann Ernst Brandenberg flew over Essex and began dropping their bombs, it was a hot day and the sky was hazy. These three-seater bombers were carrying shrapnel bombs. Numerous bombs fell in rapid succession in various districts. In the East End alone 104 people were killed, 154 injured and 269 injured; the gravest incident that day was a direct hit on a primary school in Poplar. In the Upper North Street School at the time were a girls' class on the top floor, a boys' class on the middle floor and an infant class of about 50 pupils on the ground floor; the bomb fell through the roof into the girls' class. Eighteen pupils were killed, of; the tragedy shocked the British public at
Richard Coeur de Lion (statue)
Richard Coeur de Lion is a Grade II listed equestrian statue of the 12th-century English monarch Richard I known as Richard the Lionheart, who reigned from 1189–99. It stands on a granite pedestal in Old Palace Yard outside the Palace of Westminster in London, facing south towards the entrance to the House of Lords, it was created by Baron Carlo Marochetti, an Italian sculptor whose works were popular with European royalty and the nobility, though less well regarded by critics and the artistic establishment. The statue was first produced in clay and displayed at The Great Exhibition in 1851, where it was located outside the west entrance to the Crystal Palace, it was well received at the time and two years Queen Victoria and Prince Albert headed a list of illustrious subscribers to a fund that aimed to raise money for the casting of the statue in bronze. Although the money was duly raised and the bronze cast of the statue was completed in 1856, a lengthy dispute delayed its installation for several years.
The original idea had been to erect the statue as a memorial to the Great Exhibition. This prompted opposition, as did proposals to place it outside Charles Barry's newly completed Palace of Westminster. Various other locations to display the statue were considered before agreement was reached that it would be placed in Old Palace Yard, Marochetti's preferred location, it was installed in October 1860, though it was not until March 1867 that it was completed with the addition of bronze bas-reliefs on either side of the pedestal. The quality of the statue's workmanship caused problems during its first half-century, it narrowly escaped destruction during the Second World War when a German bomb dropped during the Blitz landed a few metres away and peppered it with shrapnel. The pedestal and the horse's tail were damaged and Richard's sword was bent by the blast. In 2009, the Parliamentary authorities undertook a project to restore the statue; the statue was created by Baron Carlo Marochetti and is located in Old Palace Yard outside the Palace of Westminster, opposite Westminster Abbey in London.
With its pedestal, it stands 9 metres high. The king is depicted wearing a crowned helmet and a chainmail shirt with a surcoat, lifting a sword into the air; the horse paws the ground. Marochetti described his work as being inspired by Richard I rather than depicting a 12th-century knight, it stands on a granite pedestal designed by Marochetti and made by Freeman & Co. of Penryn, Cornwall. Bas-relief panels showing Crusaders fighting the Saracens at the Battle of Ascalon and Richard on his deathbed pardoning Bertran de Born, the archer who fatally shot him in 1199, were added to the east and west sides of the pedestal in 1866–67; as the statue cannot be accessed by the general public – the area around it is used as the House of Lords car park – the west-side scene showing Richard and Bertran is the only one visible from the street. According to Marochetti, the two bas-reliefs were designed in the style of Lorenzo Ghiberti's doors at the Florence Baptistry. Bronze letters on the front of the pedestal bear the inscription RICHARD I CŒUR DE LION / 1189–1199.
The great majority of the art in and around the Houses of Parliament is of British origin, due to a policy of acquiring British art for the building. Marochetti's statue thus represents one of the few examples of a non-British artist's work being selected for the Parliamentary estate. Marochetti was born in Italy and was ennobled by the Kingdom of Sardinia but lived and worked in France, creating a number of prestigious works for the royalist French government in the 1830s, he made his name by creating equestrian statues. By the 1840s, his popularity in continental Europe was in decline; the French Revolution of 1848, which saw the final overthrow of the French monarchy, prompted him to resettle in London and seek new patrons among the British elite. Marochetti was not popular with the Victorian artistic establishment, it was true that he benefited from the patronage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. His courtly manners impressed Victoria on their first meeting in 1849, soon afterwards he became involved with the Prince Consort's plans for what became The Great Exhibition of 1851.
Several countries planned to display sculptures of romantic historical figures in their contributions to the exhibition. The genre was common in mainland Europe but rare in England at the time. Marochetti was aware that the Belgian sculptor Eugene Simonis intended to show his statue of Godfrey de Bouillon, the leader of the First Crusade, which King Leopold I of Belgium had commissioned; the two men had a number of connections. The Italian sculptor was motivated by a sense of competition with the Belgian in designing his Richard I. Marochetti's creation of the clay model of the statue involved not only the sculptor himself but the painter Victor Mottez, King Louis Philippe's personal physician Henri Gueneau de Mussy and the singers Mario and Garcia, all of whom contributed manual input. A clay model of the statue was displayed as one of two statu
Equestrian statue of William III, London
The equestrian statue of William III by John Bacon Junior stands in St James's Square in central London. It is modelled on an earlier statue of the king by John Michael Rysbrack in Bristol. Funding for the London statue was provided in the will of Samuel Travers, M. P. dated 1724. A design for the monument was drawn up in 1794 by Bacon's father, John Bacon Senior, but this was not executed and the commission passed to Bacon Jr. under whose direction the statue was erected in 1808. The statue is a Grade I listed structure. William III, Prince of Orange, ascended the English throne in 1688 following the overthrow of James II in the Glorious Revolution. William ruled jointly with his wife, James's daughter, until her death in 1694, solely until his own death in 1702. In 1697 the first proposal had been made to erect a statue in the king's honour in St James's Square, home to many of his strongest supporters. Nothing was done and two further attempts to revive the plan, in 1710 and 1721 failed. In 1724, a member of Parliament and Crown official, Samuel Travers, left a bequest in his will to fund the construction "in St. James's Square or on Cheapside Conduit an equestrian statue in brass to the glorious memory of my master William the Third".
It was a further seventy years before the commission to design the statue was granted to John Bacon Sr. England's most notable sculptor, in 1794. Bacon Sr. died before the commission could be executed, the final design and construction was undertaken in 1808 by his son, John Bacon Jr. The sculpture depicts William in the style of a Roman general, it is influenced by the earlier equestrian statue of William undertaken by Rysbrack and erected in Bristol in 1736. The king is depicted astride a "spirited" horse and, despite his Classical style of dress, William's hairstyle follows late 17th century fashion. Jo Darke, in her history of English and Welsh monuments, suggests that the base of the statue includes a depiction of the molehill, over which William's horse Sorrel stumbled at Hampton Court, leading to the king's death from complications of pneumonia. Panels on either side of the plinth carry inscriptions in bronze lettering, the first reading GVLIELMVS III and the second I. BACON, IVNR. SCVLPTR.
1807. The statue was designated a Grade I listed structure, the highest grading given to buildings and structures of "exceptional interest", in 1958. Bradley, Simon. London: Westminster; the Buildings of England. New Haven, US, London, UK: Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300095951. Darke, Jo; the Monument Guide to England and Wales: A National Portrait in Bronze and Stone. London: MacDonald and Co. OCLC 1008240876. Troost, Wout. William III, The Stadholder-king: A Political Biography. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Press. ISBN 9780754650713. Media related to Equestrian statue of William III, St James's Square, London at Wikimedia Commons
Statue of Charlie Chaplin, London
The statue of Charlie Chaplin in Leicester Square, London, is a work of 1979 by the sculptor John Doubleday. It portrays the actor and filmmaker in his best-known role, as The Tramp. A memorial to Chaplin in the city of his birth was proposed on 25 December 1977, soon after Chaplin's death, by Illtyd Harrington, the leader of the opposition in the Greater London Council. Initial plans for a memorial in the Elephant and Castle, in South London where Chaplin spent his early years, were dropped and instead Leicester Square, at the centre of London's entertainment district, became the preferred location for the work; the bronze statue was first unveiled on 16 April 1981 at its original site, on the south-western corner of the square, by the actor Sir Ralph Richardson. An inscription on the plinth read THE COMIC GENIUS/ WHO GAVE PLEASURE/ TO SO MANY; the following year a modified version was erected in the Swiss town of Vevey, Chaplin's home from 1952 until his death. Following a refurbishment of Leicester Square in 1989–1992, the statue was moved to a site north of the statue of William Shakespeare, the square's centrepiece.
In a refurbishment of 2010–2012 Chaplin's statue was removed altogether, together with busts of William Hogarth, John Hunter, Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Joshua Reynolds. The statue was installed in a nearby street, Leicester Place, in 2013; this was. In 2016 it was re-unveiled on Chaplin's birthday. Media related to Statue of Charlie Chaplin, London at Wikimedia Commons
Statue of Queen Anne, St Paul's Churchyard
A statue of Queen Anne is installed in the forecourt outside the west front of St Paul's Cathedral, in London, United Kingdom. It became a Grade II listed building in 1972; the statue is a copy of a 1712 sculpture by Francis Bird in Carrara marble which stood at the same location. Queen Anne was the ruling British monarch when the new St Paul's Cathedral was completed in 1710. Bird's statue was unveiled at a thanksgiving service for the Peace of Utrecht, held 7 July 1713; the statue cost £1,130, excluding the marble, provided by the Queen. It was surrounded by an elegant metal railing made by Jean Tijou; the Tijou railings were removed and replaced by heavier railings to match the others around the cathedral. The original statue was attacked at least three times, in 1743, 1768, 1882, with noses and arms damaged, it was badly weathered by the 1880s. Reputedly, the statue was once defaced with the lines "Brandy Nan, left in the lurch. Richard Claude Belt was commissioned in 1885 to create a replacement statue from Sicilian marble, supplied by the Corporation of London at a cost of £1,800.
Belt was imprisoned for obtaining money by false pretences in March 1886, Louis Auguste Malempré completed the sculpture. The building work to install the statue was done by Mowlem and Sons, supervised by the city architect Sir Horace Jones, the new sculpture was unveiled by Reginald Hanson, the Lord Mayor of London, on 15 December 1886, the year before the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria; the Baroque sculpture depicts Queen Anne facing down Ludgate Hill towards Ludgate Circus. She is robed, wearing the collar of the Order of the Garter and a gilded crown, with one hand holding a gilded orb and the other a gilded sceptre; the figure stands on a Portland stone pedestal by architect Christopher Wren, decorated with four symbolic figures, one on each corner: to the west, towards Ludgate Hill, are Britannia with gilded trident and a figure representing France, holding between them a carved representation of the British Royal Coat of Arms, to the east, towards St Paul's Cathedral, are figures representing Ireland and North America.
The pedestal stands on three steps surrounded by heavy cast iron railings. The pedestal bears two inscriptions: on the south side "The Original STATUE / was erected on this spot in the year 1712 / to commemorate the completion of / SAINT PAUL'S CATHEDRAL / FRANCIS BIRD Sculptor." and on the north side: "This Replica / of the Statue of QUEEN ANNE / was erected at the expense of / The CORPORATION of LONDON / In the year 1886 / The Rt. Hon. / SIR REGINALD HANSON M. A. F. S. A. / Lord Mayor / Wm. Braham Esq / Chairman of the City Lands Committee." After they were removed, the original 8-ton weathered sculpture, the four weathered 5-ton stone figures from the base, were rediscovered months abandoned in the yard of a London stonemason. They were acquired by Augustus Hare and installed in the grounds of his house at Holmhurst St Mary near Hastings, with Queen Anne mounted on an elliptical pedestal and the four other seated figures on steps around at the base, similar to the original; the house was Grade II listed in 1976, the statue received a separate Grade II* listing at the same time.
List of public art in the City of London List of statues of British royalty in London Statue of Queen Anne in Forecourt of St Paul's Cathedral, National Heritage List for England, Historic England Statue of Queen Anne South East of Holmhurst St Mary's School, National Heritage List for England, Historic England Holmhurst St Mary's School, National Heritage List for England, Historic England Holmhurst St Mary Statue of Queen Anne, Public Sculptures of Sussex 10 London artworks that have been damaged or vandalised, Footprints of London Queen Anne, St. Paul Churchyard, Public Monuments & Sculpture Association Queen Anne in front of St. Paul's Cathedral at Waymarking Statue: Queen Anne statue, St Paul's at London Remembers Sculpture trivia: The statue of Queen Anne at St Paul's at Secret London
