Awakening

When Awakening was exhibited in 1960 at Battersea Park, Ledward described it in the accompanying catalogue as follows:

This bronze is an early work…It is a deliberate type of study from life which one rarely has the time or the opportunity to carry out more than once in a life-time and I worked on it, over a long period, from a model who in my opinion had a particularly sculpturesque figure. (London County Council, Sculpture in the Open Air (exh. cat.; Battersea Park, London, May to September 1960).

For a full description of this statue and its history, see Terry Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Kensington and Chelsea with Westminster South-West, Watford, 2023, pp. 33-34.

Location: Ropers Gardens, Chelsea Embankment, SW3

Bronze Woman

Location: Stockwell Memorial Garden, London SW9

Cracker Packers

Commissioned by Carlisle City Council, this public sculpture, celebrates the lives of the women who worked in the Carr’s (now McVitie’s) biscuit factory there and were affectionately known as ‘Cracker Packers’. The sculpture depicts two women biscuit workers, holding an imaginary conversation at the biscuit factory, one is from 1910 and the other from the present day, both are dressed in the respective factory uniforms of the period. The women are standing on top of a giant bronze Carr’s Table Water Biscuit. The sculpture is located close to the Pladis factory where Carr’s Table Water biscuits are produced. It is quite rare for working women to be celebrated with a sculpture in this way. When Cracker Packers was installed the sculptor, Hazel Reeves, commented that she hoped she had captured their ‘spirit, warmth, humour and camaraderie’, adding that to have produced a sculpture of ‘working-class women in particular is a real joy’.

Location: Caldewgate, Carlisle

Large Crouching Figure

This large crouching figure is centrepiece of a fountain commissioned by Westminster City Council, which was unveiled in 1987 at the junction of Carlos Place and Mount Street, London.

Location: Carlos Place (junction with Mount Street), London

La Délivrance

Known locally as ‘The Naked Lady’, this statue by the French sculptor Émile Guillaume was purchased by the newspaper magnate, Lord Rothermere, who donated it to Finchley Urban District Council.  Their original intention was to erect it in Victoria Park, but Rothermere insisted it should be installed in its current location.

Designed by Guillaume between 1914-1919 and initially called La Victoire (Victory), the statue commemorates the Allies victory, when the British and French armies defeated invading German armies at the Battle of the Marne in September 1914. An unusual war memorial, it was awarded a prize when exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1920. Eleven casts of La Délivrance (Deliverance) in various sizes were produced by Barbedienne and presented to cities in France and Belgium which had been occupied or destroyed during the First World War. A cast purchased by the city of Nantes is the same size as the present bronze.

When the statue was unveiled  in 1927, Lord Rothermere described the sculpture to the crowd as simply a beautiful monument, rather than a war memorial in the ordinary sense. While Lloyd George told them to  ‘gaze at this statue and you will see that its message and meaning represent a symbol of what victory in the war meant to humanity – deliverance. Now we should strive for deliverance, not by the sword, but from it.’
An information panel put up in 2007 reads: ‘LA DELIVRANCE / THIS STATUE BY EMILE GUILLAUME SYMBOLIZES / THE EMOTION INSPIRED AMONG THE ALLIED NATIONS / WHEN THE ARMIES OF BRITAIN AND FRANCE / DEFEATED THE INVADING GERMAN ARMIES / AT THE BATTLE OF THE MARNE SEPTEMBER 1914 / PRESENTED BY VISCOUNT ROTHERMERE’.

Location: Henly's Corner, Regents Park Road, Finchley, London, N3.

Draped Woman

Nearly twice life-size, this  semi-nude, idealised female figure dates from c. 1959. It was commissioned as part of the London County Council’s Patronage of the Arts programme in c. 1957-58, as a visual amenity in compensation for  a major highway development scheme, which took land from St Peter’s Church, Hammersmith, for the Great West Road.

This important modernist sculpture was part of a post war programme aiming to enhance people’s lives and improve the aesthetic of their environment by commissioning sculpture for the public realm. The weight of the figure is cantilevered so that it appears almost as though it is floating, Vogel’s intention being to link the calm of the church and square with the fast pace of the modern world.

The sculpture was recently restored by Sally Strachey Conservation thanks to the Heritage of London Trust.

Location: North Verbena Gardens, adjacent to St Peter’s Church, Great West Road, Hammersmith, London, W6

Fine Lady

Funded by the local community of Banbury, this sculpture commemorates the well-known children’s nursery rhyme:

Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross,
To see a Fine Lady upon a White Horse,
With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
She shall have music wherever she goes.

The lady in the rhyme has been identified as various well-to-do ladies, including Celia Fiennes (1662-1741), who wrote a journal about her travels around England and Lady Godiva, but in all likelihood the ‘fine lady’ is apochrypal. Here she is depicted as Queen of the May riding through the town. An annual May ride was traditional in many communities in the Middle Ages.

The work contains several references to Spring. The Fine Lady wears a crown of thirteen alternating daffodils and wild roses, which symbolise the ancient number of months in a year. She has musical bells on her feet and also seven bluebells, which represent the days of the week. Her left arm is raised as she scatters petals. The lady is riding a Welsh cob which was sculpted by Denise Dutton.

The project was conceived to celebrate HRH Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee in 2002, but it took a further three years for sufficient funds to be raised to erect the sculpture.

Location: South Bar Street, Banbury, Oxfordshire, OX16 0AH.

Fishwife

Location: Whitby Sculpture Trail

Fountain Nymph

Fountain Nymph (sometimes mistakenly given the title ‘Woman of Samaria’) was commissioned by Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 3rd Marquess of Lansdowne (1780–1863)   from the sculptor Alexander Munro, an associate of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The statue, which dates from 1865, was originally intended to be the main feature of a drinking fountain erected at the expense of Lord Lansdowne. Such fountains provided safe water and were often provided for the public by wealthy philanthropists. Although he saw Munro’s design, Lansdowne did not live to see the finished statue.

Munro had created an earlier variant of Fountain Nymph for the niche at the base of the monument to Herbert Ingram, the founder and proprietor of The Illustrated London News, at Boston, Lincolnshire, in which the pose of the statue  is reversed and the rather younger nymph holds a small urn. The memorial was erected in 1862 and the statue, which was cast in bronze by Elkington & Co., was added a year later.

For further information about the history of this statue and other versions see B. Read and J. Barnes, Pre-Raphaelite Sculpture. Nature and Imagination in British Sculpture 1848-1914, (exh. cat.), London, 1991, p. 125, no. 37; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 7–8.

Location: South end of Berkeley Square, London, W1

Gansey Girl

The subject of this sculpture celebrates East Yorkshire’s maritime heritage, the fishing industry and the local community. It was inspired by a photograph taken by a renowned nineteenth-century  photographer from Whitby, Frank Meadow-Sutcliffe. The statue is sited on the North Pier at Bridlington, the fishermen can see the Gansey Girl as they set out to sea and as they return. The statue depicts a girl from a fishing family, who is knitting a gansey, which is a traditional fisherman’s heavy woollen sweater that was originally made on the Channel Island of Guernsey, hence the name ‘gansey’. The gansey was adopted by coastal areas on the British mainland with villages and families developing their own unique and distinctive patterns.

A shoal of fish appear to swim around beneath the statue, every one was cast from an actual fish and has the name of  a local fishing family engraved upon it. The fish were placed on the pedestal by members of these families.

http://www.bridlingtonharbour.com/video/gansey-girl-statue-artist-steve-carvill-bridlington-harbour/

Location: North Pier of the Harbour, Bridlington, East Riding of Yorkshire