County Hall SE1

Whatever the politicians and public think about the sculpture on County Hall, everyone loves the South Bank Lion. Few realise it was created to advertise beer, having been modelled by William Woodington in 1837 for the Red Lion Brewery. The brewery was demolished to make way for the Festival Hall, and the lion was saved on the personal intervention of George V. After a spell next to Waterloo Station, it came to rest on the approach to Waterloo Bridge in the 1960s. The surface of the Coade stone is as crisp today as it was when it was cast, despite the removal of the red paint that it was originally coated with.

County Hall SE1

Open Spaces

Hardiman's last two sculptures on County Hall are 'Open Spaces' and 'Education', both very important topics at a time when large tracts of London were industrial dynamos and children were supposed to be going to work not mucking about in the park.
That such an unusually dramatic, even hysterical, commission drew to a close in harmony was largely due to Hardiman's diplomatic skills. Ironically, he was himself to become in the 1930s the centre of a much greater national storm over his memorial to Earl Haig in Whitehall, with one former general describing it as 'a travesty of the Elgin marbles' in a letter to The Times.

Education

County Hall SE1

Town Planning

Child Education

On the departure of Ernest Cole, the committee in charge of the County Hall project brought in another young London sculptor, Alfred Hardiman, to produce the figures on the northern end of the building.
Hardiman was just back from studying in Rome and where he been deeply impressed by Etruscan art and early Greek sculpture. The influence is already visible in his work at County Hall. Otherwise, he returned to the Victorian tradition of figurative, aspiring sculpture illustrating the work of local authorities. On the Belvedere Road facade is Town Planning, a strong, determined, far-sighted man holding a giant pair of dividers over an unformed rock, ready to be carved into a new city.
Child Education, on the northern facade, illustrates one of the difficulties that both Cole and Hardiman faced - the setting their work was placed in. Windows are never a satisfactory background for sculpture - the brightness of the sky's reflection means the detail is washed out, as shown in the photograph despite a good deal of photoshopping.

County Hall SE1

Untitled group

Ernest Cole's remaining sculptures at County Hall are more conventional than the others, but just as mysterious.
The untitled group on the southern end of the river front consists of a pair of muscly coves holding a swag of fruit. As several critics noted, they seem to be exerting far too much effort on an easy task.
Round the back at the southern end of the Belvedere Road facade, 'Hero' is depicted as an archer. His hairstyle and moustache are strangely 1960s.

Hero

County Hall SE1

Untitled Group - said to be 'Benevolence and Humanity'

Sculpture commissioned by local authorities usually depicts either local history (such as Middlesex Guildhall or Wandsworth Town Hall) or aspirations like Social Justice, Welfare, Health etc (see Southwark Health Centre). Ernest Cole broke the rules so comprehensively at County Hall that even his supporters found it difficult to classify or even identify his subjects.
The politicians were frankly bemused. In 1920 Alderman Cotton tabled a series of questions for debate, including "Are the figures unclothed as a protest against the monstrous price of clothes?...Do their positions, crowded on precarious perches outside the windows, indicate the lack of housing accommodation?"
The untitled group on Westminster Bridge Road attracted his particular ire: "The two muscular citizens have such despairing looks on their faces they appear to be preparing to hurl a bomb at the Houses of Parliament."
Cole never gave the group a title, but in the draft response to the Alderman's questions the management team called them 'Benevolence and Humanity'. They certainly don't look very benevolent, and the extraordinary globes they carry support writhing bodies in very odd attitudes. They do look a bit like ornate hand grenades.

The other group on the Westminster Bridge Road facade, 'World Beyond', is supposed to represent humanity supporting the world. Three shrugged, downward-looking, muscular men hold a globe surrounded by symbols of uncertain import. On top, a pair of bronze figures adopt painfully grotesque poses. For a symbol of a forward-looking local authority, it is deeply pessimistic.

Alderman Cotton never got his debate but the tide was clearly turning against Cole.

'World Beyond'

County Hall SE1

"River Thames" by Ernest Cole

County Hall was London's alternative parliament over the water. In the great war between right and left in the 1980s the Greater London Council under 'Red' Ken Livingstone set itself up in opposition to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who responded by brutally executing it and ordering the building to be converted into tourist facilities, the political equivalent of planting the soil with salt.
The facades, however, remain just as they were, with a fascinating array of sculpture that tells a story of artistic ambition, personal frailty, political interference and furious debates over taste and aesthetics.

The building was designed as the home of the London County Council in 1908 by architect Ralph Knott, who chose a rising star of sculpture, Ernest Cole, to produce a series of aspiring figures for the main elevations. Cole was only 24, straight out of the South Kensington Art School, where his work had been noticed by Charles Ricketts and others. So commissioning him with a major sequence of works was a brave gamble.

"Creation of Eve" by Cole

Construction started in 1912, so it was 1915 by the time Cole's sculptures were required. He started at a rush, completing five groups and most of a sixth in just 18 months despite having joined the army, which left only weekends for art. Most of the actual carving was done by his assistant Peter Induni.
At this point disaster struck. Cole was sent to the Western Front.
The artistic establishment was aghast that a talent of such promise was being put in harm's way and pressure was applied to transfer him to the much safer Intelligence Corps. In that capacity he was sent to America. On the way met a widowed lawyer called Laurie Manly and fell in love. Laurie decided Cole was a modern artistic genius ranking with Epstein and would devote her life to protecting his interests. Cole rejected his old friends such as Ricketts and struck out into abstract art. Ricketts said he had "gone over to the enemy."
After the war, Cole resumed work but he was a changed man. He had lost his drive and failed to meet deadlines, and he needed more money to cope with post-war inflation. Requests for extra payments were backed up by furious letters from his lawyer wife.

"Child Education" by Hardiman

In nearly two years he finished the incomplete group and provided only one more, which he carved without having supplied Knott with a plaster maquette for approval. Knott rejected it as unsuitable.

A major row ensued. Members of the LCC were getting worried about the escalating costs and many dismissed Cole's completed works as incomprehensible modern rubbish. 

Knott counter-attacked by getting a group of luminaries including the poet and art critic Laurence Binyon (of We will Remember Them fame) to rally round in Cole's defence. For this, he was rewarded with a letter from Mrs Cole accusing him of having spent the war in safety in London drawing two salaries while her husband was defending his country.

By this time things had broken down irretrievably and the contract was terminated. The Coles retreated to a bungalow near Canterbury, rarely leaving except for a brief period at the beginning of the second world war when they were interned because of their open admiration for Mussolini and the Fascists.

To complete the project, Knott and the LCC brought in Alfred Hardiman, sculptor of the Haig statue in Whitehall, whose work was much more accessible.

Colet Court, Hammersmith Road W6

John Colet was the Dean of St Pauls in the 16th century. A friend of Erasmus and a member of the reformist tendency in the Catholic Church, he founded St Paul's School and endowed it with a large part of the fortune he inherited from his City merchant father (he had no family - as an ordained priest he was celibate and all 21 of his siblings had died).
In the late 19th century the school had decamped to Hammersmith and was housed in a magnificent building by the great Alfred Waterhouse. The junior school, named after Colet despite the fact that it was actually founded by one Samuel Bewsher in 1881 was housed in a building across the road, designed in 1890 by architect W.H. Spaull of Oswestry. In 1968 the schools moved to their current campus in Barnes and the Waterhouse building was scandalously demolished except for the High Master's House. Colet Court was converted into offices.
A bust of the Dean is positioned at the centre of the facade, but for me the most charming part of the building is the skyline with its fancy Tudor chimneys and terracotta falcon.

18-21 Northumberland Avenue WC2

India and south east Asia are represented by the Star of India with a lotus flower at its centre, Ceylon with an elephant and Burma with a peacock.  Baker did not list the Buddhist Stupa or the garlanded ox.

As well as the portal guardians by Sir Charles Wheeler, the former Royal Commonwealth Society building is decorated with six roundels containing emblems of its various peoples. At the time (1934) it was the Royal Empire Society, created to foster the idea of a new empire on Roman lines with citizenship available to all but the British at the top (naturally).

The symbolism is explained by the architect, Sir Herbert Baker, in a revealing article "Symbolic Constellation of the Empire", that he wrote for United Empire, the journal of the society. He discusses in detail a set of roundels in wood inside the building, which repeat most of the symbols on the facade.

In the absence of a full set of official heraldry, Baker had to make it up as he went along. He remarks dryly that if he had had to wait for the Colonial Office and the College of Arms the building would never be complete.

The roundels were carved by Joseph Armitage, who also worked with Baker on South Africa House and war graves in Flanders. The next year he would go on to design the National Trust's famous oak leaf symbol.

Africa, with the stars of the Southern Cross. A winged springbok for South Africa. The source of the Nile is shown between what looks like the pyramids but in fact is intended to be Ptolemy's Mountains of the Moon. The soapstone birds are 'column sentinels' at Great Zimbabwe. Baker describes the heads as 'two types of natives, the more backward Negroid type and that with a blend of northern blood and civilization'. In 1934 racism was not just for Germans, clearly.

Britain includes England, Scotland, Wales and also Ireland, despite Ireland having been independent for more than ten years by the time the building was erected. The cross is for Malta and the rock is Gibraltar.

Canada is given a new symbol, a cross with maple leaves and maple seed pods in the middle, overlain with symbols of the main immigrant groups, the English, Scots, Irish and French. The natives don't get a look-in. The cod represent the Newfoundland fisheries, already under threat from over-fishing, and the full-rigged sailing ship is heading back from the West Indies.

Oceania is represented by  the Southern Cross around the Silver Fern of New Zealand. The shells  and lateen-rigged boats are Polynesia and Melanesia.

The Southern Cross (again) with a Wattle for Australia. The Palm Tree is for the islands of the Eastern Sea including Borneo, and the anchor is for the Naval Ports of Hong Kong and Singapore.

I sent the picture of the Indian roundel to Peter Berthoud of that great blog Discovering London, who used it in his entertaining Weekend Elephant puzzle. I was surprised nobody got it, given that it is just off Trafalgar Square, but they are rather high up.

Many thanks to Rachel Rowe, archivist of the RCS archive at Cambridge University, and Ruth Craggs, author of a very helpful article on the history of Commonwealth buildings.