41 Kingsway WC2

These magnificent merfolk with their tails tying themselves in knots and the strange fish (known in the merfolk language as 'lunch') are over the door of the Leeds Building Society in Kingsway. The 1909 design is by the building's architects Gibson, Skipwith & Gordon and they were carved by Gilbert Seale in Camberwell.
Of course, they are far too much fun for a building society. The shop was originally designed (I think) as a stationery shop called The Pen Corner, owned by L.G.Sloan Ltd who sold playing cards, board games and so on as well as pens and paper. Waterman pens were a speciality, and the building is still known as Waterman House. Are the merfolk a rebus, an architectural pun? Or was Mr Sloan keen on all things marine? Or was it all just a coincidence and they were carved for someone else entirely?

Congress House, Dyott Street WC1

From the pavement in Dyott Street and you can look through the sheet glass walls of the staircase and canteen of Congress House right into the central courtyard, where stands Jacob Epstein's Pieta, the Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Christ. It was made in 1955 as a war memorial.
The figures pack quite a punch. Christ is shrunken, almost deformed in death, with one arm dangling uselessly and his practically featureless head lolling back. Mary is traditionally portrayed gazing both piteously and with pity on her Son's face, but Epstein has her looking accusingly upwards. It's a face we often see on the TV news from the Middle East today, staring up at us from the scene of some atrocity.
The wall behind, incidentally, was originally clad in green marble but for some reason that was replaced with the the sort of tiles usually found in the changing rooms at municipal swimming baths.
Unfortunately, the view from Dyott St is partly obscured by scaffolding at the moment so you can only see Mary's feet. I had to blag my way into the TUC canteen to get this shot.

St George, Bloomsbury

The spire of St George was one of the oddest in London when I first saw it decades ago, and now it has become one of the oddest anywhere by the restoration of the lions and unicorns gambolling round its base.
The architect, Nicholas Hawksmoor, had included the royal beasts as playful guards for the statue of George I in a toga that stands on top of the stepped pyramid that forms the body of the spire. Apparently he did not include them in the estimate and the vestry initially refused to pay for them, and they were raucously mocked when unveiled in 1731. Hogarth included a distant view of the spire with beasts in Gin Lane.
Eventually, the Victorians had them recut as formal knots, and the beasts passed into history. Until recently, when a lavish restoration funded by Paul Mellon (described as a 'philanthropist and galloping Anglophile' in a plaque in the church) brought them back.
The new beasts were carved by Tim Crawley, as close to the originals as possible given that the surviving images are very small and little remained on the tower itself.

Congress House, Great Russell Street WC1

Congress House was one of the first major modernist buildings projected for postwar London - David Aberdeen's design won a competition in 1948 even though construction was only completed in 1957.
The bronze group perched rather precariously on a stand next to the entrance is called The Spirit of Brotherhood and was created by Bernard Meadows, a great talent who was totally overshadowed as the assistant and friend of Henry Moore and teacher of Elizabeth Frink.
Unfortunately, Spirit of Brotherhood is not his finest work. It is deeply sentimental. A working man dressed in an inately noble but unspecific labourer's costume helping his fallen brother off the deck with a heave and a heartfelt "Aye up, chum, get thee t'union and thas'll be champion." It is a great composition - look at the way the men's interlocked arms and the whirl of the costume spiral optimistically upwards - but for the fact that you cannot look at it from the street without peeking up the fraternal unionists' demarcations .

Southwark Health Centre, Walworth Road SE1

Southwark Health Centre is a poignant memorial to England's aspirations with Socialism in the middle of the last century. It was built in 1937, and the council obviously decided to splash out on it partly to demonstrate their commitment to public welfare but also to enlarge their empire by adding to the Town Hall and Library that were already on the site.
The architect was P. Stuart who used a rather flashy Art Deco style with lots of ornamental stonework. The main entrance is marked by the maxim "The people's health is the highest law", a slight mistranslation of Cicero's tag Salus populi suprema lex, which is literally "The welfare of the people shall be the supreme law" (I think). A bit of political spin here, possibly.
A rather wonderful allegorical group called Family Health stands on the parapet. A mother stands protectively over her children, armed with the healing staff of Asclepius. The serpent has got a great big smile over its face, rather unusually, and the smaller girl is holding her favourite dolly. It is all very domestic despite the nudism, which might have been very popular among the sun-worshipping aristocrats of the 1930s but was rather frowned on in traditional working class areas like South London.
The figure that is notably missing from the group is the father, rather prophetically given that absent dads are now a major problem in this very deprived area.
The sculptors were A.T. and E.J. Bradford.

New Camera Shock

As threatened, I have got a new camera. The Panasonic Lumix was a wonder of compactness and was unique when I bought it in having a wide angle zoom, but its telephoto ability was abysmal and its modest pixel count meant that enlarging long shots gave very iffy results.
So I have invested in a Fujifilm Finepix S8100, a 'bridge' camera with an outstanding 18 times optical zoom (that's 27mm to 486mm in real money), 10 megapixel resolution and antishake. That's just about ideal for architecture, going from wide angle for interiors to telephoto for bits of statuary. To show the difference, here is the picture of the statue of Pavlova on the top of the Victoria Palace Theatre I posted a while back:And here is one I took the other day with my new toy:What a difference! The prima ballerina's face is clear and expressive, and you can see all the details of her costume. Unfortunately, you can also see the lightning conductor sticking out of her head and the wires that presumably help to support her arms as well as keep the pigeons off. The other downside is that I had to stand in the middle of the road to get the shot and was nearly run down by a bus.
More pics soon, if I live.

Marble Arch (south side)

What a sad thing the Marble Arch is, sitting forlornly in its traffic island ignored by the few tourists that brave the subways to get to Hyde Park, when it should be the star of the daily Changing the Guard Show at Buckingham Palace.
It is a shadow of its former self as well. Sir John Nash had designed a much taller upper storey (the 'attic' storey) with sculpture commemorating victory over Napoleon, and an equestrian statue of George IV was to top it off.
It was incomplete when that spendthrift monarch died in 1830, and Edward Blore was brought in to take control of the spiralling costs. He cut down the attic, thriftily recycling the sculpture in Buckingham Palace and the new National Gallery. The equestrian statue went to Trafalgar Square.
Eventually, the arch got in the way of the enclosure of the forecourt and was removed to its present site in 1851. Its bleak surroundings today are the result of the horrible Park Lane widening scheme of 1961.
The two reliefs on the south side are by E.H. Baily, RA, the sculptor most famous for the statue of Nelson on his column.
On the left, a Roman naval warrior stands in front of a galley with an upturned prow and bronze ram. He is chatting up a woman who is definitely not a dockyard floozy but Justicia, as you can tell from the bundle of rods round an axe (the fasces) she is carrying.
To the right, Peace and Plenty are in animated conversation over the Flame of Liberty.