St Bartholomew House, Fleet Street EC4

 

This attractive Arts and Craft block of 1900 is by Herbert Huntly-Gordon, presumably one of that architect's speculative developments.
Letting income is maximised by placing as much shop front as possible at street level. This squeezes the door to the offices a little bit, but Huntly-Gordon makes up for the lack of width by adding a lovely adornment of putti by Gilbert Seale. Both architect and sculptor sign the piece, unusually.
The one on the left is more or less a standard model putto with feathery wings and a bow, carrying a quiver, but the one on the right is decidedly odd with what look like butterfly wings and flowers in its hair. Is it a boy or a girl?
The balcony of the open loggia on the fourth floor is supported by a line of attractive heads of putti. Are they also by Seale or was a journeyman mason brought in?

Victoria Station, Buckingham Palace Road SW1

I don't often do heraldic carving but this one over a side door to Victoria Station is very unusual as it is signed, by Gilbert Seale of the sculpting dynasty. It is one of a pair on the curtain wall of the train shed of 1905, said to have been designed by Vincent Harris of the LCC Architects Department, with input by the engineer Sir Charles Morgan.
The arms comprise (clockwise from top left) the St George's cross and sword of the City of London; the dolphins and martlets of Brighton; the star and crescent of Portsmouth; and the rather curious lionships of the Cinque Ports - 'three lions passant guardant conjoined with as many ships' hulls,' as the heralds put it.
Many years ago I went round Portsmouth Dockyard with David Lloyd, editor of the Hampshire Pevsner, and he bemoaned the fact that the City of Portsmouth was putting its new coat of arms on all its letterheads. "Just as every other council is junking their Victorian coats of arms and replacing them with trendy logos, Portsmouth, which has a genuinely medieval logo in the star and crescent, is replacing it with a Victorian coat of arms," he said.

Victoria Station SW1

Caroline of Caroline's Miscellany commented on the timing of my last post - apparently she spent a good deal of time during last week's tube strike looking at Victoria Station.
So Caroline, if Bob Crow's merry men carry out their threat to do it again, this is for you:

The western half of Victoria Station, the terminus of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway, was built in 1906 by the railway's own architect C.D. Collins and its engineer Charles L. Morgan. The centrepiece of the facade is topped with a bizarre assemblage of pediment, volutes and a clock. Unfortunately they don't fit together in a unified composition.
A pair of figures recline on the volutes, looking uncomfortably as though they are about slide off and fall through the glass roof of the canopy below.
But the sculptures are very good.
On the left is Hermes, the messenger god, with his winged helmet and staff. On the right is a woman wearing a lionskin, who must therefore be Omphale, Queen of Lydia, who bought Heracles as a slave from Hermes. They were in the habit of cross-dressing, she donning the skin of the Nemean lion and his club, while he put on her flimsy negligee. Those whacky Greek Gods!
Omphale is shown with a palm leaf rather than a club and has a couple of books, possibly the Athens volumes of Bradshaw.
The sculptor seems to be unknown, but the prime suspect has to be Gilbert Seale, who had been employed by Morgan just a few years earlier to tart up the blank wall of the new train shed facing onto Buckingham Palace Road with swags of fruit, coats of arms etc. The figures have a certain tense alertness in common with Seale's merfolk in Kingsway.