28-30 Cornhill EC3

The Scottish Widows Fund building in the City was built in 1934 to the designs of W. Curtis Green.
It features two statues of Scottish Widows by William McMillan, a Scottish sculptor who had the unusual distinction of designing some of the medals that he himself won for his service in the First World War.
One of the Widows is the classic figure familiar from a gazillion TV ads, wearing a hood and holding a puir wee  fatherless bairn. The other holds a cornucopia from which pours the largesse from a claim on a policy held with one of Britain's famously generous life assurance companies.
In the pediment at the top, Bellerophon grabs Pegasus's forelock, a reference to the company motto 'Est Capilatta Fronte Post Est Occasio Calva' or 'Take Time by the Forelock'. McMillan made a version of this in bronze over the front door.

262 High Holborn

The relief on the modernist office block at 262 High Holborn has been described as everything from a vision of the Book of Revelation or Celtic imagery to 'hallucinogenic doodling'.
In fact, it is the heraldry of the Pearl Assurance Company, who built it in 1956, and was the creation of Bainbridge Copnall. The architects were T.P. Bennett and Son, who occupied it themselves for many years.
At the top is St Margaret of Antioch, whose name in Latin, Margarita, means pearl. She holds a gigantic pearl in her right hand and the martyr's palm in her left - she was devoured by Satan in the form of a dragon, who lies beneath her feet looking a bit grumpy.
The other symbols relate to places associated with Pearl Assurance. The swords are the City of London, and the covered cup is St Dunstan, the patron saint of Stepney where the company had its first office. The wounded hind is St Giles, of St Giles in the Fields, the local parish.
Other symbols are the sun and a star, and the elements, air, fire and water.
The artist has not included Pearl Assurance's motto, Damus Plus Quam Pollicemur (We give more than we promise), which is a shame because then I could have given you a poem written by some unsung South African employee way back:

Upon the dragon's back for years
St Margaret bravely hid her fears.
A most precarious place to stand
And hold a pearl in outstretched hand.
But Margaret has no need to worry
For if she jumps off in a hurry,
And slips perchance and breaks a femur -
DAMUS PLUS QUAM POLLICEMUR.

Many thanks to Jo French, information manager at T.P. Bennett, who dug out this information.

Grocers' Hall Court EC2

 

This rather charming statue of St Anthony the Great was made for the Grocers' Hall of 1889.
It stood high up on the second floor, and was one of the few items to survive a huge fire in 1965. It now stands by the front entrance of the present hall.
In medieval times, grocers also supplied medicinal herbs and spices so they liked to associate themselves with St Anthony, the patron saint of skin diseases. The Grocers' company was originally incorporated in 1348 as the Fraternity of St Anthony. The old hermit is shown with his attributes: a pig (he is said to have been a swineherd), a cross of Tau, a bell and a book (despite that fact that his biographer, Athanasius, said he was illiterate).
Something I didn't know - grocers were originally grossers, that is, wholesalers who only sold stuff by the gross. You learn something every day.

Ministry of Defence, Horse Guards Avenue SW1

The vast bulk of the Ministry of Defence building was designed by Vincent Harris, originally for those ill-matched arms of government, the Department of Trade and the Air Ministry. It was built in phases from 1939 to 1959. The warriors moved in in the 1960s when the Ministry of Defence was created.
The main entrance is flanked by a pair of reclining giantesses symbolising Earth and Water, by Sir Charles Wheeler (1949). The figures weigh 40 tons each and don't look an ounce less. Despite their size, they have lovely pensive expressions.
A complementary pair, Fire and Air, were planned for the south entrance but the Treasury balked at the cost.
I don't think they are much of a loss - Earth and Water are differentiated only by sitting in waves or on the ground, so presumably the others would have had a bit of cloud and a few flames but otherwise more of the same.

56 Vincent Square SW1

To celebrate the bicentenary of the enclosure of Vincent Square as playing fields for Westminster School in 1810, the residents association put up a rather jolly half-relief portrait of the man who got it done, William Vincent, Dean of Westminster and former headmaster of the school.

At the time, the whole area was a boggy place owned by the Abbey, known as Tothill Fields. Dean Vincent saw it was being developed piecemeal and the school risked losing the area it had always used for recreation. He paid a bloke called Jonathan Green £3 to mark out ten acres of land, plus £2 4s for a horse and a plough to dig a deep furrough round it.
Vincent was a respected headmaster, known for his cry of ‘Eloquere, puer, eloquere’ (‘Speak out, boy!, speak out!’), though his vigorous use of corporal punishment would not be acceptable today. He expelled the future Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, for writing an article against the practice called The Flagellant.

The terracotta roundel is by Karen Newman, who based it on a portrait by William Owen, court painter to the Prince Regent. It livens up the corner of an extremely dull block of flats erected in 1994.

Globe House, Temple Place EC4

Globe House is a typical 1990s post-modern affair by GMW Partnership, with classical references and faced in Portland stone, and they had the good taste to retain a couple of lovely statues from the previous building on the site, Electra House by Sir Herbert Baker, built in 1933.
The life-size bronze figures of Mercury are by Sir Charles Wheeler. They stand gracefully on columns, each brandishing his snakey stick or caduceus with elegant insoucience. The model was a musician, artist and body-builder called Charles Assirati, cousin of the famous champion all-in wrestler Bert Assirati. Wheeler also used Assirati's torso for the merman in the Jellicoe fountain in Trafalgar Square.
As I was taking the photographs from the public pavement, a rather nice lady receptionist came across and told me that I must stop because it was 'against company policy'. I politely explained that the law of the land overrode company policy. Then a less nice security man said I had to stop, and fiddled threateningly with his radio. A member of the public backed me up, describing the company position as 'outrageous'. Then I took the rest of the pictures I wanted and we all left in anger.
Outrageous is the word. Even the police have stopped hassling photographers going about their legitimate business. If London's bloggers descended on the Globe House one fine day and held a mass snap-in just to get up the noses of the security men, it would serve them right.

Natwest Bank, 1 Prince's Street EC2

Ten years after he created the caryatids at the entrance of P&O in Cockspur Street, Ernest Gillick returned to the figure of Britannia for an allegorical group on top of the new headquarters of the National and Provincial Bank (now the NatWest).

The architect was Sir Edwin Cooper, a dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist, who was having no truck with the modern sculpture that had just appeared on the rebuilt Bank of England over the road. As a result, the decoration of 1 Prince's Street could just as well date to 1909 instead of 1929.
It is a lovely group. Britannia rises on a winged seat, flanked by Mercury (representing Commerce) and Truth with his torch.
At Britannia's knees are crouching nude females representing Higher and Lower Mathematics. Higher Maths, on the left, holds a carved 'magic square' a grid of numbers, almost any four of which add up to 34, the number associated in astrology with Jupiter. The square features in Durer's famous engraving Melencolia I and in Dan Brown's recent extrusion, The Lost Symbol.
The symbolism oozes with irony today, after a decade in which the financial sector cynically abused mathematics to loot the world, then hid the truth until economic meltdown was just days away and Britannia was close to ruin.

The building was adorned at ground level with serenely classical statues symbolising financial virtues, by Sir Edwin's favourite sculptor Charles Doman. 

The figures on the Prince's Street facade represent Security and Prosperity.

Security is a veteran soldier wearing a Phrygian cap (for Liberty) and a pauldron or shoulder-plate with an embossed lion's head. He holds a key and a bridle, and stands on books and scrolls.

Prosperity is a graceful girl with one foot on a cushion and holding some fruit from a basket on an ornately-carved bracket behind her. A wreath and more scrolls lie at her feet.

Two more allegorical figures by Charles Doman stand on the south facade. Courage is a female, unusually, holding a sword with which she has just slain a snake. So very unlike my dear lady wife, who hates swords almost as much as she fears snakes.
Integrity is venerable man with a beard, holding a locked ledger and standing on a pile of more ledgers. The light of truth is at his feet.