Allington House, 150 Victoria Street SW1

The old Allington House was a dull commercial office block enlivened by these endangered species by San Francisco-based Barry Baldwin, so it was very ironic when they came near to extinction themselves when it was demolished by developer Land Securities.
The excellent Peter Berthoud, London guide and blogger, mounted a campaign to save them and at the last minute the developer decided to remove them for future use rather than just prizing them off the wall and dumping them in a skip.
The building was only put up in 1997. I have to confess that I'm not a big fan of Baldwin's work. It is a bit coarse and literal and poorly-composed for me. But it is good they are saved.
Baldwin's only other work in London is the series of heads and an arch with more animals at Grand Buildings in Trafalgar Square. And who commissioned Barry to execute them? Land Securities!

Royal Automobile Club, Pall Mall SW1

The Royal Automobile Club is the last and the largest of the clubs in Pall Mall, built in 1908 by Mewes and Davis, architects of Ritz hotels around the world and many ocean liners. Clearly, clubs were moving away from being meeting places for like-minded men to luxury accommodation for the loaded.
The pediment over the grand entrance of the RAC contains a charming group by the French sculptor Ferdinand Faivre, a graduate of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris.
At the centre, a motherly figure holds a torch aloft to light the way for a winged cherub at the wheel of a motor car. Pevsner rather sniffily dismisses it as 'primitive' but in 1908 it would have been fairly state of the art. The Ford Model T was launched in that year, after all.
Three cherubic motor mechanics play with parts and tools on either side. It looks as though the motor is broken down in the woods somewhere (note the oak tree behind the lady). This would have been a very familiar occurrence in 1908, when very few journeys were completed without a puncture at the very least.
It would not, however, have been acceptable for ladies, however allegorical, to bare their all at the side of the road or for chauffeurs, however cherubic, to wave their willies from the driving seat.

Lord's Cricket Ground, St John's Wood NW8

This is one of the most prominent sculptures in London but nobody notices it. Something to do with its position on a nightmare roundabout where both drivers and pedestrians are concentrating on not getting killed rather than admiring the surroundings.

It is a relief by Gilbert Bayes showing sportsmen and the tools of their trades. Cricketers are at the centre, naturally enough, where a batsman and a bowler admire the surprisingly tiny Ashes trophy. Next to them is an athlete toweling himself off - an excuse for a nude.

Other sports are represented by (left to right) tennis players, golfers, footballers, a rower and swimmers. The relief was done in 1934 so although there is a woman golfer, tennis player and swimmer but no females in the other sports.

The figures are wonderfully formed, honed athletes rather than the muscle-bound god that Hodge put on the PLA building, featured in a recent post.

That famous line from Sir Henry Newbolt's Vitai Lampada, "Play up, play up, and play the game" runs above the group. More than anything in Kipling it summarises what was nasty about Imperial England - conformist, hectoring, class-ridden and sentimental.

Old St Pancras Church House, Crowndale Road NW1

The cult of St Pancras was brought to England with St Augustine, who carried relics of the martyr in his baggage. St Pancras Old Church is said to be one of the oldest places of Christian worship in England, which explains how the name of this early Roman martyr came to be so common in London, a place he had no association with whatsoever.
The church itself is right next to the station, so it was rather isolated from the community after the railway took over much of the land for marshalling yards in the later Victorian period. This must have been part of the motivation for building this charming mission hall to the north of the church in 1896 to the designs of C.R. Baker King.
The figure of the saint over the door was carved by Harry Hems (1842-1916), an eccentric and excitable sculptor who had made his home in Exeter after winning a commission to work on the Royal Albert Memorial Museum there. He was known for refusing to pay what he described as the iniquitous demands of the Inland Revenue, and preparing the catalogues of the resulting forced sales of his works himself. The lots he selected included the crowbar used by the bailiffs, and three "second-hand tombstones (slightly damaged) ... suitable for the graves of Income Tax Commissioners or other Revenue Officials". The publicity did him no harm at all.
His statue of St Pancras shows the 14 year old boy in a toga and carrying a bible and a martyr's palm - he was beheaded for defying the Emperor Diocletian. St Pancras is the patron saint of children and his aid is invoked in cases of cramps, headaches, false witness and perjury.

10 Trinity Square EC3

10 Trinity Square was old-fashioned when it was built in 1922 to the designs of the Imperial architect Sir Edwin Cooper.
It was the headquarters of the mighty Port of London Authority, which we now look back on as somehow eternal but was established as late as 1909 to bring order to the cut-throat competition between the privately-owned dock and wharf companies.
Like County Hall, where Cooper had been runner-up in the competition for the design, the First World War delayed construction and when completed it was an Edwardian building in the Art Deco age.
Cooper had commissioned his favourite sculptor, Albert Hodge, to create massive symbolic figures for the PLA building. He had created sketch models of three groups including this monumental figure of Father Thames when he suddenly died in 1917, at the age of just 42. His assistant Charles Doman executed Hodge's designs and added two of his own.
Father Thames has a truly memorable flowing beard and is something of a body-builder ('muscles like penny rolls' as R.L. Stevenson put it). He stands on an anchor and holds a trident, his free hand pointing downriver towards the sea.

Sir John Cass Institute, 31 Jewry Street EC3

This powerful, vigorous figure striding purposefully out of his niche high over Jewry Street is Sir John Cass (1661-1718), alderman, sheriff and MP for the City of London.
As a merchant he amassed considerable wealth and left most of it to a foundation for education that still prospers today.
The statue is a copy of a life-size figure in lead created by the brilliant Louis-Francois Roubiliac (1702-1762) who was born in Lyon but made his home in London from 1730. It is a baroque masterpiece, full of life and movement.
The original was kept in the Sir John Cass primary school in the East End. Recently it was restored by Rupert Harris and moved to the Guildhall where it would also be safer and more accessible to the public. At the same time, several copies were made in fibreglass with lead powder impregnated into the surface.
Coincidentally, the 1898 Cass Institute (by A.W. Cooksey) had an empty niche over the entrance of exactly the right size, and one of the copies was placed in it. It looks as though it had always been there.

The new copy of Roubiliac's statue attracts all the attention now, but the other carving on the entrance bay rewards a look.
On either side of the statue are Baroque-style swags of impedimenta associated with education, art on the left and science on the right. It is all very practical, with lots of tools including an artist's palette and maulstick, sculptor's tools, T-squares, globe, telescope, gears and pinions, pincers and a retort.
Supporting the arch over the front steps are heads of boy and girl pupils surrounded by fruit. No attempt is made to make them look antique, even though they wear traditional charity school headgear. Very charming.

190-195 Piccadilly W1

190-195 Piccadilly was built as a gallery, headquarters and club for the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours. The Royal Academy just down the street was too elevated to admit watercolourists, regarding oils as the only acceptable medium for art.

Unfortunately, the watercolourists were just as cliquey and two societies emerged, the Society of Painters in Water Colours (known as the Old Society) and the New Society of Painters in Water Colours.
The two were at war for centuries and still don't talk. The Old Society (now the Royal Watercolour Society) is in trendy Bankside and the New Society (now the Royal Institute) shares premises in the Mall.
For nearly a century, however, the RI was the much more richly housed, in the prominent building designed by E.R. Robson and ornamented with sculpture by Edward Onslow Ford.
Ford was largely self-taught, though he did study on the Continent. He specialised in portrait sculpture, so it is a particular gift that the front of the RI features a series of his busts of prominent watercolourists. I have only heard of one of them, which I suspect is due to a combination of the continuing prejudice against painters in water colours and my own stupendous ignorance.

David Cox (1783-1859). Who? Apparently, he was once regarded as rivaled only by Constable for his depictions of cloudscapes. I really must look at some of his pictures.

Peter De Wint (1784 - 1849) was trained as an engraver and painted in both oils and watercolours. He is particularly known for pictures of Lincoln, done on visits to his in-laws. 

George Barret Jr (1767 - 1842), the son of the Irish painter George Barret Sr, was the Stakhanov of watercolours, never missing a Royal Watercolour Society exhibition in the 38 years from its founding in 1804. He started with views of the Thames Valley, moving later to romantic imaginary landscapes after the manner of Claude. 

William Henry Hunt (1790 - 1864) was one of the founders of English water colour painting, developing a wide range of techniques admired by Ruskin. 

Paul Sandby (1731 - 1809) was a splendid example of the close relationship of water colour painting with soldiering. He started life as a draughtsman with the Board of Ordnance making maps, and began painting landscapes when he was surveying the Scottish Highlands. Later he rose to become Chief Drawing Master at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. All army officers (including my father) were expected to be able to produce a credible watercolour landscape for intelligence purposes. I suppose they do it with their mobile phones these days, sadly.

Thomas Girtin (1775 - 1802) was a childhood friend of Turner, the teenage pair getting jobs colouring prints. He is credited with inventing English Romantic watercolour painting. 

John Robert Cozens (1752 - 1797) travelled on the Continent with the notable mad person William Beckford, and sadly ended up in Bethlem himself, where he died. His paintings were dramatic and primitive in execution, but Constable himself called him 'the greatest genius that ever touched landscape.'

And finally, a name I recognise. Turner. The man. The greatest watercolourist of them all, and indeed one of the greatest artists of all time in any medium.