Cavendish Square W1

This equestrian statue of the Duke of Cumberland is not all it seems. It is made of soap, and will in the course of the next year gradually wash away before our eyes.
South Korean artist Meekyoung Shin created the figure, a replica of a statue that stood on the plinth from 1770 to 1868 when it was removed apparently because the public had got very queezy about the Duke's war record. His total victory over Bonny Prince Charlie at Culloden was marred by orders to release the dragoons to mow down the fleeing Highlanders. In England, a new variety of garden flower was named Sweet William in his honour. North of the border it is known as Stinking Billy.

It will be interesting to see how the statue erodes. Meekyoung Shin is, appropriately, sponsored by trendy soap makers Lush.
Cavendish Square is also currently home to Solo II by Naomi Press, the Polish-born, Zimbabwe-raised, South Africa-trained, London-based sculptor. The abstract shape in mirror-finished stainless steel, reflects Press's early obsession with ballet. For me, it reflects far too much - the reflections in the steel confuse and dilute the image.
Part of the Cultural Olympics, Solo II will go in September so now is a good time to visit Cavendish Square, both to get the Butcher before his features start blurring and to take in the Press piece.

15 Trinity Square, London EC3

This noble bird lords it over the former headquarters of the General Steam Navigation Company, built in 1908 by Edward Blakeway I'Anson, though it is possible it may have landed when an extra storey or two were added in 1931.
The GSNC was Britain's most prominent shipping line for years but never had the romance of Cunard or P&O because it specialised in short routes to north-west Europe. So its badge, a globe, was something of a hyperbole.
The globe on the building needs a bit of a clean, too. It gives the unfortunate impression that the eagle has a bit of a gippy tummy, possibly the result of eating in the pub that now occupies the GSNC's grand Freight Hall on the ground floor.

Pemberton House, Pemberton Row EC4

This muscular, indeed almost muscle-bound figure is a printer. I met a few printers in the dying days of Fleet Street and frankly none were at all like this. Too much indulgence in late night beer and meat pies.

But I mustn't carp. It is a beautiful sculpture, Youth,  by Wilfred Dudeney, commissioned in 1955 to stand in front of the headquarters of the Starmer Group, owners of local newspapers across the north country.

Dudeney was an academic and teacher, and this statue is a lovely example of the figurative tradition advanced by modern influences. It is hard to imagine what Henry Moore or Elizabeth Frink might have said about it.

When Wilfred Dudeney carved this coat of arms to go on the new Fleet Street HQ of a provincial newspaper group in 1956, he cannot have predicted that the story of printing there was almost at an end.
The figure on the left is probably Caxton, but they may both be representative printers.
On the ground behind Caxton is a typecase, which in those days would have held both capitals and minuscule letters. Only later did compositors get tired of faffing about sorting out the letters and stored them in separate cases, one for the capitals and another, the lower case, for the minuscules.
Nowadays we still call minuscule letters 'lower case', correctly, but it is WRONG, yes TOTALLY WRONG, to refer to capitals as 'upper case'.
I don't know why this annoys me so much.
The world these carvings represent has vanished totally. The printers have disappeared and the newspapers are fast following them down the plughole of destiny. Pemberton House itself has been converted into flats for bankers and lawyers. We live in degenerate times.

Guildhall, Basinghall Street EC2

The bit of the Guildhall that faces onto Basinghall Street was built in 1870 as the library by Sir Horace Jones, architect of Tower Bridge, which it strongly resembles. Jones placed three niches in the facade that were later filled with statues of Queens of England by J.W. Seale of Lambeth.
The figures are representative rather than realistic. Anne is portrayed as a beauty with a wasp waist when in reality she was so short and fat that when she died she had to be buried in a cubic coffin. Even Victoria, who was in her fifties at the time, is shown as a young woman.
Elizabeth I has unfortunately suffered damage to her hands and may have been holding regalia, possibly a sceptre in contrast to the orbs held by Anne and Victoria.
J.W. Seale was the progenitor of one of the sculpting dynasties that dominated the London architectural sculpture market until it collapse under the onset of International Modernism in the 1950s. Others included G.W. Seale and Gilbert Seale.

BUPA House, Bury Street W1

This enormous sculpture by Peter Randall-Page stands outside the headquarters of the private healthcare giant BUPA in Bloomsbury. The medical connection makes its title, Beneath the Skin (1991), a little sinister, making one think of some horrible larva burrowing away. Or a major organ in need of surgery at one of BUPA's luxury hospitals.
Actually I like it a lot. It has proportion, shape and presence. The polished surface of the Kilkenny marble is fantastic, although the top has been over-polished by the bottoms of tourists resting on their way to the British Museum round the corner.
The black-and-white pattern in the background is also by Randall-Page, entitled Chain of Events (1996). It is in black granite inlaid into Portland stone.
Beneath the Skin is a good example of Randall-Page's early organic style, using natural shapes to create memorable images. Now he has moved on, investigating the way nature uses simple mathematical relationships such as the Fibonacci series to create complex structures like sunflowers or pine nuts. There is much more on his website.

Goldbeater's House, Manette Street W1

In Victorian times, the lane that runs down the side of Foyle's bookshop was occupied by sundry industries including an organ builder, a maker of coach trimmings (it was close by to Long Acre, where the coaches were made) and a goldbeater who used tremendous cast iron mallets to beat out ribbons of gold into gold leaf just a few atoms thick. This would have been supplied to the carriage trade also.

The scene was described by Dickens as the home of Dr Manette in A Tale of Two Cities:

There ought to have been a tranquil bark in such an anchorage, and there was. The Doctor occupied two floors of a large stiff house, where several callings purported to be pursued by day, but whereof little was audible any day, and which was shunned by all of them at night. In a building at the back, attainable by a courtyard where a plane-tree rustled its green leaves, church-organs claimed to be made, and silver to be chased, and likewise gold to be beaten by some mysterious giant who had a golden arm starting out of the wall of the front hall - as if he had beaten himself precious, and menaced a similar conversion of all visitors. Very little of these trades, or of a lonely lodger rumoured to live up-stairs, or of a dim coach-trimming maker asserted to have a counting-house below, was ever heard or seen. Occasionally, a stray workman putting his coat on, traversed the hall, or a stranger peered about there, or a distant clink was heard across the courtyard, or a thump from the golden giant. These, however, were only the exceptions required to prove the rule that the sparrows in the plane-tree behind the house, and the echoes in the corner before it, had their own way from Sunday morning unto Saturday night.

I remember visiting the House of St Barnabas in Soho Square many years ago and being buttonholed by an old gentleman who had been one of its officers. He was very proud of having convinced the Dickens Fellowship that the great novelist had based Dr Manette's house on the House of St Barnabas and not, as they had previously thought, the Duke of Monmouth's house on the other side of the square.

Not only had the House of St Barnabas got a garden with a plane tree (which still exists), but the road, then known as Rose Street, runs down the side of it. So when Dickens describes the people in the garden hear Sidney Carton's footsteps, then a silence, then the front door bell ringing, he was clearly running down Rose Street and under the arch of the Pillars of Hercules which would have muffled the sound.

Later, a little chapel was built on the garden and the organ builder made an organ for it. The old goldbeater's premises was knocked down for an extension to Foyle's, including flats for the Foyle family. The original sign was given to the Dickens museum in Doughty Street, where it is still on display, and this replica installed in its place.

Tower Hill Terrace EC3

Tower Hill Terrace is a rather bleak space on top of a huddle of shops selling fast food and tourist tat, but its western side is graced by a pair of gateposts to All Hallows Barking, topped by these kids frolicking in the surf with dolphins.

They were created as a memorial to Sir Follett Holt, first chairman of the Tower Hill Improvement Trust. Sir Follett, a businessman with links to Argentina, had supported Tubby Clayton, founder of Toc H and vicar of All Hallows, in his campaign to remove 'certain ugly buildings' from Tower Hill. Appropriately, Tower Hill Terrace itself is the basement of one of those buildings - a rather grim warehouse.

Sir Follett died in 1944 but the memorial was not erected until 1965 at the end of the restoration of All Hallows after its almost total destruction in the blitz.
The figures, called 'The Sea' were designed by Cecil Thomas, another great friend of Tubby Clayton. He also created many works in the church, including Clayton's own memorial, a full-length recumbent figure like a medieval bishop.

Thomas was one of the 'soldier sculptors' who served in the First World War - others include Jagger, Dick and Roslyn. It seems significant that so many sculptors who came to prominence between the wars should have been soldiers, but almost every able-bodied man of that generation served in one way or another so perhaps it is not so strange. The post-war boom in memorial sculpture inevitably linked them conflict, I suppose.

Thomas started his career as a miniaturist, working in cameos and coins. He later had his studio in Brompton Road, bequeathing it to the Royal Society of British Sculptors (now the Royal British Society of Sculptors).