TRAVELLERS hurrying for trains across the upper concourse of London’s St Pancras Station cannot fail to catch sight of the bronze statue of Sir John Betjeman. It is an intensely humane, sensitive portrait of the nation’s favourite poet. He wears a shabby overcoat, his waistcoat bulges a little due to an incipient paunch and he carries a shopping bag. With a hand on his crumpled trilby, he looks up to the cast-iron Victorian roof, which, as an ardent conservationist, he had campaigned to save from demolition. It is as if he has just taken a breath in wonderment at the beauty of it all.
This conscious lifting into the air of the weight of a sculpture is a particular artistic signature of Martin Jennings, who fashioned the statue. It gives a seemingly inert artwork that dynamic sense of animation, of movement. At Broadcasting House, Mr Jennings’s George Orwell wags his roll-up cigarette at the passer-by from his plinth-soapbox —‘Big Brother is Watching You!’— and his Philip Larkin, gabardine mac flapping, dashes from Hull’s Paragon Station to make his Whitsun train journey to King’s Cross. In his most striking sculpture to date, the Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole strides out at St Thomas’s Hospital, in the sculptor’s words, ‘marching defiantly onward into an oncoming wind, as if confronting head on some of the personal resistance she had constantly to battle’.
Denne historien er fra April 26, 2023-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
Allerede abonnent ? Logg på
Denne historien er fra April 26, 2023-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
Allerede abonnent? Logg på
Happiness in small things
Putting life into perspective and forces of nature in farming
Colour vision
In an eye-baffling arrangement of geometric shapes, a sinister-looking clown and a little girl, Test Card F is one of television’s most enduring images, says Rob Crossan
'Without fever there is no creation'
Three of the top 10 operas performed worldwide are by the emotionally volatile Italian composer Giacomo Puccini, who died a century ago. Henrietta Bredin explains how his colourful life influenced his melodramatic plot lines
The colour revolution
Toxic, dull or fast-fading pigments had long made it tricky for artists to paint verdant scenes, but the 19th century ushered in a viridescent explosion of waterlili
Bullace for you
The distinction between plums, damsons and bullaces is sweetly subtle, boiling down to flavour and aesthetics, but don’t eat the stones, warns John Wright
Lights, camera, action!
Three remarkable country houses, two of which have links to the film industry, the other the setting for a top-class croquet tournament, are anything but ordinary
I was on fire for you, where did you go?
In Iceland, a land with no monks or monkeys, our correspondent attempts to master the art of fishing light’ for Salmo salar, by stroking the creases and dimples of the Midfjardara river like the features of a loved one
Bravery bevond belief
A teenager on his gap year who saved a boy and his father from being savaged by a crocodile is one of a host of heroic acts celebrated in a book to mark the 250th anniversary of the Royal Humane Society, says its author Rupert Uloth
Let's get to the bottom of this
Discovering a well on your property can be viewed as a blessing or a curse, but all's well that ends well, says Deborah Nicholls-Lee, as she examines the benefits of a personal water supply
Sing on, sweet bird
An essential component of our emotional relationship with the landscape, the mellifluous song of a thrush shapes the very foundation of human happiness, notes Mark Cocker, as he takes a closer look at this diverse family of birds