In a post-war Britain that faced colossal reconstruction challenges, newly commissioned art, mainly in the form of sculpture and murals installed in outdoor public spaces, became a symbol of national civic renewal.
The art was intended for everyone, whether in public parks, gardens, housing estates, shopping precincts, schools and universities, or integrated into religious, civic or commercial buildings.
Social context
Thousands of new homes were built, ranging from temporary ‘prefabs’ to suburban estates, to replace the half a million homes that had been destroyed or damaged by enemy action.
A programme of New Towns, planned and constructed between 1946 and 1970, offered young families modern housing, jobs and schools.
The expansion of the Welfare State now entitled people to a wider range of public services, providing security against sickness, insanitary accommodation and unemployment. From 1944, all children were entitled to education up to the age of 15, with a programme of new primary and secondary schools. 1948 saw the foundation of the National Health Service.
It was a time of hardship and austerity; after the war, the country was virtually bankrupt. But there was optimism and hope that a better future was on the way.
Festival of Britain, Southbank, London 1951
The Festival of Britain was a nationwide exhibition and fair that celebrated Britain’s cultural and technological achievements. Its centrepiece was on the South Bank of the Thames where, alongside the LCC’s Royal Festival Hall, the designers Hugh Casson and Misha Black commissioned 22 pavilions and other elements, including the Dome of Discovery, the Skylon, Sea and Ships, Power and Production and Homes and Gardens.
Between them they told a story about Britain, its culture, traditions and future.
Eye-opening public art was everywhere across the South Bank site: over 30 sculptures and more than 50 murals, including figurative, abstract and kinetic works.
The festival was a catalyst for change; an exuberant demonstration that public art could enliven contemporary architecture and townscapes.
Works by established artists as Henry Moore’s Reclining Figure, Barbara Hepworth’s Contrapuntal Forms and Jacob Epstein’s Youth Advances, were commissioned by the Arts Council at a combined cost of almost £5,000. Twice that sum was spent on works by twenty sculptors, favouring ‘young and comparatively untried talent’.
The main site attracted 8.5 million paying visitors. It was estimated that over one-third of the British population of 49 million experienced the festival and its 2,000 nationwide associated events in some way over its 4 months duration.
At the end of the Festival, the South Bank pavilions were demolished, while the public art was lost or salvaged for reuse elsewhere. Museums, art galleries, schools and the new towns were the main beneficiaries.
Piper’s mural (above) was gifted to the new town of Harlow where, in the 1960s, it was installed in the Assembly Hall at Harlow Technical College. It remained there until 1992 before being acquired by the Rothschild Foundation for display at its National Trust-managed Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire.
Patronage of post-war public art
In the 1940s the idea of state patronage of the arts gained traction and many local authorities and other bodies pursued a policy of enhancing the public realm with outdoor art.
Progressive councils, such as London, Hertfordshire and Leicestershire were in the vanguard.
Between 1948 and 1966, the London County Council (LCC) sponsored five open-air sculpture exhibitions in Battersea Park, including works by Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. These exhibitions, the brainchild of Patricia Strauss, chair of the LCC’s Parks Committee, challenged the notion that traditional commemorative statuary was all that public art could be.
The Arts Council, formed in 1940 as the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, was a government-funded body charged with promoting the fine arts. After the War, the new body established a network of local arts organisations, organising countrywide touring exhibitions.
London County Council Patronage of the Arts Scheme (1956 to 1965)
From 1956, with an annual budget of £20,000, London County Council’s innovative Patronage of the Arts Scheme commissioned or bought contemporary artworks for installation in public places, such as new housing estates and educational facilities.
Over about eight years, scores of public artworks were installed across the inner-London boroughs. Most of these were sculptures or murals by leading practitioners as well as emerging artists.
New town patronage
A series of development corporations were set up to realise an ambitious programme of building new towns under the 1946 New Towns Act. Emerging new towns across the country became important patrons of public art.
Harlow, Essex: ‘Sculpture Town’
The architect-planner Frederick Gibberd (1908-1984) drew up a master plan for the new town of Harlow, designated by the act in 1946.
Gibberd wanted to visually integrate modern sculpture into the town’s neighbourhood centres, making art works part of people’s everyday life. In 1980 he wrote that ‘of all the furnishings in urban spaces, sculpture is by far the most important, not only as works of art for their own sake, but because they make the scene more interesting by providing both contrast and focus’.
The trust invested in well-known modern artists, including Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, as well as up-and-coming talent such as Elizabeth Frink, Ralph Brown and Lynn Chadwick.
Frink’s original ‘Boar’ was cast in concrete in 1957, her first commission, and sited in south Harlow. It began to deteriorate and was replaced with an entirely new bronze boar in 1969. This was moved 20 years later to the Water Gardens (see below) for its protection. Today, the sculpture is displayed outside the Gibberd Gallery.
The Trust was also gifted art from the Festival of Britain, including Barbara Hepworth’s ‘Contrapuntal Forms (Group Symbolising the Spirit of Recovery)’ and John Piper’s ‘The Englishman’s Home’ mural.
Within 20 years of its founding, Harlow Art Trust had installed 27 public sculptures in a town dubbed ‘Sculpture Town’ by the press.
The trust continues to maintain the collection, which now numbers over 100 public artworks, as well as purchasing or commissioning further contemporary pieces.
Stevenage, Hertfordshire
Members of the Stevenage Development Corporation were inspired by the Dutch use of symbolic sculpture in the rebuilding of Rotterdam, heavily bombed during the Second World War.
Franta Belsky’s Joy Ride celebrates the arrival of a new generation in a new town. It is located in the extensive pedestrian precinct in the town centre.
Hertfordshire County Council
In line with the post-war ideal of art for everyone, art was considered an important part of a child’s education.
Many new schools were needed after the war. They were required as a result of programmes of educational reorganisation, to serve new communities and to replace damaged or obsolete school buildings. It was not only a question of numbers, but of realising ideas about child-centred education. These twin needs, to rethink education and to share out scarce resources equitably, led to fresh thinking in school design. One of the most innovative authorities was Hertfordshire County Council which built around 100 new schools in the post-war decade.
John Newsom, Chief Education Officer for Hertfordshire between 1940 and 1957, secured funding for new artworks in schools.
Barclay school was the county’s first secondary school, designed by the architectural practice Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall. For this flagship school Newsome commissioned a Henry Moore sculpture
Half the funds for the bronze sculpture were raised from private donors. Moore charged a reduced fee that covered just materials, casting and transport.
The school is also home to another important work of 1950’s public art, an abstract mural in bold block colours by Kenneth Rowntree (1915-1997), located in the entrance hall opposite Moore’s sculpture.
Leicestershire County Council
Leicestershire County Council was also an enlightened patron of the arts, especially in educational settings.
Stewart Mason, Leicestershire’s Director of Education between 1947 and 1971, believed that challenging art should be taken out of the gallery and located in places where ‘people daily congregate’.
During his tenure, Mason commissioned or bought site-specific works for individual schools and further education campuses.
Today the 200 hectare campus of Loughborough College is home to over 40 publicly-accessible sculptures, including a number from the post-war period.
Themes and materials in post-war public art
Post-war public art is characterised by its diversity, representing a wide array of themes, media and artistic styles.
Some art in these decades exploited industrial materials and techniques, such as concrete, fibreglass and cast aluminium. Experiments were made with methods of welding, casting and processing, while mixed media works juxtaposed contrasting materials, sometimes incorporating found objects.
William Mitchell’s abstract concrete relief in Coventry’s Bull Yard, shows the sculptor’s distinctive ‘Aztec’ style. It was created by cutting patterns into a sheet of polystyrene with a hot wire. The sheet was then placed behind the shuttering prior to pouring the concrete. The wall was cast in a single piece and the concrete mix included coarse, pebbly aggregate, giving the work a characteristically rough texture.
Peter Laszlo Peri pioneered the use of concrete as a medium for expressive sculptures, such as this unusual memorial to child victims of the war. He came to specialise in public architectural reliefs in coloured concrete.
Although there is no formal data, the heritage body 20th Century Society estimates that at least one thousand murals were executed/constructed between the Second World War and the 1980s, with the 1951 Festival of Britain boosting their profile and popularity.
The late 1950s and 1960s were a fertile period of experimentation with materials, not just the classic such as mosaic and ceramic, but also concrete and fibreglass. Murals were generally figurative in style, abstract reliefs, or historical in subject, with the latter increasingly popular.
The History of the Old Kent Road mural is made of 3 chronological panels, telling the rich and detailed history of the ancient road from the Roman era, through Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales’, to the 1960s East End of London with its Pearly Kings and Queens.
Commissioned by the National Coal Board, Fleischmann conceived of this heroic and monumental sculpture ‘The Miner’ in the industrial North of England both as a celebration of revolutionary technical advances in coal mining and of the sheer physical strength of miners.
The sculpture used a genuine industrial component, a toothed steel cutting drum, along with a fine art bronze bust of a miner holding a lump of coal. Both the coal, and the spiral screw which forms the base, were made from bronze-coloured fibreglass.
The decision to rebuild Coventry Cathedral was taken the morning after its destruction – not as an act of defiance, but as a symbol of reconciliation and faith in a future world free from conflict.
The architect Basil Spence (1907 to 1976) commissioned some of the finest artists of the period to create striking and emotionally moving modern artworks, both within and without the cathedral, demonstrating the powerful interplay between spirituality, sacred spaces and public art.
What happened to public art in the 1970s?
The tradition of public monuments, including war memorials and commemorative statuary continued unbroken throughout the 20th century.
New towns and educational institutions continued to support more challenging public art during the 1970s.
‘Help!’ depicts the Northern Irish peace campaigners, Betty Williams and Mairéad Corrigan Maguire, winners of the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize, grappling with a banner on which the world ‘HELP’ is inscribed. The work, by the Northern Irish artist F.E. McWilliam responded to a pub bombing during the Troubles. It was commissioned by the Harlow Arts Trust.
In the 1970s and 1980s a wide range exterior murals were realised as part of the community arts movement, sometimes with the participation of members of the local community.
Many examples of this ‘street art’ were ephemeral, but the best examples, such as The Battle of Cable Street (commenced in 1979 by David Binnington and completed in 1983 by Paul Butler, Ray Walker and Desmond Rochfort) are celebrated by their local communities and have been carefully restored.
The private sector could also be a source of enlightened patronage. Commercial organisations commissioned sculptural pieces for banks, offices and retail complexes, sometimes attached to the buildings and sometimes freestanding. Bold works of sculpture were deployed at out-of-town corporate headquarters and at urban developments such as Broadgate in the City of London. Artists such as Elizabeth Frink and Eduardo Paolozzi created works of freestanding sculpture for public and private patrons alike.
In the 1990s, the advent of National Lottery funding and regional regeneration agencies resulted in a wave of new public artworks, some in celebration of the new millennium. Perhaps best known is Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North (1998) in Gateshead. The impulse to memorialise has never gone away: some recent works commemorate figures of note, including heroes of sport and popular culture.
Written by Nicky Hughes
Further reading
- Out There: England’s Post-War Public Art short YouTube film
- Public Art walking tours Bristol, Birmingham and Sheffield on Geo
A really interesting article. Thank you. Being an older Londoner, I remember many of the pieces shown and some from elsewhere. I have to admit that as a youngster, I didn’t really like ‘modern art’, but many such sculptures grew on me. Recently South Holland District Council, Lincolnshire installed some concrete cows and sheep in the old market places. Those haven’t grown on me yet, but perhaps they will. I think public art is important. My favourite recent piece is the Avro Lancaster ‘on freedom’s wings’ beside the A46, but no government or local council funds were involved in its creation.
Perhaps there is a need to put a call out for images/photos of murals or art work from members of the public that have been lost completely to create a body of reference material and raise awareness. for instance I know of murals in Leeds that were created by the very’ hip and happening’ School of Art at Leeds Polytechnic as it was known and Leeds University in the early 1970’s. More recently some of this artwork has been painted over.