Looking down from Blackfriars Bridge the artwork on this new Thames-side space seems somewhat distant. However, walking onto the embankment itself your attention will be caught immediately by Nathan Coley’s five dark sculptures, Stages.
Glasgow artist Nathan Coley was commissioned by Tideway to create sculptures for the newly formed three-acre public park on the banks of the River Thames at Blackfriars. His work, called Stages, is made up of five abstract sculptural forms designed to reflect Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s pioneering engineering of the past and Tideway’s masterful engineering achievement of the present. For beneath the 0rdered, open, tree-lined setting of this new embankment lies hidden the complexity of machinery and plant that operate London’s latest marvel: The Tideway Tunnel, known as the ‘Super Sewer’, here at 48 metres below the surface.
Made from techcrete limestone concrete*, with black basalt and quartz aggregate, they dominate the space and are described by the artist as a group of related objects in “conversation” with one another. But in a more tangible dimension, they are also in relation to the newly created views of the Thames, with the boats passing along it, and bridges and buildings along its banks.
The first of the sculptures is simply called Stage, commanding the view from the western end of the Bazalgette Embankment from where you can see Waterloo Bridge, the Hungerford Bridges, and the palatial looking buildings along the riverside front of Whitehall Place.
Zig Zag
Waterwall
Interesting contrasts… And though there are several places here where you can sit and turn your back on the heart of the City, you can still feel its overbearing presence, yet these new views of the river do offer an escape…
Twins
These two strangely satisfying dark forms, non identical twins, maintain a direct link with the Thames, as part of their structure is fixed over on the waterside wall of the Embankment.
Kicker
Kicker links two of the terraces.
Kicker’s lines and angles seem to echo, almost blend in with the shapes of City buildings beyond.
Nathan Coley explained that: “We saw Bazalgette Embankment as an opportunity to work at a scale that echoes the site’s surroundings. The sculptures create personal moments to pause and linger and introduce the idea of abstraction into the public realm.”
Whereas you are left to reflect on Coley’s forms and to enjoy their structures in your own way in this Thames-side setting, poet Dorothea Smartt’s work has a more obvious direct link to not only this Bazalgette site but to other Thames Tideway sites as well. Commissioned to write poems to be fixed in raised type on the sewer’s ventilation columns at eight of the sites, her lines are all linked to the “Lost Rivers” of London, swallowed up by Bazalgette’s original nineteenth-century sewer network, and relate to each specific site. Exploring London’s libraries, consulting historians, visiting the paths of the lost rivers themselves and meeting people on the way, she wrote her poems, keeping to the necessarily short brief of about 150 characters.
Here her words run from just above ground level, twisting up the three, five-metre high ventilation columns, at the upstream end of the Bazalgette Embankment. Not only are they decorative, they are also oddly tactile, the solid and chunky raised type, giving a real sense of a connection to the past.
The raised type chosen to use for Smartt’s poems on the vents is the famous Doves Press font recovered, adapted, and digitised by graphic designer Robert Green. Believed to be lost after its creator T.J. Cobden-Sanderson threw his precious pieces of Doves type into the Thames by Hammersmith Bridge, Green, with a careful study of Cobden-Sanderson’s diaries giving him a good idea of where the pieces might be, and with the help of Port of London divers, records that over 150 pieces were recovered.
Smartt is quoted in an article by Tideway saying that she hopes her poems on the ventilation shafts will add to human knowledge and understanding by the way she has “drawn threads across social history, through the lives of people, events, or significant buildings and reflected and honoured well-known facts and features”. Importantly, she has also highlighted in her work “the lesser-known, marginalised or hidden past.”
Panels on this long building above, disguising machinery operating on and beneath this major Tideway site, are covered in hundreds of carefully crafted designs capturing images of a tunnel, ranging from a single circle to several, altering your perception as you look into them.
Finally to be counted among the artwork, are three lion mooring rings along with Vulliamy’s ‘Dolphin’ lamp, removed during construction of the site, beautifully restored and placed at strategic points on the site.
Yet it’s Coley’s sculptures that dominate the new embankment. A press release by Tideway states: “Coley’s work reflects Bazalgette’s legacy, particularly his role in shaping London’s infrastructure for public benefit”, in the way that Bazalgette’s work on London’s sewer, completed in 1875, led to the fine, tree-lined Victoria Embankment. They add: “Coley’s sculptures, conceived as a series of objects in conversation with one another, echo the themes of engineering, innovation, and civic ambition.” Although this is clearly the underlying concept, for the project has been thoughtfully developed and carefully brought to fruition, visitors are free to enjoy the sculptures and make of them what they will.
Sources and further Information
Sir Joseph Bazalgette: Builder of London’s first ‘Super Sewer’.
Tideway: Stages by Nathan Coley
Dorothea Smartt: Hidden Rivers, Hidden Times
See: The Bazalgette Embankment I: Images of work in progress
Thanks to N. for company and patience…
