So with little of interest to report on the Tube I’m
turning to another non-work related issue, Henry Moore’s Draped Seated Woman. Moore sold the 1.5 ton, 3m tall bronze statue
to the LCC for the knock down price of £6000 in 1960 on the condition that she
be put on public display in a deprived area.
“Old Flo” sat on the Stifford Estate in Stepney until 1997 by which time
the LCC had been replaced by the GLC and when that was abolished she passed
into the hands of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. She’d suffered numerous acts of vandalism over
the years and with the estate due for demolition the council thought it best to
move her to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in Wakefield.
And there she stayed, mostly forgotten, apart for a rare
trip down south for the Henry Moore retrospective at the Tate two years ago
where she sat by the front entrance greeting visitors and where I had the
pleasure of making her acquaintance. According to the East London Advertiser it was
around this time that the Tower Hamlets Conservatives discovered her
whereabouts through a FIA request and started clamouring for her return. Maybe one of them is an art lover and saw her
at the same exhibition that I did.
Later that year the good voters of Tower Hamlets elected
Luftar Rahman, an independent, as their mayor.
He’d been a Labour councillor
since 2002 and leader of the council since 2008 but after a bit of scandal over
connections with an Islamic fundamentalist group he was de-selected as their
candidate. Simply put Rahman is a bit of
a political chancer in the style of George Galloway or Derek Hatton, he
splashes cash around on his pet projects while at the same time pleading
poverty, in that respect he should get on famously with Boris.
Numerous places have been proposed that would offer her a
safe home including Queen Mary College on the Mile End Road and Victoria Park
but Tower Hamlets say with insurance costs and the risk of metal theft they can’t
afford to put the statue back on public display in the borough. They have a very good point, two sculptures
have been stolen from the Henry Moore Foundation in Hertfordshire in the past
few years; “Sundial”, worth £0.5m, was
stolen earlier this year and recovered a few days later but a 2 ton reclining
figure, est. value £3m, was taken in 2005 and has not been seen since. The thieves used a crane to lift it onto a
truck and the whole thing was captured on CCTV; so much for security.
According to council sources the proposed sale of Old Flo
would raise up to £20m but there are a fair number of experts who think that
the figure would be much lower. As it is
£20m would be a drop in the ocean, Tower Hamlet’s budget is around £3bn and
they are looking to make savings of around £100m, any suggestion that the money
raised by the sale would make any significant difference is laughable. Despite that the residents of Tower Hamlets are
generally in favour of selling the statue with opposition mostly coming from
the art and media world.
Boris has naturally stuck his oar in saying that Tower
Hamlets should rethink the sale but without mentioning that they will be paying
TfL £2m for extending the bike hire scheme into the borough. Both sides are making political capital out
of the issue, Rahman gets to turn the spotlight on how Coalition cuts are
effecting one of the most deprived boroughs in the UK while his opponents get
to shout about his £1000 a day “consultants”, £100k spent redecorating his
office and £1500 a month for a chauffeur driven Merc leaving Old Flo sat quietly
in the middle.
For myself I think it’s time to stop all the public arguments,
for those who want to keep her in London to get together somewhere quietwith
Tower Hamlets and cut a deal that keeps Old Flo in London
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