Given the proliferation of utterly awful public sculpture popping up over London—hurtling elephants and giant Jelly Babies on Park Lane, anyone?— the new permanent artwork by Langlands & Bell unveiled this week at Piccadilly Circus tube station provides a timely and welcome antidote. The brief was to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the death of Frank Pick, London transport’s chief executive. Pick was the mastermind behind such iconic London Underground designs as the famous bar and circle logo, the tube map and many of the capital’s Art Deco stations, including Piccadilly Circus itself, which Pick commissioned from Charles Holden in the 1920s.
Langlands & Bell have risen to this considerable challenge with elegance and lightness of touch. Set into a curving travertine marble wall, in the station’s main ticket hall, is a classic illuminated roundel with Pick’s name in place of a station, along with eight words from Pick’s personal notes spelt out in solid bronze. These include “Beauty < Immortality”, which is the title of the piece.
As Ben Langlands explained at Monday’s (7 November) opening celebrations held at the London Transport Museum—where else?—it was when the artists were going through Pick’s personal papers in the museum’s archives that they found the key to this new work. “We came across this little note, no more than a doodle, written in the margin of his lecture notes,” Langlands explained. “It was a grid of two columns of four words: beauty, immortality, utility, perfection [and] goodness, righteousness, truth, wisdom. Each was connected by a backwards arrow—we then knew that he was a true pioneer.”
There were also more words at this packed event when poet and writer Ben Okri climbed aboard of the trams on show in the museum and delivered an excerpt from Pick. The long poem was written in homage to the man who saw that “like the alchemists/ You had to change the inner structure of things before you can change their outward form.” Beauty and immortality, indeed.