Irwell Sculpture Trail Tales (2) – Ed Allington

In the first IST blog, I mentioned how the National Lottery Assessor, Mike Sixsmith, who recommended we receive the funding to build the trail, observed that we hadn’t bid for enough money to achieve the scale of its ambition. My previous experience had been with projects of up to about £15,000. When describing the aim of commissioning internationally significant artworks which would put IST on the world stage, I had guessed that such commissions would cost about £80,000. Mike and I were standing in Ramsbottom Market Square which was one of the highest profile sites on the whole trail. He really like the site and thought it had massive potential for a sculpture but, like with other key sites, he observed that such a location would need nearer to £250,000. It was this conversation that prompted the significant increase in the final lottery grant referred to in the last blog.

Because of the high visibility of the sculpture, we created a selection panel of local councillors and organisations supported by arts expertise. A long list of 27 artists was created by the arts consultant Bev Bytheway and the panel narrowed it down to a shortlist of 5. One withdrew. So the remaining four submitted proposals. The London-based sculptor Ed Allington was very keen to win the commission – as I recall submitting 3 or 4 possible designs. The panel chose the Tilted Vase.

The Vase draws its inspiration from the legacy of the Industrial Revolution in the valley. The classical shape reflects the Georgian architecture of the square, while the manufacture of it points to industrial heritage, built in sections and bolted together to look like a machine or the steam engines operating on the railway a few hundred years away. Bronze and Steel.

As often happens with public art, a controversy followed. The design hadn’t even been released when an angry local person decided that a sculpture was a bad idea. The Square's current condition was a couple of scraggy rose bush plots and a small graffitied shelter at the back used by drunks and young people with nowhere to go. The angry person started a petition against ‘the’ sculpture and got 500 signatures in a week. But, except for the panel, no-one had seen the design, so it was a petition against sculpture on principle. Next phase was a public consultation, which on the evidence of the petition we expected to be bloody. A public meeting was convened at the Grant Arms pub which overlooks the site. On the evening I chaired the meeting (with some trepidation expecting hostility). Ed Allington sat beside me. I recognised faces in the 50+ audience that were vocal opponents of the sculpture. The event started, I introduced the plans for the Sculpture Trail and this and other sculptures proposed for Ramsbottom; Ed introduced his practice, other commissions and then explained the design. Then I threw it open to questions from the audience. A woman stood up and said: ‘Well, I like it. Ramsbottom needs this to make the centre of the town attractive to visitors’. This was a shock; even more shocking was that the next and the next stood up and said the same thing. It turned out that the vast majority of Ramsbottom actually liked and looked forward to the sculpture being installed! After that, the petition was never mentioned again.

A few months later, Ed was ready to install. The converging roads to Market Square were closed (quite a big disruption to local traffic), cranes manoeuvred into place, barriers, police, crowds, men in hard hats. The huge bronze arrived on a flat-bed truck. Straps were attached and the crane lifted it into the air – a magnificent sight. It hovered over the foundations, ready to be lowered, when one of the Council engineers asked Ed: ‘when did you pour the concrete into the foundations?’ At this point all hell broke loose. Ed’s team had poured the concrete 2 weeks before; within this was located a chemical bolt system which would bond the sculpture immovably to the ground. But technically the chemical only works if the concrete is 3 weeks old or more. At this a general chaos erupted. It couldn’t be installed. I got a phonecall from the then Chief Executive (my overall boss) angrily wanting to know who was in line for sacking; the Lisson Gallery which represented Ed rang threatening legal action against the Council for stopping the installation. The vase was re-lowed onto its truck and driven away to a yard for storage, everything was taken down, the crowd drifted away. Against a background of recrimination, a disconsolate Ed and I ended up sitting in the Grants Arms with beers. I told him that when it all came down to it, all he and I wanted was for a great sculpture to be standing in Market Square, nothing else mattered, we should ignore all the noise and just reschedule and get it right. And that’s we did. The vase returned a few weeks later and was installed without incident. The site works around it were completed and the water was turned on.  

This project (my first really big commission) was a real learning experience. The first lesson of public art I would say to would-be project commissioners is never install a water feature. The issues of public health & safety, freezing, children adding detergent to make it bubble, pumps, electric supplies, etc., make it the most complex long-term maintenance commitment. As it is, the vase has not poured water for about 5 years for technical reasons; but these are being sorted out specially to coincide with the 25^th Anniversary so it will be turned on this Spring. Sadly, Ed Allington died last September.

Irwell Sculpture Trail – 25 Years of Public Art (1)

This year is officially the 25^th Anniversary of the Irwell Sculpture Trail  (IST). It’s a funny feeling realising that you have been working on something that long, provoking, inevitably, the urge to reminisce. As anyone who tried to study the Text Festival, before Susan Lord stepped in to establish the Text Archive, will know I am notoriously disinterested in past projects – as John Peel used to say: “The last song isn’t as interesting as the next song”.  Someone wanting to know about the IST can look at the website, visit the sculptures or, if studying public art, make an appointment to see the historical files. But there are very few people left who can tell the stories behind the IST and the artists, and actually only me left still able to recount the tales of the 40+ artworks plus supporting community projects, temporary works and exhibitions, and ultimately also the creation of the Bury Sculpture Centre in 2014. The first sculpture I curated was by an artist called Pauline Holmes who made a beautiful (no longer extant) work with logs in Rawtenstall and

the latest was Auke de Vries magnificent untitled sculpture at Burrs Country Park last year. The next (later this year) will be the memorial sculpture of Victoria Wood by Graham Ibbeson. So, this starts an occasional series of blogs recounting an anecdotal history of sculptures in the Irwell valley.

The first thing to say is that this 25^th Anniversary isn’t commemoration of IST’s inauguration - I have actually been working on IST since 1993. I had just arrived at Rossendale Council as the new Tourism & Arts Officer, when the Councillor responsible for Tourism came into my office and told me that he wanted me to organise Sunday markets at newly opened Rawtenstall station to encourage visitors arriving on the East Lancs Steam Railway to get off the trains and spend money in the town. The idea of me organising Sunday markets was abysmal. So I had to think of something quick that would achieve the same result without me wanting to kill myself in the first month of the new job. At the time there was one sculpture on the roundabout beside the station, celebrating the town-twinning with Bocholt in Germany. A few days later while washing some dishes, it occurred to me that a small sculpture trail around the station could be used to guide visitors to point of interest in Rawtenstall. I started identifying sites for sculptures with John Elliman in the Planning dept and realised that almost by accident the locations were on the Irwell Valley Trail. So that’s how it started in Rossendale. A few months later I was shopping in Manchester and saw a street sign pointing to the Irwell River; blinkedly working in Rossendale I had only recognised the river there. Suddenly I realised that, as rivers do, it ran all the way down to Manchester. I wrote from Rossendale to Bury and Manchester with the proposal that they commission art on the path too and together we could create the longest public sculpture trail in Europe. I had no idea if that was true, but we’ve been saying it ever since!

In that period, I commissioned 3 or 4 artworks (some of which no longer exist) and Bury commission a couple. I moved to a job in Bury which coincided with the launch of the National Lottery. With that pot of money available, I coordinated the 3 local authorities plus then Lancashire County Council and a handful of Environmental agencies (most of which have been abolished now) to bid for my vision of an environmental art trail running 30 miles from Bacup at the source of the river to Salford Quays. This is why this year is the 25^th anniversary – it commemorates the year we started commissioning in earnest with an operating budget of £4million (£2.1million from the Lottery). We didn’t bid for that much money originally – it was much less; but when the lottery assessor came, he said that I wasn’t asking for enough money to achieve the scale of vision I was describing. He didn’t have to submit his judgment straight away so he gave me 2 weeks to rewrite the bid. In that 2 weeks I wrote 26 new documents and the money flowed. I doubt you can do that in today’s bureaucracy –  Lottery funding was more wild west then!

The other interesting anecdote about the bid itself came, when one morning the Councillor mentioned above came to my office to congratulate me on the success of the bid. I pointed to the documents still laying on my desk, and told him I had not yet submitted it. But he told me that the Secretary of State for Heritage/Culture had announce on Radio 4 that the Irwell Sculpture Trail had been awarded the grant. It took a little time to work out what this was about. It came down to politics. I discovered that the Secretary of State, Virginia Bottomley MP was scheduled for an interview on Radio 4 during which it was obvious that she was going to have a hard time justifying the Lottery’s first major grant being £50million to ‘elitist’ Covent Garden Opera. Her bureaucrats were charged with finding something she could point to that was ‘up north’ and ‘for the people’. To the system’s shame, they had not funded anything of the kind, so her briefing had to talk about something that fitted the bill and gloss over that it hadn’t actually been approved yet.

Anyway, on Saturday 17 February, the Sculpture Centre hosts an IST retrospective celebration of the work of Brass Art (Chara Lewis, Kristin Mojsiewicz and Anneke Pettican). Brass Art have a long history of working with Bury Art Museum and did their IST From the Tower Falls the Shadow in 2002.

(More IST artist stories in the next blog)