Public Art, Memorials and Statues
On the corner of Braidwood Street on a building that is part of the London Bridge Hospital is the memorial to James Braidwood who died in the fire of 1861. In the foyer of the Cottons Centre, an office block next to the river, is a modern work of art. Likewise, within Hay's Galleria is the sculpture / fountain 'The Navigators'. There are three water features on More London: a channel called the Rill runs the length of the street; at the City Hall end there are 210 fountains; at the Tooley Street end there are three "Water Tables" continuously overflowing with water and above these is a statue, almost like a waxwork, of an ordinary member of the public.
At the fork in the road between Tooley Street and Elizabeth Street and Tower Bridge Road there are two statues. One is a bust of dockworkers' trade unionist, founder of the Transport & General Workers Union, Churchill's Minister of Labour during WWII and Attlee's Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin. This is somewhat overshadowed by the full size monument to local worthy Samuel Bourne Bevington, a member of a Bermondsey leather manufacturing dynasty and philanthropist. He is represented as the first Mayor of the Metropolitan Borough of Bermondsey, which incorporated this street, and was erected shortly after his death in 1908.
Read more about this topic: Tooley Street
Famous quotes containing the words public, memorials and/or statues:
“Some crimes get honor and renown by being committed with more pomp, by a greater number, and in a higher degree of wickedness than others. Hence it is that public robberies, plunderings, and sackings have been looked upon as excellencies and noble achievements, and the seizing of whole countries, however unjustly and barbarously, is dignified with the glorious name of gaining conquests.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“My titillations have no foot-notes
And their memorials are the phrases
Of idiosyncratic music.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“America loves the representation of its heroes to be not just larger than life, but stupendously, awesomely bigger than anything else. If blue whales built statues to each other they’d be smaller then these.”
—Simon Hoggart (b. 1946)