influences in design an omnium gatherum || roughcast textures with cosmic overtones: a survey of...

The Decorative Arts Society 1850 to the Present

Roughcast textures with cosmic overtones: A survey of British murals, 1945-80Author(s): Lynn PearsonSource: The Journal of the Decorative Arts Society 1850 - the Present, No. 31, INFLUENCESIN DESIGN AN OMNIUM GATHERUM (2007), pp. 116-137Published by: The Decorative Arts Society 1850 to the PresentStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41809385 .

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Roughcast textures with

COSMIC OVERTONES

A survey of British murals, 1945-80

Lynn Pearson

One of the least recognized landmarks of postwar British art - and the one most threatened by demolition - has been the mural. Lynn Pearson

rights the balance and explains what was achieved when a wealth of talent too' advantage of a vast

array of materials.

For the Britain

over Second

twenty

worked World

years

in War, following

an mural

atmosphere

the artists

end of

of in the Second World War, mural artists in

Britain worked in an atmosphere of excitement and experiment. The postwar building boom of itself created opportunities. Advances in

technology made available new materials with unusual textures. The relationship between artist and architect changed. Artists collaborated with

industry to incorporate mass produced items into their work. Individuals worked in a wide variety of different media. All this was in the era of

'bringing art to the people'. In 1966, The Connoisseur, in its survey of

patronage from industry and commerce, noted 43 examples relating to murals.1 In addition to the plethora of works made for the Festival of

Britain, well over 600 large scale murals are known to have been installed between 1945 and

1980, of which over half are still extant.2 Even those which have been lost deserve

to be rescued at least from academic neglect.

ARTISTS, MATERIALS AND LOSS

A wide spectrum of artists was involved in the

production of these postwar murals. Some, such as John Piper and Victor Pasmore, were better known than others; some worked individually

and others 'in-house' There was also a notable contribution from émigrés and from the students of Kenneth Rowntree (1915-97), who

taught mural painting at the Royal College of Art (RCA) for 10 years from 1948.3 In scale, murals ranged from the domestic to an entire side of a tower block or the length of an

underpass. In terms of materials, painted murals

retained their popularity during the 1940s but ceramic tiles began to dominate by the mid

1950s, with concrete coming to the fore during the 1960s. A wide range of other materials was also used - glass and ceramic mosaic, Formica

(plastic laminate), vitreous enamel, terrazzo, metals (notably aluminium), plastic, plaster, photographs, leather, embroidery, stone, resin, glass, brick and fibreglass.

Around a fifth of the new murals were carried out in schools and higher education

institutions; a further fifth were done for civic and public buildings; while offices (especially headquarters buildings), churches and shops each accounted for over a tenth of new works. There were also a significant number done for

cafeterias, canteens, hotels, restaurants, pubs and for ocean liners.

More recent years have seen a period of

neglect and loss. The apparent permanency of murals can become a disadvantage, particularly in the corporate context when buildings change hands. Many murals have been destroyed, by building alterations or demolition, over-

painting or weathering. There is an increased threat to buildings and murals of the 1960s and

2. Detail of the Armada Way underpass mural ( Edward Pond)

THE DECORATIVE ARTS SOCIETY JOURNAL 200J II7



1. View of the Armada Way underpass mural (1987-8), Plymouth , by Edward Pond and Kenneth Clar' ( Edward Pond)

1970s due to redevelopment - nearly 100 murals have already been destroyed and the fate of almost 200 is unknown. Those which remain are often endangered. The 1987-8 ceramic tile mural from Plymouth's Armada

Way underpass, a collaboration between the

designer Edward Pond (best known for his

graphic work for British Rail's Network Southeast from 1987 to 1992) and the tile

designer and maker Kenneth Clark (whose firm was responsible for 30 large scale tile murals around the world) (Figs. 1 and 2) was both innovative and popular. However, when the local council wished to create a new city centre space in 2004, they simply buried it, by filling in the underpass. Other councils and

companies have been more sympathetic, and have looked at relocating murals.4

RESTAURANTS AND SCHOOLS

During the war, British Restaurants were

brightened up with murals commissioned from several well known artists including Edward

Bawden, Eric Gill, Kenneth Rowntree and

Mary Adshead (1904-95). After the war, Adshead painted a spectacular scheme for the

Jungle Restaurant at Selfridges in 1949-51

(destroyed 1967).5 In 1950, Victor Pasmore

(1908-98) was commissioned by the London

Passenger Transport Board to produce a mural for the staff canteen of a bus garage in Kingston upon Thames. It was his first mural and his first relief, being painted in a form of tempera on an incised plaster base. Pasmore showed the

design at the Society of Mural Painters (SMP) 1950 exhibition in London. The foreword to the exhibition catalogue emphasized that 'the

present need for a vital school of mural painting is great if the opportunities of bringing colour and gaiety into our public buildings are not

again to be lost'.6 Schools were an important source of

commissions. In Leicestershire, Stewart Mason

(1906-83), director of education during 1947-71, was a long-term patron of

contemporary art for the county's schools and

colleges. It meant that no new building was 'without its sculpture or murals as a focal

point'.7 In Hertfordshire, where Stirrat

Johnson-Marshall (1912-81) was deputy county architect from 1945, the emphasis in building primary schools was on préfabrication and standardized construction, with informal

planning, new materials, bright colours and murals. Artists involved included Fred Millett, who was later to create the seaside village in the Festival Pleasure Gardens, and Kenneth Rowntree. The latter painted a stylized land-

scape of geometric forms at the Barclay School

(1947-9), Stevenage, which was designed by Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall (YRM) and also

incorporated a ceramic tile mural by Peggy Angus (1904-93). Angus was a consultant

designer to the ceramics manufacturer Carter's of Poole from 1951 to 1961, and was also used

by F.R.S. Yorke. The latter commissioned

Angus to design her first tiles in 1948, and

subsequently used them in 18 YRM projects, including at least 10 schools and colleges, during 1949-59.8 The murals were generally

Il8 THE DECORATIVE ARTS SOCIETY JOURNAL 2OO7



made up from repeats of pattern-making tiles; a small number of individual tiles with different geometric motifs were combined to

produce an overall patterned design, occasion-

ally including figurative or symbolic elements. In 1951 her tile work for two schools in Poplar, now jointly known as the Lansbury Lawrence

Primary School, designed by YRM as part of the Festival of Britain 'Live Architecture'

Exhibition, was widely admired and publicized and led to a series of mural commissions from other architects.

FESTIVAL OF BRITAIN

Murals were a significant element in the decoration of Festival of Britain sites

throughout the country. The South Bank Exhibition alone included around 100 murals executed by almost as many different artists.9

The Festival's director of architecture was

Hugh Casson (1910-99), professor of interior

design at the Royal College of Art. He felt that the Lion and Unicorn pavilion could be a

prominent showpiece for the RCA and he gave several commissions to college staff. They included Kenneth Rowntree, who designed and painted the long Freedom mural showing historical scenes,10 assisted by the printmaker Sheila Robinson (1925-88), who was then a student under Edward Bawden (1903-89), who

painted the Country Life mural in the same

pavilion.11 The vast majority of the South Bank murals were figurative. One visitor commented

'Naturally the figurative artists came off best in the public arena'.12

The few abstracts included the first mural work to be carried out by (John) Cecil

Stephenson (1889-1965), a former RCA student who was then head of art in the architectural

2. Detail of the Armada Way underpass mural ( Edward Pond)

THE DECORATIVE ARTS SOCIETY JOURNAL 2OO7 II9



department of London's Northern Polytechnic. He was commissioned by the Glasgow architect T. Warnett Kennedy (born 1911) to produce a mural for the ceiling of a gloomy corridor in the Power and Production Pavilion, which

Kennedy helped to design. Stephenson suggested using the recently developed fluorescent paints, and loosely based his multi- coloured design on musical notation. He was later commissioned by Plyglass Ltd of Harlow to design the colourful glass laminate mural on the facade of the British Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels International Exhibition.13

Another South Bank abstract was the ceramic tile mural commissioned for an outside wall of the Regatta Restaurant, alongside a busy double-height staircase connecting the Bailey Bridge and the River Walk. Victor Pasmore's black and white design, made by Carter's, was intended - by means of contrast - to transform how the building was perceived. The tiles were not 'pointed', as Pasmore felt that 'the more uneven the tile grid the more movement we would get in the painting'. This is a rare comment by an artist on one of the obvious

challenges of working with tiles.14 The spiral composition was called The Waterfall , although it appears that the title was added purely as an

afterthought.15 The tile mural received much

press comment at the time and was thought to be one of the most successful of all the artworks on the South Bank site.16 The critic William

Feaver, in his later assessment of Festival style, selected Pasmore's spiral as one of the event's

key motifs, praising the 'roughcast textures with cosmic overtones'.17 Pasmore's The

Waterfall and many of the South Bank murals were lost when the exhibition site was cleared to make way for a garden used in the 1953 Coronation celebrations.18

The SMP organized an exhibition in 1953 at the Royal Institute of British Architects, which hoped to capitalize on the popularity of murals at the Festival of Britain.19 However since rationing and targeting of materials in short supply continued until November 1954, two-thirds of the murals carried out in the 1950s were executed in the second half of the decade.20

THE RISE OF CERAMIC TILE MURALS

The major tile manufacturers were responsible for around half the large scale murals produced from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. The total number is probably in the region of 150, but archive records are scarce and it is impossible to be more exact. Carter's of Poole, established

3. Detail of tile mural (1953) by Carter's of Poole, former cafeteria of Lewis's department store, Liverpool

120 THE DECORATIVE ARTS SOCIETY JOURNAL 2OO7



in 1873 and already known for its tile panels by the 1880s, produced around thirty. Other major firms were responsible for another forty or so, with individual potters and small firms

carrying out the remainder.21 In general, the

design and manufacture was relatively traditional, but by combining elements of hand craft and mass production, ceramic murals form a transition between the traditional

painted and the later concrete murals. Large- scale ceramic murals were a rarity in new

buildings by the late 1970s.22 In 1953, Carters produced its first postwar

large-scale pictorial mural, installed behind the

servery counter of the new cafeteria in Lewis's

department store in Liverpool (Fig. 3).23 Some 65 feet long and 10 feet high, it showed stylized outsize images of food and drink in colourful

hand-printed and hand-painted tiles. It was

probably designed by Alfred Burgess Read

(1898-1973), who was appointed head of the

company's design unit in 1952. It was the

precursor of the tile murals which by the late 1960s would surpass painted murals in

popularity.24 'Tiles are another example of a traditional material which can seem quite fresh and stimulating when used by artists who think and feel in the atmosphere of our times,' 25 is how it was put in a press release by the Victoria and Albert Museum for the SMP's 1960

exhibition, Mural Art Today , which was seen by 10,000 people.

Although the company also used invited

artists, staff designers produced many of the tile murals for Carter's. In 1955, Angus and A. B. Read were joined by Ivor Kamlish (born 1931), who carried out a great deal of work including a Jackson Pollock-style mural for Hartcliffe

School, Bristol in 1960. As a graphic designer he was also responsible for the firm's packaging and other publicity material. Joseph Ledger (born 1926) designed a series of ceramic reredoses for the firm. Large scale murals were

popular with industrial and corporate concerns, and the designs often featured stylized images relating to the commissioning body.26 Notable

4. Tile mural (1959) by Carter's of Poole, Transport House, Belfast

examples include the 1959 mural at Transport House in Belfast, the headquarters of the

Transport and General Workers' Union, which shows workers in local industries (Fig. 4). Other 1960s commissions include the Shellhaven oil

refining plant in Essex and and Parvaulx Electric Motors of Poole, for whom an enlarged version of a blueprint was produced.27

Several architects also worked for Carter's in the 1950s. Gordon Cullen (1914-94), author of Townscape (1961), was commissioned in 1957

by Coventry's City Planning and Redevelop- ment Committee to design a mural illustrating the spirit in which the reconstruction of the city was undertaken. The idea came from the city's chief architect, Arthur Ling (born 1913).

THE DECORATIVE ARTS SOCIETY JOURNAL 2OO7 121



5. Tile mural (1957) designed by Gordon Cullen , Lower Precinct, Coventry

Cullen s design was sited in Coventry's pedestrian shopping precinct and showed historical images relating to the city, culminating with its postwar master plan on a detached section (Fig. 5).28 Despite subsequent neglect and redevelopment plans, it was, thanks to the council, restored and successfully relocated in 2002 to another part of the precinct, where it is more visible and has been

enthusiastically received by the public.29 Kenneth Barden (1924-88), chief architect with the contractors George Wimpey & Co, designed several hundred murals worldwide.30 He

produced one in 1955 with Carter s depicting stylized images of pumping equipment for the Herts and Essex Water Company s pump house in Harlow. Other Carters 'architects murals' were for Hurlingham School for Girls, by Geoffrey Robson, and for a Wandsworth school

by Oliver Cox (born 1920).31 Also well known for their ceramic mural

work in the 1960s was Pilkington s of Clifton

Junction, Manchester (founded in 1893) which

began mural work in the early twentieth century. One of their most important postwar commissions was for Carlisle's Civic Centre,

which opened in 1964. The four stairwells have dramatic double-height abstract tile murals, all in different colourways. Pilkington 's was one of several firms experimenting with pattern- making tiles from the late 1950s, although their individual designs were more complex than those

previously produced by Carter's, and often

asymmetric. Examples were the Planit system designed by Derek Hodgkinson for the manufacturers H. & R. Johnson of Stoke-on- Trent in 1959, with 5 random patterned tiles in 30 colours, and the Turinese range (1961) of surface textured tiles, designed by James Rushton and Leonard King for Malkin Tiles of Stoke.32

ARCHITECTS AND ARTISTS

Mural commissions tended to come from

architects, who built up relationships with

specific potters or firms. As early as the inter- war years, the architect Basil Spence (1907-76) used the sculptor Hew Lorimer (1907-93) to

design reliefs for Spence's Broughton Place

(1935-8). In the 1950s, Spence turned to the artist William Gordon (1905-93). Gordon was born in St. Petersburg but was educated in

122 THE DECORATIVE ARTS SOCIETY JOURNAL 200J



Scotland, London and at Oxford University. He began by learning iron working skills from a Gloucestershire blacksmith, and then worked for Walton Pottery in Chesterfield, which he ran after the war until it closed in 1955. After that he went to London, 'to take up work on a new type of ceramic tile which he has

developed'.33 Spence provided Gordon's first large scale

tile commission. It was for a full height stoneware mural at St Aidan's Church (1957-9) in the suburbs of Leicester (Fig. 6). The mural depicts scenes from the life of St Aidan, and there are four small evangelist panels on the main doors. A second commission from Spence around 1958 resulted in a colourful abstract mural, measuring 100 feet by 18 feet, for a site above the shop frontages at Basildon Bus Station (lost in the 1980s). Gordon collaborated with Carter's on this mural, and carried out several more with the firm.34 He later worked with the architect Robert Matthew (1906-75) on several tiling projects as well as contributing two artworks - one glass, the other ceramic - Matthew's New Zealand House

(1959-63) in London. The only external ceramic church instal-

ation comparable to St. Aidan's is the massive Last Judgement (1963) tympanum at St Mary's Roman Catholic Church, Leyland, Lancashire

(Fig. 7). The church was commissioned in 1959

by the Benedictines of Ampleforth. The

tympanum was designed by the Polish muralist and sculptor Adam Kossowski (1905-86), who came to Britain as a refugee in 1943.35 He was

6. Stoneware mural (1959) by William Gordon, St Aidan's Church , Leicester

soon invited to join the Guild of Catholic Artists and Craftsmen, and through them was introduced to the Carmelite foundation of

Aylesford Priory (now The Friars, a pilgrimage centre) in Kent. From 1950 he worked there

intermittently during a period of over 20 years, producing a large number of mainly ceramic works decorating a series of chapels and the external Rosary Way. He was a prolific artist in several media, and Aylesford was only a part of his huge output over the period 1955-71. This included the sgraffito decoration of St Benedict's Chapel (1964), Queen Mary College, London (Fig. 8). His major secular work The

7. Adam Kossowski, detail o/*Last Judgement ( 1 963), St Mary's R. C. Church, Leyland, Lancashire

THE DECORATIVE ARTS SOCIETY JOURNAL 2OO7 I23



8. Adam Kossowsfy, part of The Apocalypse of St John (1964), St Benedict's Chapel , Queen Mary College

9. Detail of polychrome ceramic frieze (1964) by Adam Kossowski, former North Pechjiam Civic Centre

History of the Old Kent Road (1964) is located on the exterior of the former North Peckham Civic Centre in London (Fig. 9).

PAINTERS AND OTHER MEDIA

A number of artists who worked primarily on small scale paintings also experimented with murals - some ceramic - in the 1950s and 1960s. Keith Vaughan (1912-77) made two albeit disappointing ventures into public art. A

painted mural, At the Beginning of Time

(Theseus) y featured in the South Bank's Dome of Discovery, but was not generally considered to be a success. In 1954 he was asked by an architect to design a ceramic mural for a bus shelter in the new town of Corby. The resulting colourful abstract was intended to reflect the

surrounding buildings and landscape, but so shocked the local Development Corporation that it was almost immediately boarded up. It was destroyed when the bus shelter was demolished in the mid-1970s.36

The new Civil Engineering Building at

Liverpool University was the site of the sole ceramic mural (1960) designed by the artist Peter Lanyon (191 8-64),

37 who was more used to painting on small easels. He was

I24 THE DECORATIVE ARTS SOCIETY JOURNAL 2OO7



10. Peter Lany ori s 1963 mural poorly displayed in the entrance hall of the Faculty of Arts Building, University of Birmingham

commissioned by the building's architect, Maxwell Fry of the practice Fry, Drew &

Lasdun, who were well known for working with artists. Its location and tide, The Conflict of Man with the Tides and the Sands , had already been decided by a committee, which also wanted the work to be 'student-proof. Fry therefore suggested using ceramic tiles. These were new to Lanyon, who found them

problematic. They shattered during firing and the colour quality was poor, partly due to his use of enamel rather than ceramic glaze.38

Lanyon went on to produce two more

murals, though in paint: one for his patron, Stanley Seeger, for his house in New Jersey (1962) and the other in the following year for the wall of the entrance hall of the Faculty of Arts Building at the University of Birmingham (Fig. 10). It seems there were no preconditions laid down for the latter, which currently is

pardy obscured by a row of chairs and a large pot plant - a type of treatment not uncommon for interior mural works.

Other painters trying their hand at ceramics include the mural artist and SMP member Dorothy Annan (1908-83), who

designed a series of nine stoneware panels for the Fleet Building (1960-1) in Farringdon

Street, then one of London's largest telephone exchanges. Still extant, they were intended to 'add interest at street level'; the designs show

stylized images relevant to telecommunications

(Fig. II).39 The building, which is not listed, is

currendy vacant and the subject of a planning

11. One of 9 stoneware panels (1961) designed by Dorothy Annan on the Fleet Building, Farringdon Street, London




12. Tile panel (1963), representing literature , by Walter Hudspith at Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens

application. Annan designed other murals in

tiles, mosaic and paint for locations including the Bank of England and Durham University Library. Walter Hudspith, who became Senior Lecturer at Sunderland College of Art, produced his sole ceramic work (Fig. 12) for the new extension to what is now the city's Museum and Winter Gardens.40 The striking

group of three abstract panels, the first

examples of public art to be commissioned in

Sunderland, represent music, art and literature.

FROM OTHER MEDIA

In contrast a significant number of tile murals were produced by artists used to working in several media. The career of the designer and artist Robert Stewart (1924-95), who studied at the Glasgow School of Art during the 1940s and

taught there from 1949 until 1984, encompassed printed textiles, tapestries, ceramics and

paintings. In 1960 he was commissioned to design the swimming pool and a large ceramic mural for the First Class section of the P&O cruise liner, Oriana . The commission came from Misha Black

(1910-77), professor of industrial design at the

RCA, whose Design Research Unit was working on the interiors of the ship.

The next year, Stewart moved to a larger studio at Loch Striven in Argyll, where he could make as well as design murals. He

produced over twenty from here during the

13. Ceramic mural (1966) by Robert Stewart in the foyer of Motherwell Theatre




1960s and 1970s, for hotels, schools and offices, the commissions generally coming from architects. Many of his works, which were often abstract panels with unusual metallic glazes, have already been destroyed, but those at Motherwell Theatre, built as part of the town's Civic Centre development, have survived (Fig. 13). The theatre is entered through a lobby defined by two sets of glass doors; on either side of this small space are full height murals made

by Stewart in 1966.41 The German-born sculptor Fritz Steiler

(born 1941) worked with ceramics, bronze, concrete, stone and fibreglass. His output included the extraordinary series of massive stoneware murals entitled Articulation in Movement (1970) on the east facade of

Queensgate Market, Huddersfield. The work, made from Stourbridge fireclay, comprises ten

large panels, one pierced by stairs leading to the

market; the designs reflect the structure and use of the market hall. After experiencing difficulties making the Huddersfield panels, Steiler invented an easily handled ceramic

cladding product called Transform. It was

designed for interior and exterior use and

provided many options of texture, form and colour. Transform was installed in at least six British locations (Fig. 14). Steiler, who came to Britain in 1959 and trained at the Birmingham College of Art, produced a series of mural works and sculptures during the 1970s before

leaving to teach in southern Africa.42

FROM HAND MADE TO MACHINE MADE

By the mid 1950s, the new generation of architects saw 'hand made' artworks as out of date. They favoured the 'machine made' with

tough surfaces. If they were to have decoration, it would be a part of the wall itself. Their almost

complete rejection of the gentle, romantic Festival of Britain style led on to architectural New Brutalism, a style strongly associated by the public with concrete.43 A June 1959

Architectural Review article began 'To leave concrete unfinished is the latest vogue', but went on to say, 'the lay mind thinks of concrete as a

rough blotchy material of dreary colour which is best kept out of sight'.44 A 1961 Architectural Review article by LCC architect Oliver Cox and muralist Fred Millett asked: 'Why, for example, does concrete, in order to be truthfully expressed, have to look like hairy wood?'45

The search for new textures coincided with a declining belief in a synthesis of art and architecture in which neither dominated.46 A series of collaborations between avant-garde artists and architects on housing projects had been unsuccessful - one example is the work between 1954 and 1959 by the artist John Forrester (born 1922) on the Park Hill scheme in Sheffield. Although he assisted with the form and colour of facades, and the design of play areas, many of his ideas were not taken up.47 These early forays into the architectural world

14. A page from the 1971 Transform catalogue of ceramic cladding (Fritz Steiler)

THE DECORATIVE ARTS SOCIETY JOURNAL 7.00J I2J



provide the background for the mural artists of the 1960s whose preferred material was concrete and whose work was very much part of the architecture. Around sixty large scale concrete mural works were produced during the 1960s, until belief in the sculptural possibilities, of concrete declined by the mid-1970s.

LOCAL AUTHORITIES AND ARTWORK

The LCC was notable for its artistic patronage. The council sponsored an open air sculpture exhibition in 1948, commissioned artworks for the Festival of Britain, and during the 1950s

acquired and commissioned artworks for schools and housing estates. In 1958 the LCC hired two artists, William George Mitchell

(born 1925) and Antony Hollaway (1928-2000), to collaborate with the council's architects as

part-time consultants. Their tasks varied from

constructing decorative reliefs to making signs.

They drew yearly fees, the cost of their materials was absorbed as normal building expenses, and the site workmen helped with producing the works. They pioneered the technique of using carved polyurethane foam as forms for pouring concrete, a method which eventually became

internationally known. In 1969 Hollaway said: Tor the LCC, there were two types of art; the

expensive kind they got through art galleries... and the cheap art they got from their own consultants for the price of the building materials. Probably a one to forty-eight ratio in

price was involved'. Oliver Cox, who liaised between the architects' department and the two

artists, backed up this point: 'It became a

challenge to devise techniques that would cost no more for production than, say, glazing'.48

Mitchell was apprenticed to a painting and

decorating firm in 1938, served in the Navy during the war, then worked for the NAAFI

(Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes) for two

years painting murals in their canteens

15. William Mitchell, late 1960s cast concrete facade of the Three Tuns, Coventry




worldwide. He enrolled at the Southern College of Art in Portsmouth, but left to go to the RCA, where it seems likely that he first met Hollaway, who was a student in the stained glass department in the early 1950s. Hollaway went

straight from the RCA to the LCC in 1958, having started his own stained glass and mural

design practice in 1957, but Mitchell spent a year in Rome first.49 The two men stayed with the LCC until 1966 when it became the Greater London Council and the consultancy programme was cut back. They produced a vast amount of work in Londons housing estates, much of it now gone. At an exhibition held in

April 1959 at County Hall, twenty-one of their different decorative treatments were displayed, many of them completely novel.50 Both Mitchell and Hollaway applied for patents to cover various aspects of their new techniques. Mitchell

eventually established William Mitchell Design Consultants, and continued producing large- scale mural and other works in a wide range of materials until the early 1970s, when - in search of new opportunities - he began to work abroad.

Several of Mitchells works outside London survive. Most notable amongst his extant concrete works are the high relief facade for the late 1960s Three Tuns public house in

Coventry, and the three murals (1968) at

Hockley Circus in Birmingham (Figs. 15 and

16).51 Other artists experimenting with concrete included Steven Sykes (1914-99), who designed a mural in ciment fondu (high-aluminium cement) for the directors' dining room at Beecham House in Brentford in the early 1960s. The mosaicist George Garson (born 1930), who was head of mural design and stained glass at

Glasgow School of Art from 1971 to 1985, carried out the double height structural concrete wall in the entrance hall of Glenrothes House (1968) for Glenrothes Development Corporation.52 Scottish new towns and educational bodies commissioned another nine Garson murals in mosaic, tiles, brick or paint during the late 1960s and 1970s.53

16. One of 3 concrete relief panels ( 1 968) by William Mitchell at Hockley Circus, Birmingham

NEW DESIGNS AND MASS PRODUCTION

An unusual stylized figurative concrete mural was designed in 1973 by the Scottish artist Charles Anderson (born 1936) for the Thompson Centre in Burnley. At 400 feet long, it was one of the longest murals in Britain (Fig. 17). Anderson trained at the Glasgow School of Art and carried out a series of murals and sculptures from the mid-1960s for property developers, local

authorities, banks and major insurance

companies, until he returned to easel painting in the mid-1990s. The Thompson Centre was demolished in early 2007, but after a campaign to preserve the mural, it was saved thanks to the intervention of a local businessman, who paid for it to be removed and put into store until a suitable home can be found.54

A completely different approach was taken

by the New York-born sculptor Mitzi Cunliffe

(1918-2006), who moved to Manchester in 1949. She worked in many media. A 1967 exhibition




17. A section of the concrete mural (1973) by Charles Anderson at the Thompson Centre, Burnley

18. Mitzi Cunliffe's Cosmos 2 (1964) at Wearmouth Hall , Sunderland

I3O THE DECORATIVE ARTS SOCIETY JOURNAL 2OO7



of her work, Sculpture by the Yard , focused on mass produced concrete and fibreglass units which she then assembled into large external reliefs. As the press release stated, her life-long dream is a world where sculpture is produced by the yard in factories and used in buildings as

casually as bricks'.55 In the introduction to the

catalogue, Buckminster Fuller noted the difficulties artists had encountered when trying to employ mass production techniques, but 'the work of Mitzi Cunliffe is an outstanding exception'. Of the nine reliefs shown, five came from Cunliffes Cosmos series, including the cast concrete wall sculpture Cosmos 2 at Wearmouth Hall (1964), now part of the University of Sunderland (Fig. 18). This building is currently threatened with demolition. Cunliffes last major architectural work, completed in 1970, was four carved stone panels for Scottish Life House in the City of London. Although the building was demolished in early in 2007 the panels have been retained and will be relocated to a new building on the site.56

There were other attempts to incorporate mass produced concrete into architectural reliefs. The artists Francis Carr (born 1919) and his wife Sarah Firmin (Dorothy Carr) (born 1933) who pioneered silk screen printing as a fine art medium, designed concrete relief

cladding panels measuring a few feet square with various repeat motifs. These were

produced in the early 1960s under the trade name Kastone by KendelPs Stone & Paving Company.57 The panels were similar to the

slightly later products of the Minkstone works in Longton, Stoke-on-Trent, which made high relief concrete cladding blocks which could be

arranged in a wide assortment of patterns. They also produced concrete murals, designed by their panel of artists and designers. Their

publicity leaflet outlined the wide range of different finishes, colours and styles available.58 One surviving example is the History of Cement , made for the Cement Marketing Company but now mounted on the gable end of the former Minkstone works.

HISTORICAL THEMES

The colourful figurative concrete murals of

Philippa Threlfall (born 1939), who trained as an illustrator and potter, were popular from the mid 1960s. Her method was to take small

pre-cast concrete slabs, add a one inch thick cement rendering on top, then set into it materials such as pebbles and ceramics. The slabs were then attached to a wall with metal ties. She made several murals for schools,

including the North London Collegiate School

(where Peggy Angus taught during 1947-65),

generally on historical themes, after which she and her husband, the historian Kennedy Collings (1933-2002), collaborated on a series of large scale works. The largest was the 85 feet

long Life in West Riding (1969, destroyed 2003) for the restaurant at Leeds-Bradford Airport.59 The 60 feet long Greenwich Mural (1972), whose theme is the maritime history of

Greenwich, was commissioned for an external wall of Greenwich District Hospital. When the

hospital closed in 2001, it was safely relocated to a nearby park.

Henry Collins (1910-94), who was

responsible for one of the South Bank murals in the Sea and Ships pavilion, went on to

produce a series of historically themed murals with his wife Joyce Pallot (1912-2004), using concrete, mosaic, stone and ciment fondu. The

murals, generally dating from the 1970s, were

mostly made for Sainsbury s and British Home Stores as well as the subways of Colchester, their home town. They never worked on site but collaborated with a regular contractor who cast the concrete in panels around four feet

square. They incorporated a great deal of

variety in terms of relief, roughness and colour,

intending the work to be touched.60 Henry Collins described this as 'spectator involve-

ment', much in the same manner as Mitzi Cunliffe wanted her work to be 'used, rained

on, leaned against, taken for granted'.

THE DECORATIVE ARTS SOCIETY JOURNAL 2OO7 I3I



MOSAIC MURALS

Mosaic was often used as external cladding for concrete - sometimes with poor long-term results - but also for mural panels, to add colour to new schools, housing and shopping developments.61 Perhaps the most unusual use of mosaic on an early postwar housing development is at Gosport, where the twin 16-storey blocks Seaward Tower and Harbour Tower

(1963) were clad with Carter's mosaic murals

running their whole 135 feet height (Fig. 19). The designs - vast abstracts - were by Kenneth Barden and the architect J. E. Tyrrell.

One of the most notable postwar mosaic artists was Kenneth Budd (1926-95), who studied mural design at the RCA. He was attracted to the works of artists such as Stanley Spencer, John Piper and Hans Feibusch, feeling that their murals 'succeeded in dominating space in a truly architectural sense'. He was also influenced by the colours and designs of the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. Budd collaborated with his RCA teacher, Jesse Collins, on the mural exhibited by the British Paint Federation in the Power and Production pavilion on the South Bank in 1951. Budd began working with William Mitchell in 1961, and was commissioned that year by Mitchell to design a massive mosaic for the facade of Kettering School for Boys. The building is to be

demolished, but work is currently in progress to save the mural. Budd went on to design around thirty large scale mosaics. Some have

already been destroyed; his 120 feet long Chartist Mural (1978) in Newport is currently threatened by demolition.62

The artist John Piper (1903-92) designed two notable ceramic mosaic murals. One, an abstract (1960) for the foyer of Birmingham's Chamber of Commerce and Industry, will

probably be rescued before the building's impending demolition by removal to the Barber Institute at the University of

Birmingham.63 His only other mosaic on this scale is Risen Christ at Emmaus for the internal east wall of St Paul's Church, Harlow (1956-9) (Fig. 20).

THE FUTURE

The sculptor Edward Bainbridge Copnall (1903-73) has criticized architects for using 'sculpture as a status symbol'.64 Nevertheless, a wide range of murals continued to be created for Britain's reconstructed towns and cities, giving artists scope for experiment in terms of

space and materials. Too little critical attention has been paid to this work, which may account

19. Tower bloc' (1963) at Gosport clad with Carters mosaic mural designed by Kenneth Barden and /. E. Tyrrell

I32 THE DECORATIVE ARTS SOCIETY JOURNAL 200J



for the view expressed in 2002: 'it is difficult to

identify more than a handful of buildings in the last forty years that incorporated an artwork as more than an aesthetic fig-leaf.65 Murals are difficult to show in exhibitions, other than as

photographs or drawings; access to them may be difficult; and they may have been destroyed as part of the normal building process.66 They are not collectable so do not pass through salerooms or have any clear financial value. These practical problems, the academic void and the difficulty in ascribing any financial worth to them have combined to enable artistic disasters like the burial of Plymouth's Armada

Way mural to occur in a vacuum. The present listed buildings system in

England does not deal adequately with artworks such as postwar murals, which may be further endangered by being attached to

buildings of little architectural or historic interest.67 The murals however may themselves be of significant artistic worth, and several

important examples are currently under threat with litde hope of protection through the listing system. If more postwar murals are not to suffer a similar fate to the Armada Way mural, more

thought needs to be given to a method of

dealing with these outstanding but vulnerable artworks.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author is grateful to the following for their assistance in the preparation of this paper: Phil

Almond, Penny Beckett, Oliver Budd, Kenneth Clark, Adrian Evans, Robert Field, Tony Herbert, Sue Hudson, Rod Humby, Ivor

Kamlish, Peter Kelly, Chris Marsden, Dolores

Mitchell, Tony Mould, Alan Powers, Aidan

Turner-Bishop, Jon Wright and David Wurtzel. My grateful thanks to Edward Pond, for permission to reproduce two images of the Armada Way mural; and to Fritz Steiler, for

permission to reproduce an image of the Transform catalogue.

20. Mosaic (1959) designed by John Piper on the east wall of St Paul's Church , Harlow

NOTES 1 . Alan Osborne (ed), Patron: Industry supports the

Arts , (The Connoisseur, London, 1966). 2. Information on which this article is based was

gathered from archive research, a literature survey, communication with artists, and site visits. This has enabled the author to build up a database of details on well over 600 murals completed during 1945-80, but it seems probable that many more existed.

3. Émigré artists involved with postwar mural work include Francis Carr, Hans Feibusch (1898-1998), Paul Feiler (born 1918), Adam Kossowski, Fritz Steiler, Hans Tisdall (1910-97), Feliks Topolski (1907-89) and Hans Unger (1915-75). An artist in the vanguard of the sculptural use of concrete was the Hungarian-born Peter (Laszlo) Peri (1899-1967), who came to Britain as a political exile in 1935 and was commissioned to produce a wall relief for the Cement and Concrete Association in 1938. After the war he developed Pericrete, a concrete and polyester resin mix with high tensile strength, and carried out commissions for education authorities during the 1950s. See Gillian Whiteley, 'Peri, Peter Laszlo (1899-1967)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , Oxford University Press, 2004; online, cited 12 April 2007, < http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/64507>. The catalogue of an exhibition on the work of German émigré artists (including designers, graphic designers, photographers, fine artists and architects) in Britain names 157 people; the figure would need to be expanded to include those from other countries, but does give a rough idea of the number of artists involved. See Robin




Kinross, 'Emigré Graphic Designers in Britain: Around the Second World War and Afterwards', Journal of Design History , 3 (1990) 1,35-57.

4. Penny Beckett, 'The Ceramic Murals of the Armada Way, Plymouth ( 1 988-2004)', Glazed Expressions , Special Issue (2006), 1-11. Another threatened underpass with a large-scale artwork is the Southgate Subway Mural (mosaic, 1991, artist Sue Ridge), Leicester, which is likely to be lost to redevelopment in 2007-8.

5. Melanie Unwin, Modern spaces : Mary Adshead's post-war murals and the promotion of mural painting by the SMP 1939-1965, 49-79 in Earthly Delights : Mary Adshead 1904^1995, Matthew H. Clough and Ann Compton (eds), (University of Liverpool Art Collections, Liverpool, 2004), 52-3, 56-9.

6. Exhibition catalogue, Society of Mural Painters: First Exhibition 1950-1951 (Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 1950), V&A National Art Library (NAL) 77.GB. The exhibition began in London in April 1950, then travelled around the country.

7. Terry Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Leicestershire and Rutland (Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2000), xvii-xviii.

8. Katie Arber, Patterns for Post-war Britain - the tile designs of Peggy Angus (Middlesex University Press, London, 2002). Other early examples of Peggy Angus tiling were at Warren Wood Secondary School for Girls, Rochester (1949); Kings wood County Secondary (now Hainault Forest High) School (1951), Redbridge; and South Hill Primary School, Hemel Hempstead (1951). See also Katie Arber, Peggy Angus, designer of modern tiles for a modern Britain (DAS Journal 26, 2002, pp 121-34)

9. Festival of Britain muralists include: Bruce Angrave, John Armstrong, Michael Ayrton, F. Baines, John Barker, Edward Bawden, Ferdinand Bellan, Peter Bender, Stephen Bone, James Boswell, Kenneth Budd, John Campbell, K. C. Chapman, Bernard Cheese, Prunella Clough, Henry Collins, Jesse Collins, Evelyn Cooke, Dor rit Dekk, Jupp Dernbach-Mayen, Ronald Dickens, Arpad Elfer, Eleanor Esmonde- White, Barry Evans, Beresford Evans, Fred Exell, Pearl Falconer, Mary Fedden, Hans Feibusch, Ronald Ferns, Patricia Field, James Fitton, Eric Fraser, Abram Games, James Gardner, Anthony Gilbert, Carl Giles, Keith Godwin, Walter Greaves, Kathleen Hale, Harkers Studio, Barry Hart, Josef Herman, Patrick Heron, Tristram Hillier, Denys Hinton, Leonard Horton, Constance

Howard, Malcolm Hughes, James Hull, John Hutton, Peter Ibbetson, Barbara Jones, Margaret Kaye, William Kempster, Morris Kestelman, Richard Levin, Lewitt & Himm, Augustus Lunn, Leonard Manasseh, John Minton, Charles Mozley, Ben Nicholson, Roger Nicholson, Michael O'Connell, Pantak Ltd, Victor Pasmore, Peter (Laszlo) Peri, Cecil Philippson, Beverley Pick, Paul Piech, John Piper, E. Pollak, Hilda Pope, Reuben Railthorpe, Manfred Reiss, Sheila Robinson, Leonard Rosoman, Kenneth Rowntree, Robert Scanlan, Laurence Scarfe, George Skolli (Jerzy Skolimowski), Albert Smith, Alan Sorrell, Basil Spence, Humphrey Spender, (John) Cecil Stephenson, Graham Sutherland, Betty Swanwick, Steven Sykes, Lyn Thompson, Feliks Topolski, Julian Trevelyan, John Tunnard, Keith Vaughan, Birtwistle Vore, Norman Weaver, Carel Weight, Edward Wolfe and Marek Zulawski. The main sources for this list of artists were the collection of Festival of Britain photographs held by The National Archives (TN A), notably Public Record Office (PRO) WORK 25/204-218; and the Catalogue of Exhibits: South Ban' Exhibition (HMSO, London, 1951). See also photographs in the collections of the Museum of London (for instance IN 166 18-95 and series HG1318) and the National Monuments Record; the Festival of Britain records at the V&A Archive of Art and Design, A AD/1 979/5; and Elain Harwood and Alan Powers (eds), Festival of Britain (Twentieth Century Society, London, 2001).

10. John Milner, Kenneth Rowntree (Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2002), 45.

1 1 . Sheila Robinson is shown painting the Freedom mural with Kenneth Rowntree in photograph TN A: PRO WORK 25/206/3296. She also assisted Bawden with the Country Life mural.

12. G. S. Whittet, Encouragement for artists , 181-3 in A Tonic to the Nation : the Festival of Britain 1951 , Mary Banham and Bevis Hillier (eds), (Thames and Hudson, London, 1976).

13. Simon Guthrie, John Cecil Stephenson: A Victorian painter s journey to abstract expressionism (Cartmel Press Associates, Grange-over-Sands, 1997), 105-7, 115-7. Stephenson also collaborated with his Polytechnic colleague, the architect Edward Curtis, on a mural for Solar House (1955) in Rickmans worth, and with Plyglass Ltd in 1957 on a design for the Engineering Building at Queen Mary College, London, where there are also contemporary tile murals by Carters of Poole. Fluorescent paint had been used by the artist John Hutton (1906-78) for a mural on the




Orient Line ship Orcades III in 1948; see Margaret Brentnall,/oÄw Hutton: Artist and Glass Engraver (Associated University Presses, London, 1986), 126. For mural work on this and other Orient Line ships, see Veronica Sekules, 'The Ship-owner as an Art Patron: Sir Colin Anderson and the Orient Line 1930- 1960', Decorative Arts Society Journal , 10 (1986), 22-33.

14. Victor Pasmore, A Jazz Mural , 102 in A Tonic to the Nation: the Festival of Britain 1951 , Mary Banham and Bevis Hillier, (eds), (Thames and Hudson, London, 1976).

15. Ronald Alley, Victor Pasmore: Retrospective Exhibition, 1925-65 (Tate Gallery, London, 1965), catalogue number 93.

1 6. Deanna Petherbridge (ed), Art for Architecture , (HMSO, London, 1987), 12.

17. William Feaver, Festival Star , 40-57 in A Tonic to the Nation : the Festival of Britain 1951 , Mary Banham and Bevis Hillier (eds), (Thames and Hudson, London, 1976), 49.

18. Several mural works from the South Bank Exhibition are known to be extant. The stump work hanging designed by Constance Howard for the Country pavilion, celebrating the work of the National Federation of Women's Institutes (NFWI), is at the NFWI residential college in Oxfordshire; Miners by Josef Herman, from the Minerals of the Island pavilion, is at the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in Swansea; the huge hanging by Michael O'Connell in the Country pavilion is held by the Rural History Centre, University of Reading; Graham Sutherland's The Origins of the Land , from the Land of Britain pavilion, is in the Tate Collection; Carel Weight's The English Landscape , from the Country pavilion, was moved to Woodberry Down Secondary School in the London Borough of Hackney, but is now in storage following the school's demolition; John Piper's The Englishman's Home , from the Homes and Gardens pavilion, is owned by Harlow Arts Trust, which also has some panels from the Alan Sorrell mural in the Nelson Bar on the Festival ship Campania' and Ben Nicholson's mural from the Thameside Restaurant was bought by Sir Frederick Gibberd for the VIP lounge at Heathrow Airport. In addition, the ceramic tile mural by Peggy Angus at what is now known as the Lansbury Lawrence Primary School, part of the 'Live Architecture' Exhibition in Poplar, is also extant, and there may be other survivors. The English Heritage listed building description for Woodberry Down Community School, formerly Woodberry Down Primary School, states that its cement and plaster

sgraffito mural by Augustus Lunn, showing youths engaged in woodworking and reading, was salvaged from the Seaside pavilion. Although Lunn carried out a sgraffito mural in the Seaside pavilion, it seems highly unlikely, given the subject, that it was the Woodberry Down mural, which is more likely to have been carried out specifically for the school.

19. Well over 150 murals were executed in Britain during the 1950s. Exhibition list, The Second Exhibition by the Society of Mural Painters at the RIBA, London, 9 April - 2 May 1953 , V&A NAL D.644/53 (200.BS). The exhibition toured the country in 1954-5.

20. Elain Harwood, 'White Light/White Heat: Rebuilding England's Provincial Towns and Cities in the Sixties', Twentieth Century Architecture , 6 (2002), 55-70.

21. A good example of a small ceramics firm is Craig Bragdy Design, established by Rhys and Jean Powell (born 1925), who both trained at Wallasey School of Art, in north Wales in the 1950s. They began making murals in the mid 1960s, their early works being mainly for locations (often pubs) in and around Liverpool, and went on to produce major works for the Royal Liverpool University Hospital and the city's Dental Hospital. When British commissions became scarce in the late 1960s, the firm moved its focus to the Middle East. Although Rhys Powell died in 1994 the firm, now based in Denbigh, continues to flourish, designing and making exotic, large scale works for a worldwide market. See Jean Powell, Earth, Fire and Water (Poetry Live Ltd, Denbigh, 2006).

22. 'Mural expresses computer art', Ceramic Industries Journal , 84 (1974) 989, 9. The tile mural, which measured about 40 feet by 30 feet, was believed to be the largest permanent work of computer art in the world at the time; it was lost in later refurbishments. The design resulted from nearly 19,000 calculations made by the computer, which was programmed by designer John Lansdown.

23. Carter Archive, Poole Museum Service, CP269. The mural, which is at Lewis's store on Ranelagh Street (not the John Lewis Partnership store) is extant but may be threatened as the store is changing hands.

24. Lynn Pearson, 'To Brighten the Environment: Ceramic Tile Murals in Britain, 1950-70', Journal of the Tiles and Architectural Ceramics Society , 10 (2004), 12-17.

25. Mural Art Today , (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1960). By 1965 the SMP had effectively ceased to function.

THE DECORATIVE ARTS SOCIETY JOURNAL 200J I35



26. For location details of extant ceramic murals, see Lynn Pearson, Tile Gazetteer : A Guide to British Tile and Architectural Ceramics Locations (Richard Dennis, Shepton Beauchamp, 2005).

27. Carter Archive, Poole Museum Service, CP720. 28. Alan Swale, The Gordon Cullen Ceramic

Murals: Lower Precinct, Coventry. Part 1: Background to the removal and reinstallation of the mural', Glazed Expressions , (2003) 46, 14-15.

29. Alan Swale, 'The Gordon Cullen Ceramic Murals: Lower Precinct, Coventry. Part 2: The removal, re-installation and restoration of the mural', Glazed Expressions , (2003) 47, 14-15. Carter's also collaborated with Gordon Cullen around 1957 on a set of small tile panels depicting various Dunn shops in Bromley, which are now held by Jackfield Tile Museum. See Jennifer Hawkins Opie, 'Geoffrey Dunn and Dunn's of Bromley: Selling Good Design - a Lifetime of Commitment', Decorative Arts Society Journal , 10 (1986), 34-9.

30. David Buckman, Artists in Britain since 1945 (Art Dictionaries Ltd, Bristol, 2006), 83-4.

3 1 . Diana Rowntree, Pattern : Carter Publication 82 (Carter Group of Companies, Poole, 1960). Other artists working with Carter's included Laurence Scarfe (1914-93), Paul Feiler (born 1918) and the cartoonist Rowland Emett (1906-90) who designed the Tile Mosaic Map (1960) on the Hillfield Road Car Park in Hemel Hempstead.

32. Architects Journal, vol 130, 21 May 1959, 760. 33. 'Walton Pottery Closure', Derbyshire Times , 13

January 1956. 34. Biographical information on William Gordon

from the Kenneth Clark Archive, Ringmer, East Sussex. See also Carter Archive, Poole Museum Service, CP 175. For other potters who did not follow the neo-oriental style, see Matthew Partington, 'Espresso, Exoticism and Earthenware: The London Coffee Bar Ceramics of the Picassoettes (William Newland, Margaret Hine and Nicholas Vergette) 1952-1966', Interpreting Ceramics , (2005) 6, online, cited 31 December 2006, <www.uwic.ac.uk/ICRC/issue006/articles/02. htm>, and Matthew Partington, 'Coffee Culture', Ceramic Review, (2004) 206, 32-3.

35. Benedict Read, Tadeusz Chrzanowski, Martin Sankey and Tymon Terlecki, Adam Kossowski: Murals and Paintings (Armelle Press, London, 1990).

36. Malcolm Yorke, Keith Vaughan : His Life and Wor' (Constable, London, 1990), 162.

37. Margaret Gar lake, Peter Lany on (Tate Publishing, London, 2001), 58-60.

38. Mo Enright, Peter Lanyon : The Mural Studies (Gimpel Fils, London, 1996).

39. 'Office building, Holborn', Architect and Building News, 220, 16 August 1961, 245-50.

40. Arkj A Journal of Design and the Fine Arts, 9, 1953 (London, RCA). The issue included contributions from Barbara Jones, John Minton, F. H. K. Henrion and Walter Hudspith. The Hudspith panels in Sunderland have recently been restored and are on display on the exterior of the Museum.

4 1 . Liz Arthur, Robert Stewart : Design 1 946-95 (A. & C. Black, London, 2003), 126-9. The Motherwell murals were a great success although not financially rewarding, as he spent so much time on them. He was later astonished to find out that the tradesmen installing the tiles in the public toilets earned more per hour.

42. Christopher R. Marsden, 'The architectural ceramics of Fritz Steiler', Journal of the Tiles and Architectural Ceramics Society, 13 (2007), 3-14. See also photographs on Fritz Steller 's website (German language), online, cited 17 December 2006, <http://www.fritzsteller.de>.

43. Louise Campbell, Coventry Cathedral : Art and architecture in post-war Britain (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996), 261.

44. John Eastwick-Field and John Stillman, 'Out of the Form', Architectural Review, 125 (1959), 386-397. John Eastwick-Field (1919-2003), his wife Elizabeth and his colleague John Stillman formed their architectural practice Stillman and Eastwick-Field (SEF) in 1949. Initially they specialised in schools and housing, later designing hospitals and university buildings.

45. Oliver Cox and Fred Millett, 'Mural Techniques Today', Architectural Review, 130 (1961) 774, 88-100.

46. Eugene Rosenberg, Architect's Choice : Art in Architecture in Great Britain since 1945 (Thames and Hudson, London, 1992), 14-20.

47. Sam Gathercole, 'Art and Construction in Britain in the 1950s', Art History, 29 (2006) 5, 887-925. For critical neglect of the Constructivists, see Alastair Grieve, Constructed Abstract Art in England after the Second World War: A Neglected Avant-Garde (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2005), 233-6.

48. Dolores Mitchell, 'Art patronage by the London County Council (L.C.C.) 1948-1965', Leonardo, 10 (1977) 3, 207-12.

49. Keith New, 'A personal appreciation: Antony Holla way ARCA', Journal of Stained Glass, 24 (2000), 181-5. See also William Mitchell's website, online, cited 31 December 2006, < http://www.william-mitchell.com/ > .

50. G. S. Sandilands, 'London County Council as Art Patron: II', The Studio, 159 (1960) 802, 42-7.




51. Mitchell's internal concrete wall for the reception area of the Lee Valley Water Works Company at Hatfield was shown on the front cover of Concrete Quarterly in 1964. The wall was structural, and was at the time said to be the largest single cast ever executed. Inset into it were small water jets which poured water into the reflecting pool at the base of the sculpture. His early 1970s Stations of the Cross at Clifton Cathedral, Bristol, were moulded by hand in Faircrete, a concrete and fibreglass mixture produced by the building firm John Laing; it remains plastic for about an hour after pouring.

52. 'New-town Mural', Concrete Quarterly , (1969) 81, 16-17.

53. Dugald Maclnnes and James Buchanan Johnston, 'Obsessed by the Wonder of Stone: George Garson - Mosaicisti Andamento , 1 (2007) 1,22-7.

54. Lynn Pearson, Public Art since 1 950 (Shire Publications, Princes Risborough, 2006), 14. The estimated cost of relocating the frieze is said to be around £100,000.

55. Sculpture by the Yard: Mitzi Cunliffe, Sculptor for Architecture y (The Cloister Press, London, 1967), V&A NAL 200.BA; attached to this copy is a press release from the United States Information Service dated 10 January 1967. The sole post-1945 building to be listed entirely for its sculpture is Heaton Park Pumping Station, Greater Manchester, with Cunliffe's 1955 stylised figurative stone relief.

56. Elain Harwood, 'Mitzi Cunliffe (Obituary)', The Independent , 18 January 2007.

57. George Perkin, 'Concrete murals', Concrete Quarterly, (1963) 57,15-21.

58. Horace Barks Reference Library, Stoke-on- Trent City Libraries: Minkstone Products, SP840.338.

59. Philippa Threlfall, 'Philippa Threlfall talks about her mural at Leeds and Bradford Airport', Concrete Quarterly , (1969) 82, 26-30.

60. 'The scholarly murals of Henry and Joyce Collins', Concrete Quarterly , (1975) 104, 14-19.

61. Susan Macdonald, Conserving 'carbuncles' - Dilemmas of conservation in practice : an overview of current English Heritage research and advice , 207-24 in Structure and Style : Conserving Twentieth Century Buildings , Michael Stratton (ed), (E & FN Spon, London, 1997). Examples of mosaic murals in schools include work by Robyn Denny at Abbey Wood Primary School in south London (1959), and an abstract glass mosaic by Philip Suffolk at a Putney school (1955). The latter is shown in Lesley Jackson, ' Contemporary Architecture and Interiors of the 1950s (Phaidon, London, 1994), 191.

62. My grateful thanks to Oliver Budd for generously allowing me to see draft sections from his forthcoming book on his father's and his own life and work with mosaics, from which the quotation and much of the information concerning Kenneth Budd were taken. Oliver Budd (born 1960) began to assist his father with mosaics in 1979, and carries on the family firm Budd Mosaics at Robertsbridge, East Sussex; he is involved in conservation projects relating to his father's mosaic murals in Kettering and Birmingham.

63. Cordula Zeidler, 'Tubes, Murals & Pools', Twentieth Century Society Newsletter , (2006) Spring, 7. The 1982 series of mosaics by Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) inside the Kingfisher Shopping Centre in Redditch predate his well known 1984-5 work at Tottenham Court Road underground station. They were commissioned in 1981 by local industrialists and Redditch Development Corporation, which was sure the mosaics would put Redditch on the map.

64. Victoria Worsley, Edward Bainbridge Copnall , 51-3 in Sculpture in 20th-century Britain , Volume 2, Penelope Curtis (ed), (Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 2003).

65. Martin Harrison, Transition: The London Art Scene in the Fifties (Merrell Publishers, London, 2002), 127.

66. Reflecting the lack of academic study of muralists, it is perhaps significant that where artists mentioned in this article have been the subject of obituaries, a constant theme is that their work did not fit into the usual art historical progression; the work of Betty Swan wick (1915-89), for instance, designer of the mural in the South Bank's Rocket Restaurant, was described as 'visionary and unique and she did not belong to any grouping of British artists'. See Judith Collins, 'A parrot beside her pencil (Obituary, Betty Swanwick)', The Guardian , 7 June 1989.

67. However, one positive note concerns the Trafalgar House historical mural (1949) in Portsmouth, painted by Eric Rimmington (born 1926), a student at the Southern College of Art in Portsmouth during 1947-9. It was threatened with destruction when the building was about to be converted into a pub, but the building was listed grade II in June 2002. Unusually the list description stated that 'the principal interest of the building is a painted mural'; it was protected and restored during redevelopment, and the pub- the Trafalgar -

opened in 2004.




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