Time for change

Known for his striking bronzes, sculptor Martin Jennings is the man behind the image on The King’s new coins. He tells Timothy Mowl how he captures the essence of his subjects and why this Royal Mint commission is so special

- Timothy Mowl

TRAVELLERS hurrying for trains across the upper concourse of London’s St Pancras Station cannot fail to catch sight of the bronze statue of Sir John Betjeman. It is an intensely humane, sensitive portrait of the nation’s favourite poet. He wears a shabby overcoat, his waistcoat bulges a little due to an incipient paunch and he carries a shopping bag. With a hand on his crumpled trilby, he looks up to the cast-iron Victorian roof, which, as an ardent conservationist, he had campaigned to save from demolition. It is as if he has just taken a breath in wonderment at the beauty of it all.

This conscious lifting into the air of the weight of a sculpture is a particular artistic signature of Martin Jennings, who fashioned the statue. It gives a seemingly inert artwork that dynamic sense of animation, of movement. At Broadcasting House, Mr Jennings’s George Orwell wags his roll-up cigarette at the passer-by from his plinth-soapbox —‘Big Brother is Watching You!’— and his Philip Larkin, gabardine mac flapping, dashes from Hull’s Paragon Station to make his Whitsun train journey to King’s Cross. In his most striking sculpture to date, the Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole strides out at St Thomas’s Hospital, in the sculptor’s words, ‘marching defiantly onward into an oncoming wind, as if confronting head on some of the personal resistance she had constantly to battle’.