WALKING WITH MASTERPIECES

Art is breaking free from the traditional gallery and its emergence on our streets and in our parks is changing the way we live, says Clive Aslet

- Clive Aslet

HERE’S a tip for anyone wanting to engage bored children as they go around the capital. Count the statues. They are thick on the ground—they’re up on plinths, in pediments, on the façade of Fortnum & Mason. In recent years, some have been contested, but neither the number of statues already in situ, nor the opprobrium some excited has deterred developers, public authorities and champions of special causes from adding more. Look at the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, occupied by a succession of colourful, if sometimes incomprehensible artworks in recent years. Always the subject of great popular debate, it is only one of the many ways in which public art is transforming London. It can delight and amaze those who see it, contributing to the conviction of many Londoners that they’re living in the best city in the world.

The East End now has a public sculpture trail that links a dozen or so artworks from the Olympic Park to the Millennium Dome. It’s called The Line. Some, such as Richard Wilson’s A Slice of Reality—a section of a sand dredger, cut like a cake and deposited on the foreshore—have been in place since the Millennium, but others are new. Joanna Rajkowska’s The Hatchling of 2019 takes the form of a gigantic blackbird’s egg, from inside which comes the sound of hatching chicks (recorded with an ornithologist’s microphone).

Thomas J. Price unveiled the most recent contribution in 2020,