http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-berkshire-23769081

Cost a 6-figure sum. So is that £100,000 or £999,999?

That seems unnecessarily pessimistic. I love public art and the interpretation of our cultural history, so I'm keen to see what we're getting and I think it could be great. It's also funded privately by the BID so I'm more than happy (it is funded privately, right?).

Here we go: Proposed by David Allen at the last Town Council Community Services committee: "Chairperson of Victoria Park Working Group – Cllr David Allen. To consider using £4,000 of Victoria Park S106 Interface monies (remaining balance £16,622) to purchase an additional Wayfinding Monolith in or adjacent to Victoria Park as an extension to the currently agreed BID specification of 8 monoliths throughout the town"

As the BBC says there are to be nine signs, and the item above talks about eight, then it looks the Clown Tonsils have thrown £4k of public money at this thing, though I don't see how that gets nine of the signs to cost upwards of £100,000.

Can you have stainless steel monoliths? Perhaps this is a different thing altogether.

Waste of money
Everyone knows Newbury is a dump.
That's why they go to Festival Place or The Oracle to go shopping.

From what I understand though, the signposts will be directing visitors to our local cultural riches, not the high street.

I do love how your attitude to things changes as soon as your beloved town council gets a whiff of involvement.

From ' I love public art and the interpretation of our cultural history...I think it could be great' to some 'thing' money is 'thrown at'.

Reading the articles it looks to me as if a grand total of 9 signs promoting the town are being installed. Eight funded by the BID to the tune of 6 figures & which will be in steel located at strategic entry points about town and an additional one in Victoria Park costing £4,000, paid for by NTC using the contractor slush fund.

I don't think I've ever tried to hide my prejudices. I do indeed appreciate public art - I particularly like the TC's Heads on Hospital Green which I think is an inspirational piece of art which was installed in an impressively good setting and which works extremely well at the gateway to the town, setting a positive, modern, and affluent tone.

I simply despise how the town council is run, and I have good reasons for being bitter.

The council's management of Victoria Park is utterly dire, and has been for many years now. Victoria Park needs a strategy, the contentions over ownership bewteen NTC and WBC need resolving, and the cracks snafu needs exorcising, and only when all of that is in place should the council start spending public money of monoliths, stainless or otherwise.

What "cultural riches" are those?

Skylings?

That and St. George's Avenue, I presume.

Maybe.

I do have to wonder "What's in it for the donors?" Are this signs going to be advertising in the disguise of information boards?

unlikely - the BID is paid for by all the town centre businesses, so specific advertising would be unfair.

Sure. I'm surprised that upwards of £100,000 on nine stainless steeley things is going to deliver more than £100,000 of extra profit for the BID businesses, but it's private money and not really any of my concern, and I'm open-minded enough to suppose that it might, at least if they're a central aspect of a larger promotional and branding exercise. At the end of the day I just like shiny things.

That said, there are some stainless steel obelisks with garish lights on the cathedral green in Winchester and they are truly awful and completely out of place, so I don't know how they came to be there, but it's clearly possibly to get this kind of thing wrong.

You mean

http://www.peterfreeman.co.uk/winpg.htm

Yes, that's them. Maybe it's just me, but I thought they were nasty and inappropriate.

much modern ecclesiastically commissioned art ( although these are in the Cathedral grounds they were paid for by Winchester Council ) is along a simliar vein.

I can think of umpteen examples where the art sits uncomfortably in it surroundings. Maybe that is the point.

Can you cite examples - I don't mean that in a "I bet it's not true" kind of way, I'd just like to see what you mean.

I can't think of much public church art. The stuff you find inside churches is often pretty banal - lots of turquoise and silk doves, that kind of thing.

For examples online -

Tom Denny & John Hayward's Stained Glass, There is a sculpture in Ely Cathedral etc etc.

It can work - is Sutherland's work in Spence's Coventry Cathedral. It is the juxtapoistion of new & old. The glass work - stands out a mile as being 'new'.

It is akin to the work being done at Newbury Museum - instread of the new work blending seamlessly with the old...



eg - http://www.flickr.com/photos/amthomson/gal...57628025829301/

Highclere too-don't they realise its not in Berkshire!

Yes, stained glass is difficult because it's so easy to be cliched, but Tom Denny has created something modern and tasteful.

I agree too about the juxtaposition of the old and new, and I was thinking of Newbury Museum before you mentioned it. I like the museum design for just that reason, and I can think of a couple of church extensions that have tastefully augmented the traditional with the modern - there's a reasonably good oak extension to the parish church in Goring for example, and the parish church in Wantage has a rather fine oak door which makes no pretension at being anything but modern, but compliments the building because of that.

I thought the standing-stone sculpture in Ely Cathedral was very brave of the church commissioners to allow, being so obviously pagan.

What does it matter what county it's in?