During renovation work at London’s Tottenham Court Road tube station, some of the Eduardo Paolozzi mosaics were destroyed. This sparked a controversy which resulted in the remaking of some of the destroyed sections. The University of Edinburgh kept bags of the salvaged fragments. But what will happen to the fragments and why are they so important? Helen Miles Mosaics explores the issue.
A youthful encounter
Once upon a time I bleached my hair, had a ring in my nose and lived in a squat near the Tottenham Court Road tube station in London. I was young and raced past the Eduardo Paolozzi mosaics in the tube station passageways on my way to work.
If you had asked me then what the Paolozzi mosaics were, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. If you wanted to know what impact they had on my life, you would have been rewarded with a look of blank confusion. But I liked standing on the escalator and looking up at the mosaicked arches as I glided earthwards at the end of the day.
Visiting the mosaics
That was in the 1980s when the mosaics were freshly installed and I was freshly released upon the world. But that was then and this is now. When I recently returned to London on a day trip from Edinburgh a different me, grey-haired and without the nose ring, descended into the tube to look at the Paolozzi mosaics. This time I was fully aware that these mosaics are one of the most important public art installations in the country.
My interest is piqued
My interest in the Paolozzi mosaics was piqued by being part of the organising team for the British Association for Modern Mosaic’s annual forum in Edinburgh in 2017. The forum included talks by Christopher Smith, who worked with Paolozzi on the construction of the Tottenham Court Road mosaics. Liv Laumenech, public arts officer at the University of Edinburgh – now the custodian of the rescued mosaic fragments – also spoke.
Ever keen to keep my finger on the throbbing pulse of mosaic matters, I attended an all-day symposium entitled A Public Art Puzzle. It was run by the university and culminated in a heated discussion about what should happen to the fragments.
The future of the fragments
Ideas about their future flew about the room. Eduardo Paolozzi was born to Italian immigrant parents in Edinburgh’s port of Leith. Thus, the suggestion of repurposing them in Leith was well received. Could they perhaps be incorporated into a future tram stop at the port? What about inviting different artists to respond to the fragments and use them in new works?
Could they be exhibited across Europe as part of an exploration of the impact of migration and movement? What would Paolozzi himself have wanted? As an artist fixated on the tension between man and technology, perhaps he would have understood and even relished the fact that his mosaics have been partially dismantled in the face of the relentless forces of change?
Baffled
I sat there in a state of bafflement. As a mosaicist, to my eyes the fragments looked like nothing more than chunks of concrete with bits of vitreous glass and smalti still clinging to them. Most of them weren’t appealing to look at. Many had the distinctive blackened pockmarking formed of the sweat and breath and exhaustion of decades of London commuters.
A mosaic’s value, the reason why we appreciate them, is for the overall composition, design, use of colour and artistic skill. Discarded tesserae are no more a mosaic than flakes of paint are an oil painting. I was clearly missing something. Why was rubble being treated with such reverence and seriousness? I thought of the neglected Roman mosaics I had found by chance, seen underwater or walked over and wondered what all the fuss was about. Little did I know.
A little history
Some history will help put things in context. Eduardo Paolozzi, a sculptor and founder of the pop art movement, was commissioned in 1979 to create an art work for Tottenham Court Road.
Over the next five years 955 square metres of mosaics were installed in stages along the Northern and Central line platforms. The competed project also included a circular mosaic, known as the Rotunda. In addition, is a large panel referred to as the Church Window and mosaics around the arches over the entrance to the escalator.
Designs
The designs for the Tottenham Court Road mosaics were drawn from recurrent themes in Paolozzi’s work, particularly the city as a ‘machine age jungle’*. They reflected his interests in collage, surrealism and abstract art.
The completed mosaics also incorporated references to the area surrounding the tube station. Butterflies for the all night Turkish bath formerly in the Russell Hotel** and architectural plans because of the Architectural Association nearby. Also included are cameras, saxophones and electronics to acknowledge the life on the streets above ground. The use of strong, primary colours was a deliberate allusion to the ethnic diversity of the local community.
A colourful transformation
The tube station was transformed. Once the passage ways and platforms had been ‘bent on reminding travellers that they had penetrated a region of the earth noted only for its dank and claustrophobic gloom’*. By the mid 1980s the station was exuberantly colourful and swirling in metaphor, pattern and imagery. Cogs, a space shuttle, a mechanised cow, conveyor belts, a heart with industrial valves, a commuter overlaid with a primitive mask and machine components are all part of the mix.
Method of making
Paolozzi contracted mosaic artists in Spilimbergo, Italy, and London to interpret his designs. Subsequently, the mosaics were made on paper using the reverse method with a mixture of smalti, vitreous glass and piastrelle (tiles) in glass.
There are distinct differences between the mosaics on the Central Line which is coloured red on the tube map and the Northern Line, which is black. The Central Line mosaics are unashamedly shouty in their use of colour and include rich hand cut smalti elements. On the other hand, the Northern Line ones are subdued and simplified. They rely on the pre-made squares of glass to delineate the designs.
Time for an upgrade
The decades passed. People like me glimpsed the Paolozzi mosaics as they dashed through the station. But few stopped to look at them more closely. Finally, severe congestion and the need to expand the station meant that things couldn’t stay as they were. There needed to be a ticket hall six times its original size, wider escalators and new passageways. The Paolozzi mosaics were in the way.
One version of events
At this point, the story of the Paolozzi mosaics gets as murky as the remaining fragments.
One version of the story, the version I heard at the University of Edinburgh symposium, is that Transport for London did everything they could to preserve the mosaics. However, the authority had no choice but to remove the mosaics from the arches at the entrance for logistical reasons.
The arches are an essential part of the overall design but they represent only five per cent of the whole mosaic and are perhaps the least interesting.
The rubble from the demolition was destined for landfill until the Twentieth Century Society (now known as SAVE Britain’s Heritage) swooped down and rescued about a third of it. Later, it ended up in black plastic bags in Edinburgh University’s storeroom.
A second version
In fact, however, Transport for London also set about demolishing significant sections of the iconic Central Line mosaics. SAVE Britian’s Heritage, the Paolozzi Foundation and other organisations got wind of what was going on. A furore broke out, the demolition was halted and Gary Drostle was called in to remake the missing sections.
The original tesserae were unsalvageable. So Drostle went to Spilimbergo to track down the exact smalti colours. He and his team then painstakingly remade around 20 square metres of mosaics using photographic records to replicate the shape and positioning of the individual pieces.
All becomes clear
I found out about the fate of the Central Line mosaics through a chance conversation months after the symposium. Once I did the passion aroused by the mosaic fragments not only made more sense but aroused my ire too.
The lumps of rubble suddenly seemed incredibly important. Paolozzi’s artistic stature is undisputed but this is his only mosaic work. It is a public art installation which is recognised by millions and is intimately linked to the fabric and history of London. Despite this, it was somehow not considered worthy of preservation.
For me, those fragments now stand in for what was lost. They remain as a tangible reminder of how easily casual disregard can culminate in wilful destruction. I am older and distinctly frayed around the edges but I am still here. The Paolozzi mosaics very nearly weren’t.
*Eduardo Paolozzi Underground. Edited by Richard Cork. Royal Academy of Arts. 1986
**Correction. Sent by reader Malcolm Shifrin: ‘Although many news items …. note that the butterfly represents the artist’s memory of a visit to the all-night Turkish baths in the Russell Hotel, the baths were actually in the now demolished Fitzroy Doll Imperial Hotel, almost next door to the Russell.’