It was the curves and intersections of the stone ceiling of the crypt in St Paul’s Cathedral that provided the inspiration for the gates forged for the crypt’s Treasury by the artist blacksmith Alan Evans, who has died aged 70, of pancreatic cancer.
Alan entered and won a design competition for the gates in 1980, early in his career. The outcome was a large pair of steel centre-pivoted gates, a web of joints and riveted connections that one commentator described as having all the grace of a web hung across a cave mouth. His reaction to the features of the adjacent architecture, in this case, or, in other pieces, the landscape, was a feature of his early work. In later years it developed into a more emotional response to the site and how people interacted in the space.
