A £120,000 modernist sculpture in a yet-to-be completed garden behind Waltham Forest Town Hall has attracted criticism for its hefty price tag.
‘The Arch,’ designed by the late sculptor Henry Moore, has been loaned to the council for the next four years.
It will form part of the new Queen Elizabeth II Memorial Garden and Sensory Garden, which is set to open in June this year.
In a newsletter sent to residents last week, council leader Grace Williams said the installation was “made possible” thanks to civic fund contributions from Countryside Properties, a construction company involved in the redevelopment of the area around the town hall.
But not everyone is on-board. Josh Hadley, the chairman of Waltham Forest Liberal Democrats, called it “non-essential during a time of very tight council budgets”.
He said the council was “throwing away” £30,000 a year on the sculpture, despite cutting budgets to frontline services, redundancies, and being forced to “dip into the reserve to cover shortfalls” over the past year.
In February, the council announced it would be cutting spending by £18million over the next two years. The cuts – agreed as early as November 2023 – spanned from reductions to adult social care to “revising” help for private sector renters.
Walthamstow resident Natalie Proud said she was “perplexed” by the choice to put the Henry Moore sculpture behind the town hall, and questioned whether it would attract any new visitors to the area.
Describing the statue as “ugly”, she added that the £120,000 could have been much better spent elsewhere.
The £120,000 figure given for The Arch is comprehensive: it includes planning application costs, installation, insurance and loan costs from the Henry Moore Foundation.
The sculpture will also be protected by security patrols and CCTV cameras, but at no extra cost to taxpayers.
A spokesperson for the council said: “Fellowship Square, including the newly opened North site featuring the commemorative gardens and sculpture, is patrolled by security for the safety and wellbeing of our visitors and to protect the spaces.”
Others were more optimistic. Hilary Douse, who runs the Leytonstone Art Trail, said she considered Henry Moore a “really special” artist.
She said: “I grew up with Henry Moore’s ‘Family’ sculpture, which was the symbol for the town I grew up in in Essex – Harlow. It is now dubbed sculpture town owing to the large volumes of sculpture they have amassed in the town.”
Alongside the memorial garden, the Fellowship Square programme also involves the building of 433 new homes, new shops, a new civic building and 200 landscaped gardens near the town hall.
It was described by Waltham Forest Council as a “once in a lifetime” opportunity to create a new neighbourhood and cultural centre in the heart of the borough and has been in development since 2022.
Henry Moore was best known for his contributions to the Modernism art movement and his work in sculpting bronze.
The Arch, one of his final pieces, was constructed between 1979 and 1980, before being gifted by the artist to Kensington Gardens.
The travertine piece was found to be unstable in 1996 and was subsequently dismantled. It was returned to the gardens in 2012.
The sculptor was born in Castleford, west Yorkshire, in 1898 and died in 1986 in Hertfordshire.
