At the bottom of a field in Milton Keynes, a concrete mural has lain dismantled and covered in moss for the past 10 years. Unless it finds a new owner soon, the 34-tonne sculpture will be taken away and broken into rubble. Local art enthusiast Tim Skelton is on a mission to find it a loving home.
The current circumstance of the mural, named Celestial, is a far cry from its triumphant debut in 1969. A young Scottish artist, Keith McCarter, was summoned by the Ministry of Public Building and Works to meet the designer of the BT Tower, Eric Bedford, to discuss designing a piece of art that would sit as part of the new headquarters for the Ordnance Survey (OS), the national mapping agency, in Southampton.
McCarter was prolific: you will have unknowingly walked past his work on your way to catch a train in Birmingham or Glasgow, driving down the M25, shopping in Kent, or walking through Aldershot or London. Alongside Anthony Holloway and William Mitchell, he designed many of the concrete walls, murals and patterns on buildings that formed the aesthetic of postwar Britain. This was a period of optimism in British architecture. In the aftermath of the second world war, the Labour government and idealistic designers began rebuilding the UK’s damaged cities and public morale. Modernist buildings were to be egalitarian, and much thought was given to public space and art.
The mural for the OS office was to be something special. The new site was vast, housing areas for drawing, printing and the storage of large, flat maps. Britain was being transformed, and every inch of its new neighbourhoods, town centres and motorways needed documenting. The site required a piece of art that reflected the organisation’s growing stature, and coming in at 12.4m x 6.3m, McCarter’s gigantic sculpture achieved just that. Unlike his previous work, in which concrete murals were designed as part of a building’s structure, this piece was to stand alone. It was to be erected in between two buildings on a grassy verge, around which workers would drive buggies loaded with heavy maps.
The very same year, foundations were being laid in the ground for the headquarters, man landed on the moon. When designing the piece, McCarter says, he thought to himself: “If they have mapped terra firma, they must be able to map the heavens.”
“At that time there was a lot of aerial photography coming back from space probes,” he says. Images of the moon’s surface inspired the heavy, cratered texture of the mural. The only tweak the government requested was for holes to be incorporated into the design to make sure workers could see any oncoming traffic.
Once the design had the go-ahead, McCarter carved a negative of the shapes and textures into blocks of polystyrene assisted by his brother Graham and friend Mark Lang, who were students at Guildford Art College. The negative formwork was placed into the timber frames and concrete poured into the mould. Once the material hardened, the timber sides were pulled off and the final design was lifted out by an overhead gantry crane before being transported to the site.
Upon its unveiling, the sculpture was widely acclaimed. The Architects’ Journal said the mural was one of the “outstanding features” of the new site, along with the concrete domed roof over the staff restaurant building. The mural stayed at the site until 2010 when the OS downsized and moved to new premises. As map-making and storage became digitised, and printing was outsourced, there was no longer a need for vast factory floors. The future had arrived, just not the one McCarter had imagined.
The OS never did map the moon. The collective optimism of the 1960s morphed into a new belief in the progression of the individual, rather than society. Concrete public art became weathered and covered in moss and vines; some of it, including McCarter’s mural at Charing Cross in Glasgow, was painted over in bright tones to “cheer up” the grey; some were destroyed for ever. McCarter began making sculptures in metal and receiving commissions from private developments. Reflecting on his career, he says: “Tastes come and go, and what might be popular one day, won’t be the next. It can be very fickle.”
In 2010, the Public Arts Trust in Milton Keynes caught wind that the mural was at risk of being destroyed and sought to give it a new home, hence its temporary berth in a field. It’s fitting that an organisation from a new town, created in the same period of civic optimism, ended up seeing the value in McCarter’s work.
But the mural wasn’t to find a home in the city. “Politics came into it, and a couple of the councillors raised objections,” says McCarter. After 12 years of failed attempts to find a home for the work, the owner of the field has now made a polite request to move the mural on. In desperation, a member of the Trust, Skelton, recently took to Twitter and asked if anyone wanted the mural. For free. He was deluged with replies and is in talks with one organisation, which he cannot yet reveal, about rehoming the sculpture.
Unlike a painting, which can change hands with ease, finding a home for a huge sculpture isn’t easy. This is not the first time one has struggled to find a taker. In Glasgow, a statue of the Scottish comedian Billy Connolly has been covered in tarpaulin in a warehouse for the past decade because the local council believe it may be an obstruction to pedestrians if erected in the city’s West End.
Installation may also be an issue for Celestial. Two articulated lorries will transport it from its current home and, when in place, the concrete panels will need to sit on top of an in-situ wall. Stainless steel dowels will be placed through rapid-hardening cement-filled receiving pockets, much like how a carpenter might make a set of joins at a right angle when making a set of drawers. It also would not hurt for the new owner to give the panels a jet wash to rid them of the accumulated moss.
Today, McCarter’s creative energy remains undiminished, although he became a full-time carer for his wife, Brenda, a talented needleworker. She died recently; this is why there is something enticing about the near-permanence of art made in concrete. It serves as a reminder that there was once a generation of men and women who thought that the future could be better and worked hard to bring their vision into existence.
McCarter and Skelton hope the mural and their ideals will live on, wherever it ends up, and remind the next generation to shoot for the moon.
