Dredging Up Memories

I was walking up Kingsway at the weekend, and was stopped in my tracks by the most striking sculpture I’ve seen in a long time:

Square the Block, by internationally-renowned sculptor Richard Wilson RA, is a five-storey addition to a chamfered corner of a London School of Economics building.

I must admit to being a huge fan of Wilson’s work. I first encountered it in 2004, when I visited the Saatchi collection at London’s County Hall. One exhibit was Wilson’s 20:50, a room full of sump oil, which I found enchanting.

Wilson is also responsible for an artwork that’s closer to (my) home. Slice of Reality is a section of ship planted on the beach off the Greenwich peninsula, near the O2 (what used to be the Millennium Dome).

To make the sculpture, Wilson bought an old sand-dredger called Arco Trent, built in Devon in 1971, and had it chopped up in a shipyard on the River Tees before fixing it to the Greenwich beach.

I met Wilson on board the ship a couple of years ago, when he opened it for London Open House (a weekend when buildings that are normally off-limits throw open their doors to the public). He told me it is a perfect site for drawing and thinking, and I must say the views from its sun-drenched superstructure were magnificent.

We’ve got a handful of dredger models on show at the Science Museum, including Prins der Nederlanden, built three years before Arco Trent:

Extra points for anyone who can find the other two (much older) model dredgers in the gallery…