Patrick Comerford
The future of two famous and favourite sculptures in Bloomsbury seems uncertain as the TUC (Trades Union Congress) moved to the final stages of selling off Congress House on Great Russell Street, close to the British Museum.
The TUC agreed last year to sell off Congress House after reports showed major work was needed if the building it was to keep up with environmental standards. The TUC is looking for a new modern home for the trade union movement.
The TUC appointed Newmark (formerly Gerard Eve) to manage the sale and a competitive tender process. Congress House was viewed 100 times and 10 bids from prospective buyers were narrowed down to three bids before he TUC has agreed on 28 June to prepare heads of agreement for a sale.
Already the basement and other storage spaces have been cleared, significant documents have been transferred to the TUC archives at Warwick, and a project is in hand to preserve the history of Congress House.
The sale of Congress House, a Grade II listed building with ca 138,000 sq ft across six floors, has also meant the closure of Congress Centre, a well-known London venue, on 4 July and redundancy negotiations with many staff members.
Congress House has been the TUC headquarters since 1958, and Congress Centre appeared in popular television shows such as Killing Eve and Netflix’s The Crown.
David du Roi Aberdeen won an architectural competition to design the new TUC headquarters in Great Russell Street in 1948. Staff began to move into the offices in 1956. Congress House was officially opened on 27 March 1958 along with the unveiling of a giant pietà-style statue of a woman cradling her dead son. Carved in situ in the internal courtyard by Sir Jacob Epstein, it was commissioned as a memorial to trade unionists who had died in the two world wars.
Epstein had previously cast a bronze portrait of the TUC General Secretary Ernest Bevin, commissioned in 1943. Although he was invited by the TUC General Secretary to enter the competition he refused. But he agreed to take on a paid commission, and argued that he should be paid for his labour.
The scale of the installation means the final piece looks very different from the original model. It was described in a contemporary TUC internal document as ‘a memorial for the dead and an act of faith for the living’.
The front of the building is dominated by ‘The Spirit of Brotherhood’, a bronze sculpture by Bernard Meadows representing the spirit of trade unionism with the strong helping the weak. It was cast section by section by skilled craftsmen. It shows two semi-clad male figures, one standing over the other; one figure is sitting helpless on the ground while the other is stretching out to help him.
Bernard Meadows (1915-2005) was associated at an different stages in his career with Henry Moore, and was also part of the Geometry of Fear school, a loose-knit group of sculptors whose prominence was established at the 1952 Venice Biennale.
Meadows was born in Norwich in 1915, and educated at the City of Norwich School. After training as an accountant, he attended Norwich School of Art and in 1936 became Henry Moore's first assistant at his studio in Kent, and took part in the first Surrealist exhibition in London that year. He moved to Chalk Farm on 1937, assisting Moore in his studio at Hampstead, and he studied at the Royal College of Art and at the Courtauld Institute.
At the outbreak of World War II, Meadows registered as a conscientious objector. But when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, he withdrew his objection and was called up to the Royal Air Force.
After World War II, he returned to Moore’s studio and helped him with his marble sculpture ‘Three Standing Figures’ (1947) and his bronze ‘Family Group’ (1949). He found acclaims with an elm figure exhibited in the open air sculpture exhibition at Battersea Park in 1951, alongside the Festival of Britain, which went to the Tate Gallery.
Meadows exhibited in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale a year later, with Anthony Caro, Lynn Chadwick and Eduardo Paolozzi. Their angular styles, contrasted with the rounded work of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth gave them the name of the ‘Geometry of Fear.’ His edgy pieces often based on animals and seemingly carved from shrapnel could imply Cold War menace.
His first solo exhibition was at Gimpel Fils in 1957, with four more in the decade to 1967, and he also exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1964.
Meadows was a Professor of Sculpture at the Royal College of Art for 20 years, from 1960 to 1980. He returned to assist Henry Moore again at Perry Green, Hertfordshire, from 1977, after Moore’s health started to fail. After Moore died in 1986, he became an acting director of the Henry Moore Foundation. He died in London in 2005.
Congress House was one of the earliest post-war buildings in Britain to be listed at Grade II*, in 1988. The design by the London-born architect David Du Roi Aberdeen was chosen because it was explicitly modern. He employed real craftsmen who had a great passion for their work and used eclectic materials. All the labourers and craftsmen on site had to be a member of a trade union to work there.
Congress House is a significant post-war building in Bloomsbury and one of the great physical testaments of the British labour movement. It was designed to be light and airy and very different from the pre-war 1930s architecture found in many public buildings.
The building was 14 years in the making, its existence mandated by a resolution passed in 1944 calling for a new centre of the organised workforce, a proud space that could not only honour the ‘supreme sacrifice’ trade unionists had made ‘in the successful prosecution of the war to overthrow the yoke of Nazi domination and the annihilation of the Nazi creed’, but also to encourage cultural development, training and participation among working people.
Its curved glass, lightness and open space resembles many of Le Corbusier’s unrealised design sketches. The wood was donated by fraternal unions from across the globe, while the street facings were shaped from Cornwall granite slabs as a gesture of solidarity with Cornish communities confronting souring economic prospects.
Much of the wood for the panelling was donated from trade unions and labour movements around the world, while the Cornish granite was sourced from a variety of quarries in order to help relieve unemployment in those areas.
All the construction work was completed and overseen by union members: even the Royal Horse Guards who were invited to perform a fanfare at the formal opening were made members of the Musicians’ Union for the occasion.
The end of Congress House is seen by many as a symbolic moment of selling off the family silver at a time where many unions are struggling to maintain relevance and the leading structures of the trade union movement seem to be losing their sense of direction.
The existence of the building was purely determined by union workers democratically mandating it, physically constructing it, aesthetically shaping it, and appealing to union workers from across the world for assistance in its realisation. Now it may soon fall into the hands of private developers, and no-one seems to be expressing concern for the future of the works by Epstein and Meadows.
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