Patrick Comerford
I was in Lloyds Court in Milton Keynes, yesterday for further tests at the new Community Diagnostic Centre at Lloyds Court. The centre is just a short walk from the Central Milton Keynes shopping centre and opened last October. But Lloyds Court is half a century old, and when it was completed in 1975 it was the first site to be developed in Central Milton Keynes.
In many ways, it could be said, Lloyds Court represents the birth of Milton Keynes in the ways it broke the ground for building the city centre and in its style, design language, public art and construction.
Lloyds Court, originally coined ‘D.1.4’ after the grid location into which Central Milton Keynes was divided, was envisioned to accommodate a mix of commercial users, much as it is today. Lloyds Bank, which gave its name to Lloyds Court, funded its construction at a cost of £2.2 million and the bank is present on a prominent corner to this day.
Lloyds Court became a blueprint for the city as a whole. The ‘portes cochère’ – the long black shelters running from the road to the building’s colonnade – sheltered visitors and workers from the rain and expanded the grid roads into the pedestrians’ experience of crossing the city.
The Black Horse, a sculpture by Dame Elisabeth Frink (1930-1993), stands outside Lloyds Bank at the corner of Lloyds Court, near the corner of Secklow Gate and Silbury Boulevard. Fink made the life-sized bronze sculpture at the Meridian Foundry in 1978. It shows a walking horse on a shallow plinth, mounted on a pedestal.
Fink’s Black Horse was commissioned by Lloyds Bank in 1978 as part of a major public art scheme and because it is the emblem of Lloyds Bank worldwide.
Lloyds Bank dates back to 1765, when John Taylor, a button maker, and Sampson Lloyd, a Quaker iron producer and dealer, set up a private banking business in Dale End, Birmingham. The first branch office opened in Oldbury, 10 km (six miles) west of Birmingham, in 1864. A years later, in 1865, Lloyds Bank converted into a joint-stock company, with a board of directors and a large capital base. In a period of expansion over the next five decades, the company took over more than 50 banks, large and small.
When Lloyds absorbed the Lombard Street bank of Barnetts, Hoares & Co in 1884, it inherited the black horse as its logo. But the black horse was more than 200 years older, dating back to at least 1677, when it was used as a symbol by the Lombard Street goldsmith Humphrey Stokes, whose customers included the diarist Samuel Pepys.
At the end of World War I, Lloyds Bank had its biggest merger, with its takeover of Capital & Counties Bank, and became one of the largest banks on the High Street.
Lloyds Bank first used a real horse in its advertising campaigns in 1979. Cancarra was the best known, appearing in advertisements between 1989 and 1996. Other horses have included Beatos, Dante, Tarantino and Imperator.
Before that advertising campaign began, however, Lloyds Bank had commissioned ‘Black Horse’ at Lloyds Court in 1978. The monumental bronze horse reflects the brand of the bank to the right of the sculpture, but also symbolises the pioneering and symbolic breaking of the ground in Milton Keynes.
Elisabeth Frink was one of Britain’s foremost sculptors emerging from World War II, and the issues she addresses in her work include war, religion and nature. She sculpted in wet plaster of Paris which was then chiselled and carved. This created the highly textured surfaces that fit the characteristics of the birds, animals, warriors and hybrid figures that were her main subjects in the 1950s.
Elisabeth Frink was born in Thurlow, Suffolk, on 14 November 1930. Her childhood memories of World War II and her life in the Suffolk countryside near a military airfield fed her imagination throughout her career. Her work was also shaped by her strong belief in human rights and her devotion to themes associated with nature.
The themes in her sculpture, print and drawings includes horses, heads, human figures, animals and birds. She had loved horses since her childhood, and from 1969 on she created several sculptures of horses with and without riders.
She worked mainly in bronze and had numerous public commissions, including as her Horse and Rider (1975) in Piccadilly, London, made for Trafalgar House Investments, and her Black Horse in Milton Keynes. Later in her career, she also did numerous portrait busts of distinguished sitters. She died in Wolland, near Blandford Forum in Dorset, on 18 April 1993.
The street furniture at Lloyds Court is a reminder of the influence of the Milton Keynes Development Corporation architect Brian Milne (1933-1996), who considered every element that was needed to express a truly modern city.
Milne studied at Ipswich School of Art and worked with Geoffrey Clark, one of the artists at Coventry Cathedral, and then studied stained glass at the Royal College of Art before joining the new Art and Design Group at the Greater London Council.
He moved to Newport Pagnell in 1971 to work with the planning and design team building the new city of Milton Keynes. He later worked as a stained glass artist, designing windows for houses, churches and pubs.
His work design work can still be seen throughout the city centre in Milton Keynes, including his black perforated metal benches and the streetlights. Even the dustbins were designed to create a shared language and look that would tie the streets together, and his bench is now considered a contemporary design icon.
His innovative designs have been copied across the world, and Lloyds Court remains a snapshot of life in Britain half a century ago. Today, it is a focus for the public realm heritage of the city where the original materials and street furniture have been preserved, with conservation work that protects and tells the stories of the city’s origins.
