Patrick Comerford
‘The Meeting Place’ statue was the first thing we saw as we stepped off the Eurostar from Paris in St Pancras Station last month. The 9-metre tall bronze statue on the Grand Terrace shows a couple’s embrace and is known popularly as ‘The Lovers Statue.’
London and Continental Railways was responsible for the restoration of St Pancras, and it said in the brief for the commission that the sculpture should be romantic, democratic and as iconic as the Statue of Liberty in New York.
It is intended to evoke the romance of travel through the depiction of a couple locked in an amorous embrace. When the artist Paul Day created the work, he wanted to show a meeting of minds as well as a physical connection.
‘The Meeting Place’ is a 9-metre (30 ft) high, 20-tonne bronze sculpture at the south end of the upper level of St Pancras station. It was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth II at the reopening of the station in 2007. It is reported to have cost £1 million and was installed as the centrepiece of the refurbished station.
The work is modelled on the sculptor Paul Day and his wife. Day’s high-relief sculptures in terracotta, resin and bronze have been exhibited widely in Europe and his work is known for its unusual approach to perspective.
His other major works include the Battle of Britain Monument on the Victoria Embankment in London, the Iraq and Afghanistan Memorial in Victoria Embankment Gardens, and ‘An Urban Comedy’, a long terracotta frieze in the Royal Galleries of Saint-Hubert in Brussels.
A high-relief frieze was added to the base of ‘The Meeting Place’ in 2008. It features images from the history of the Tube and train, including: people queuing on platforms or travelling in carriages; soldiers departing for war and returning injured; and repair works following the 7 July 2005 London bombings. The frieze stirred controversy when it was first put in place, as one panel depicted a commuter falling into the path of a train driven by the Grim Reaper.
Day said the piece to be in a ‘tragi-comic style’ and believed it was ‘a metaphor for the way people’s imaginations ran wild.’ But he revised the frieze before the final version was installed, and replaced that panel.
The interesting details in the frieze include sunglasses reflecting commuters at the station, a ‘bag lady’ with and her dog, a woman checking her phone over the shoulder of her lover, and a family waving their loved ones off to war.
Paul Day studied at art schools in Colchester and Dartington, and completed his training at Cheltenham in 1991. He now lives in a village near Dijon with his French wife Catherine. Their Anglo-French relationship is an explicit and repeated theme in his work, and their embrace in the Meeting Place stands as a metaphor for the role of St Pancras as the terminus of the rail link between England and France.
One critic singled out The Meeting Place as ‘a very good example of the crap out there.’ Another dismissed it as ‘barely a work of art.’ Day accepted a ‘lot of people will no doubt detest it because it is not violent or controversial,’ and admitted ‘some will say it is a chocolate box sculpture.’
Despite these harsh criticisms from major figures in the art world, the statue has become popular with the public. The World’s Most Romantic Spots by the Lonely Planet in 2011 said the statue was a key reason for describing the station as one of the most romantic meeting places in the world.
‘The Meeting Place’ stands beneath a replica of the huge St Pancras clock, a work of art in itself. The original clock, with a diameter of 5.15 metres (16 ft 9 in), was said to be the largest clock at any railway station in England, with the hand 4 ft 5 in long and the minute hand 7 ft 3 ins Like all the clocks at St Pancras, the original clock was made by John Walker of Cornhill, London, and the clock dial was made of slate. The present replica was made by Dent with Smith of Derby.
Close-by is the larger-than-life statue by Martin Jennings of the poet Sir John Betjeman, who led the campaign to save St Pancras Station and the Chambers from demolition in the 1960s.
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