Postcard from Winchester

The Christmas market, a feature of many European towns, as indeed are markets.  English markets are, traditionally, the place you go to buy fresh veg and knock-off DVDs, most other shopping taking place in the supermarket or on-line.  There is, however, a growing taste for Christmas Markets that may or may not be linked directly to a growing taste for hot sausage and mulled wine from November onwards.  If Sainsbury’s had discovered in 1974 that all you needed to keep customers coming back was to serve them alcohol and hot sausage while they shopped, the world might be a very different place, with lots less Tesco in it.

Birmingham has an enormous Christmas market.  The press used to have an annual story of reporting that the council has re-branded Christmas as ‘Winterval’, however, realising that a) nobody actually believed this for a second and b) even if they did, nobody cared, the press now report annually that Birmingham’s German Market is causing friction because it takes trade away from the rest of the traders in Birmingham.  I don’t know if this is true but I can make an assumption – it’s not.  This assumption is made not on the number of times I have visited Birmingham’s Christmas Market (once, I had a hot sausage, it was lovely) but on the number of times I have visited Christmas markets in general both here and in Europe and, unless Birmingham’s resident traders get rid of all of the stock they sell for the other eleven months of the year and stock wooden Christmas tree decorations, scented candles, warm wine or hot sausage, then I really don’t see that the German Market is going to be taking an awful lot of trade away from the Bull Ring.

Winchester has a Christmas Market, and it’s well worth a visit, also obviously the opinion of everyone that lives in the South of England.  Staying for the weekend in the centre of the city, I was lucky enough to be able to visit early in the morning and late in the evening and to get there on foot.  It was charming, it was lively and if you wanted either scented candles or wooden Christmas tree decorations, it was the place to be.  I’m not sure it would have had quite the same charm if you had arrived after ten o’clock, failed to get parked, eventually got parked, walked to the Christmas Market and discovered a crowd roughly the size of the ones normally associated with the overthrowing of despots, but tetchier.

Winchester though is an exceptionally charming town and this year, as well as having that extra jingle-scented sparkle that comes with the season, there was an added attraction.

‘Sound II’ is a sculpture by Anthony Gormley that stands in the crypt of Winchester cathedral.  The crypt itself is devoid of decoration; white stone, with Normal arches.  Apart from the statue it is unremarkable except for having that sense of peace that buildings that measure their span in millennia acquire.  It is, however, prone to flooding and when there has been rain in the chalk hills surrounding Winchester, then a couple of weeks later the crypt first becomes damp, then wet, then home to a foot or two of standing water.

Which Sound II stands in, the figure upright and holding a bowl, listening to the sound of his soul, standing up to his knees in water.

I have never been anywhere quite like it.  The sense of quiet, of stillness, is quite extraordinary, as people automatically either lower their voices or edit anything unnecessary out of their conversation.  One could stand and stare for hours, or do the next best thing and take many photographs to look at later.

Above ground, the Christmas Market is hustle, bustle, and in fairness charming if busy, with the shopkeepers resident in posh garden sheds looking for all the world like elves running an arts and craft business.  Below ground, silence and stillness.  And all around, people moving from shop to shop and stall to stall, looking for a gift that will make a loved one’s face light up on Christmas Day, or at least a hot sausage.

One and Other

If you live in the city, you’re surrounded by statues. Look around you, at the angels and the dragons, at the lions and the unicorns. Clinging onto the corners of buildings, adorning arches, winding sinuously around pillars and porticos, so much part of the architecture that we no more notice them than we would a door or window. No wonder they look down on us.

If you live in the countryside, even the smallest hamlet, then you surround, rather than are surrounded by, statues. Don’t believe me? Go to the church, every village has one. There in the guttering, that chap with the spout in his mouth? On there, right up in the vault of the ceiling, a carving of the priest who underpaid the masons, with his cock up the bishop’s arse or something. Medieval masons may have been master craftsman, but their sense of humour was anything but subtle.


Any town will have a statue of some worthy, normally standing on a plinth, normally looking constipated, which is as close as a sculptor can get to ‘noble’ if he’s not Michelangelo. Still, even if the statue is constipated, the pigeons normally are not.

The Victorians loved a statue. Usually of Queen Victoria. Under the Victorians, Civic Art made its mark on the landscape of Britain, well, on the landscape of its market squares anyway. Like the Romans before them, what the rich and powerful really thought would enhance any spot was a bloody big statue of themselves. This is why there are so many statues of men with beards looking constipated, often pointing at things just out of frame, like bronze or marble catalogue models.

The other way to be commemorated was to die heroically in the service of your country, hopefully leaving behind a country named after you, or the Monarch of the time, and a kill ratio of 1,000 natives to one Englishman.

Times changed and as this century progressed statues of people faded from fashion as abstract sculpture became the civic art of choice. This was for two main reasons. The first was that instead of one person making the decision about the funding and erection (snigger) of a statue of, usually, himself, town councils were now responsible. A body of men and women who didn’t even like one another, let along unify in their admiration of somebody long enough to have them cast in bronze. The second reason was that in the late half of the twentieth century, the abstract embodiment of ideas was popular, especially if that idea was ‘ugliness’ and ‘cheapness’.

All that has now changed. Somehow, statues of people have become popular again. More than that, they are recognised as important. It probably started with Anthony Gormley’s ‘Angel of the North’ when, as a nation, we took one look at something that we were supposed to resent the hell out of and…fell in love. The Angel of the North is probably the most instantly recognisable landmark in Britain after the London Eye, Stonehenge and Big Ben. It will probably remain so until the Kelpie Heads in Scotland are finished off.

Trafalgar Square has some excellent statues. There are the Landseer lions, which are staggeringly beautiful and there’s Nelson himself, of course. Then there’s the fourth plinth. I think it’s a monument to Britishness itself that the fourth plinth has remained vacant, because nobody can agree what to put on it. It took the visionary Mayor of London ken Livingstone to decide to have many temporary exhibits on it instead of a single statue (although one of Ken’s not a bad idea).


By far the finest piece of work to inhabit the plinth to date was the statue of Alison Lapper. It had everything, it was beautiful, with curves like a Henry Moore, it was modern, yet perfectly at one with the rest of the statues on the square, especially at one with Nelson because both were statues of disabled people. It was also possibly the most serene piece of sculpture I’ve ever seen.

For the next 100 days the fourth plinth is occupied by a different person every hour. This is Anthony Gormley’s ‘One and Other’ project, where people drawn from a lottery can stand on the plinth for an hour and do, almost anything really, as long as it’s not illegal (bets on whether we go a week before the first proposal?).

It’s not the first time that ordinary people have been used to create art and it won’t be the last but it is the most important. This is happening right in the centre of Trafalgar Square and will live on in, well, how many tourist images? Millions?

It turns the statue into the statme. People will get on that plinth and if they have something to say they will say it, and if they don’t, well, that’s okay, most statues don’t say much.

The chap I saw seemed to be shouting about something, in full Town Crier’s rig. I don’t know what he was shouting about, I didn’t unplug my iPod (best of ELO, very good) and that, I think, is what it’s all about. As soon as a piece of art goes on display it no longer belongs to the artist, it belongs to whoever is looking at it. The artist may be trying to say something but if the viewer wants to misinterpret it, that’s their prerogative. Which is why you may have people going up there to make a point about worthy causes, but the judgement will be made about their hair or why somebody carrying a little bit too much weight would choose to wear that outfit. Think the human race is not that shallow? Somewhere out there I’m sure ‘Plinthwatch’ has started and I’m also sure that ‘Plinthbabes.com’ has already been registered.