The diversity of work coming in continues to suprise us. We have plaques under way in Russian and Mandarin Chinese and our first order from Australia, for signposts for a miniature railway. Harrods of Knightsbridge have brought us some shop metalwork to refurbish and work has started on a little bandstand for Llandudno, bronze toposcopes for Cheshire & Scotland and war memorials for Twickenham and Bethnal Green.

The National Trust are clearly gearing up for the season as we’re making a great many of their famous ‘Omega’ signs for NT sites all over the UK. I wonder how many Omegas we’ve made since our first one in 1936?

Orders for plaques also continue at a high rate. A certain member of the royal family unveiled one of our plaques last week and will unveil another, 200 miles away, next week!

The people and building commemorated on plaques continue to add to our knowledge of curious things. For example, I’d never heard of a famous ju-jitsu practising suffragette or the inventor of the ’square motion comb’!

May the sun keep shining!

One thing we aren’t short of is interesting work. 2011 was a smashing year for Leander and 2012 is matching it so far. Our workload is the usual mixture of plaques, signs and bronzes with a little Alice-in-Wonderland themed bandstand to create and a Victorian canopy for a Cumbrian property. We also won the commission for the new Bethnal Green Memorial, commemorating the horrific loss of life in WWII when a bomb hit the tube station.

Other challenges include a bronze toposcope for an HLF funded park restoration, textured cast aluminium panels for a theatre facade in the West End and large coats-of-arms for a public school.

No new photographs to hand but will include some in the next news update.

Our first human sundial

A very different project in many ways. We were commissioned by High Peak Community Arts to work with Caroline Chouler-Tissier and a group of local people with learning difficulties to create the sundial. A human sundial uses the ‘human’ as a gnomon, to cast a shadow onto hour discs set in the ground.

The hours and months were designed and carved by the learning difficulties group and cast as ceramics by Caroline. We made all the hour and month frames and installed the whole thing on site.

The pleasure this work generated for all concerned was remarkable and we now have a follow-up commission to create an arch and bench in another part of the borough - and working with a different group of people. This time, the group will create reliefs in clay (with Caroline’s guidance) and we will cast the reliefs in aluminium, as well as fabricating the arch and bench.

Coal Wagon & Canal Crane

This commission came from Groundwork Merseyside and was to create a ’sculptural’ version of a mid-19th century colliery wagon and canal wharf hand crane. Both incorporate authentic details but neither is intended as a replica - more an interpretation.

To create the aged timber look of the crane post and wagon body, we used rough timbers as casting patterns and made new patterns for wheels and other components.

Groundwork Merseyside described the pieces as ‘fantastic’ and the ultimate customer, St Helens Council, were equally pleased.

Footbridge windows

We’ve just completed a large contract to manufacture and install cast opening windows for Eastleigh Station in Hampshire. The footbridge there is a listed structure and replacements for the existing timber windows were only permitted if they matched the original profiles - something that cast metal can achieve!

Installation was completed on schedule recently and we’ll post some photos in the next update.

Heraldry

We’re nearing the end of two heraldic projects - creating relief coats-of-arms and crests. Several designs were cast in bronze and are for the magnificent new gates for Eaton Hall in Cheshire. The gates themselves were made by our old friends Chris Topp & Co.

A large range of oval crests have been made in cast aluminium for Wellington School, again on behalf of our friends Marsh Bros Engineers. Photos next time.

War Memorials

Recently unveiled for Remembrance Day was the very large new bronze WW1 memorial for York. Comprising 6 large panels with 2,270 names, they augment the fine existing stone memorial on which the carved names are wearing away.

Our next memorial projects are a naval mural for Twickenham and the new Bethnal Green Memorial - commemorating the horrendous results of a bomb dropped on the Tube station there in WW2. This memorial will be unusual in that a new typeface has been specially commissioned for the memorial panels.

For the last seven years, it has been inside our works (which fortunately has a 2ft gauge railway) being slowly and systematically restored.

At last, on Friday 12th August, it left for its permanent home on the Apedale Valley Light Rly in Stoke, barely four miles from where it was built! The finishing touches will be applied at its new home.

The

The series, to be shown from Feb 2012 onwards, isn’t about inner city riots or the plunging stock market but the many threats to all kinds of heritage building and the surviving small manufacturers and craftspeople involved in traditional skilled work. John moulded a sign and helped to cast it.

Once filming was finished, Steve Thorpe, our foundry foreman, presented John Craven with ‘one we’d made earlier’.

This Heritage Foundation plaque to Sir Norman Wisdom is the first plaque in the UK (or possibly the world) to be interactive. The chip in the recess at the top can interact with mobile phones or wireless notebook Pcs to take the viewer straight to Norman Wisdom websites.

Further plaques in this series are under way for Joe Meek and Dusty Springfield.

(Unveiled 31st March 2011)

The Frankton Memorial (the ‘Cockleshell Heroes’)

On the 31st March, a very poignant ceremony was held at Pointe de Grave, near Bordeaux to commemorate the unveiling of the Frankton Memorial - a series of bronze plaques on stone monoliths forming a tribute to the heroic efforts of a small group of Marines working at night in canoes launched from a submarine. Details of the ceremony and the history of the ‘Cockleshell Heroes’ can easily be found on the internet.

The bronze panels, incorporating many hand-carved reliefs were cast in CMA1 (a copper-manganese-aluminium alloy) giving a silver finish. See also ‘Feedback from customers’. We are delighted to have played a major part in what was, for many people, a moving occasion and an overdue memorial to the Royal Marines who perished.

Something big in bronze!

A commission we’ve just started is to create a bronze ring 150mm (6″) wide but 25 metres (80 feet) in diameter!! Made up of 40 segments, it will be set in the paving around the new Coventry War Memorial. Some segments will include famous quotations relevant to war and others will incorporate relief poppoes in various arrangements. We also have to supply a series of small plaques commemorating men awarded the V.C. and some long lengths of curved bronze handrails.

Something else big in bronze!

In the same week, we received the go-ahead for a new bronze memorial in York, adjacent to the City Wall. Consisting of 5 very large panels, each with around 450 names, it commemorates all the men of the North Eastern Railway who died in World War I. A third of all NER employees served in some capacity during that horrible conflict. The railway company erected a large and imposing Portland stone memorial but the names are being slowly eroded and the new bronzes will ensure that they are perpetuated. Cross-checking of all available lists has also allowed us to add a few names missed from the original memorial.

Enhancing Weardale

Another March commission was for the design and supply of signs, maps and plaques for the town of Stanhope (’Stannup’ if you’re a local) in the centre of Weardale, Co Durham. Once surrounded by huge limestone quarries, iron, lead and fluorspar mines, Stanhope now looks to tourism, farming and small industries for its future. Local schoolchildren and several local interest groups will all have their say in what we produce.

Bits and pieces

In between all our major projects is a never-ending stream of curious things. As the only foundry in the area, we try to help anyone who needs anything casting. This month, we’ve made human hands, a face mask, window frames for old steam locomotives, tooling for plastic forming and 250 children’s sweets (not edible!). A well-known local confectionery firm uses our little aluminium sweets as patterns for their sugar and jelly creations.

Two major projects received the go-ahead this month:

Building of a replica mid-Victorian barrel-vault canopy for HMS Collingwood in Fareham, Hants. The original had been restored but was demolished by a large vehicle in 2009. The barrel-vault was and will be constructed of cast frames, each with dozens of small shaped openings for the glazing.

The original was constructed by Walter Macfarlane of Glasgow and was designed in this way so that the barrel vault could be achieved using only flat glass - i.e. not glass bent to radius.

Eastleigh Station, Hants

Our commission is to design, make and install 45 cast aluminium windows on the station footbridge. By using cast aluminium, with extruded sections for cills and mullions, we can accurately copy the profiles of the original and life-expired timber windows. It’s a technique we developed very successfully some years ago for a footbridge project in Sussex.

Bronze plaques and planters

A major project during the spring will be the assembly and patination of 50 large (and very solid) cast bronze planters for a street in central London. We have won this contract jointly with a Sheffield company after providing a lot of help to the architects and designers at concept stage.

Other bronze work in hand includes a series of large floor plaques for Anglesey, a 1000mm diam floor bronze for Haltwhistle in Northumberland and locomotive plates for a WW1 steam loco repatriated from Australia.

This month also saw completion of our large project for the Royal Marines in Bordeaux, referred to in an earlier News posting. All the bronze plaques and murals commemorating Operation Frankton (a.k.a. ‘The Cockleshell Heroes’) have now been shipped to France and will shortly be unveiled at an Anglo-French memorial service.

Later this spring we start work on a large new WW1 war memorial with over 2000 names - all employees of a single railway company. During cross-checking of the lists, it was depressing to see how many families were affected by multiple fatalities - brothers, fathers and sons and so on - and how some villages seemed to be hit much harder than others.

Lastly (nothing to do with bronze but I’ve just remembered it!) we are close to finishing a large batch of map units for Gibraltar. Working with Cityscape Maps, we have made 20 free-standing units, each with cast columns and header panels and a large rigid frame to house Cityscape’s full colour map

Another update next month.

Sculpture

Our life-size bronze of Sappho, the Greek poetess, is well under way. Denise Dutton has finished the piece and it’s now ready for moulding - and a superb figure it is! Very shortly it will be ceramic shell moulded and cast in silicon bronze and then it will head for its final home in Letchworth, Herts.  

At the other end of the spectrum are these one hundred angels. They were modelled in plaster by children in Edmonton, London and sent up to us to cast in aluminium. We became quite attached to them but have reluctantly delivered them to the customer!

Signs and plaques

We are currently making a new set of patterns for the familiar National Trust ‘Omega’ signs to suit the new typeface and the slightly modified design they’ve created. The NT have been rummaging in their archives and have established that the very first ‘Omega’ sign was made by us in 1936, which means we’ve been making them continuously for 75 years! When the new signs are in production, the old original patterns will be given to the National Trust Archive and preserved.

The ‘blue plaque’ season is well under way with examples commemorating Kathy Staff, Brian Wilde, Norman Wisdom, Joe Meek, Alfredo Campoli, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, James Tissot, Charlie Drake, Mary Wollstonecraft, Henry Boddington and the original home of Stilton cheese! (If there are names you don’t recognise, try Google).

The Norman Wisdom plaque will be unique - quite different in concept from any other plaque. Look out for an announcement in March.

We’ve also just delivered the first of the new Manchester City Council plaques. These are engraved bronze with the lettering and coat-of-arms infilled in coloured vitreous enamels.