Content area
Full Text
This is a story of modern art. One day, Prue Leith, of posh restaurant and cookbook fame, was driving through Trafalgar Square when she noticed something funny about it. There was an empty plinth on the north corner of the square, opposite the National Gallery. Why was it empty? When were they going to put back whatever used to be up there? Had the statue's head fallen off? Had someone painted an orange bikini on it for a prank? After that first sighting, she could never drive by the spot without the thought erupting again: Had it been a royal? A bard? A symbol of enterprise? An explorer? But the plinth just went on being empty.
I have to confess I had never even noticed the plinth. It was just part of the square. I may have fed pigeons once near it. But I never thought it was odd that there was a statue on one corner of the square; and a place where a statue should be, but wasn't, on the other corner. But then I'm not the kind who would wonder about that stuff.
You'd think Prue Leith wouldn't be either, what with all her sauces to worry about. But the fact is, as well as being a cook, she is a great supporter of the arts, and once she'd been made deputy
| chairman of the Royal Society of the Arts an ancient |
| organisation with a brief to `support art' she started by doing |
something about the enigma of the plinth.
By now, to her at least, the plinth was not quite so much of an enigma. She learnt that when the square was first laid out in 1841, by the architect Charles Barry, his idea was to use the large oblong plinths for `groups of sculptures'. Or maybe, he said, they might be `surrounded by groups of sculpture'. Three years later, on one of the plinths, a statue of George IV went up. That's the one that still stands today. The other plinth, the one still empty, was supposed to have William IV on it. But William IV had died, and hadn't left any provision for the statue in his will; and somehow, there wasn't any will on the part of...