Public Sculpture at The Terrace, Manor Royal: ‘SUN & CROWS’

March 2023

Client: Manor Royal BID / Steve Sawyer – Executive Director

Artists: Fire & Iron Limited (Designed by Lucy Quinnell; made by Tom Quinnell & Giles Clarke)

Project Description

Commissioned in lockdown by Manor Royal BID from local artist-blacksmiths Fire & Iron, the new sculpture features dramatic crows in flight around a rising golden sun.

Its themes are many and complex, but the overarching sense is one of energy and hope.

It is designed very specifically for its site, reflecting the area’s rich human history, and forming a whole ‘picture’ when viewed against the ever-changing sky, framed by the seasonally bare or leafy branches of trees which have been planted in recent years at Manor Royal. The placename ‘Crawley’ means ‘crows in a clearing in woodland’, and the combination of trees and grassy open areas with this new artwork brings this ancient origin back into a modern setting.

The sculpture is made from four different metals and finished in various ways to achieve distinct textures and colours.

It is part of a rolling programme of thoughtful enhancements carried out by Manor Royal BID to ensure that the landscape is a pleasant and interesting place to work and visit.

Artist’s Statement

“There was something intangibly special about this project from the outset.

Looking back, the initial discussions took place at a hugely surreal time for the world. There was nothing familiar at all about the early stages of this commission – Zoom and Teams meetings were the new order of the day, and at our very first screen encounter with Steve Sawyer (Executive Director of Manor Royal BID) we struggled with technology and ‘backgrounds’, and had to retreat from our office and forge to a room in our ancient house, where we balanced a laptop on a box.

As Steve spoke from his modern office about replicating the flat shiny birds we had produced for a past public artwork in Crawley, a real and very large crow was pecking and star-jumping at the leaded-light window just behind the computer to get out attention. Distracted, we finally gave in and abandoned any hope of sustaining the professionalism we had prided ourselves on pre-2020. Steve immediately revealed himself as a man of great empathy and humour, and when I pointed out that “as it happens” the placename ‘Crawley’ means ‘crows in a clearing in woodland’, he was immediately open to my new notion that it might unexpectedly be crows who would quite literally inspire the bird forms within the sculpture. I like very much that a real crow was at that first meeting and so strongly influenced the direction of things. The same crow is still around (and now with his family) – I must remember to thank him with some good food.

I was relieved that the themes Steve briefed us with related in part to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Our small craft business had been hugely impacted, as of course had major sophisticated business centres like Manor Royal BID and the huge international hub that is Gatwick Airport. Steve spoke compassionately about the impact on people. We - and people we knew - had by then lost friends, colleagues and family as events unfolded. I had for some months felt uncomfortable that no-one seemed to be emotionally acknowledging the deaths and the trauma, beyond watching the numbers rise and fall and talking about the economics of it all. I remember seeing online footage of communities in other countries gathering silently and safely in town squares to reflect on it all, or banging black posts into beaches to represent those lost, each with a ribbon blowing in the breeze, forming a spectacle not unlike that of lichen-covered gravestones stretching out across a British country churchyard. We seemed, nationally, to be missing the humanity and the importance of contemplation, beauty and ceremony in tough times. Here was the project I selfishly needed, in many ways; a chance to express and convey those feelings about the human ability to survive and create and uplift without shying away from the darker aspects of our history and our predicament. Soberingly, every single one of us in our little ironworking team needed hospital treatment during the pandemic. Our site is a residue from the Black Death of the 1340s (our house pre-dates that), a survivor isolated after the rest of the village was wiped out, and it is impossible not to make a comparison. I think it’s fair to say that while we were making this artwork, we developed a growing sense of gratitude and a greater sense of the layers and layers of people who have been through all kinds of similar challenges on the same landscapes before us. It felt lovely having the golden sun from the top of the sculpture sitting so patiently in our workshop this winter, gleaming radiantly and being exactly the symbol of light and optimism that we had intended it to be; and this piece more than any other I can think of in my career contains a spirit of generations, and of the passing on of skills and knowledge to younger ones. My son Tom made and installed it, along with our young colleague Giles, and the crane that lifted it into place on site is owned and operated by my late work colleague’s son. This all has a very human rhythm. It feels right.

I love connections, particularly those involving history and ecology. The local history around the Manor Royal location is rich and wonderful. I have already talked about the placename. Close by is ‘Forge Wood’. I am descended from Henry Gratwicke, born just south of Crawley in 1420, as is my son Tom who built this sculpture; we are made of many Sussex families, both lords of manors and the dirt poor who Simon Jenkins so brilliantly described as “those who sowed, reaped but mainly starved”. Our Quinnell family were ironworking in Sussex and Surrey from the 1400s, and we still are - Anglo-Saxon surname intact - but in between one destitute Quinnell left Sussex for India (faced with a choice of ship or poorhouse) and his descendants returned in the 1800s with new Indian, African and American DNA, and picked up the ironworking again where their ancestors had left off; we are now firmly embedded in Leatherhead and Redhill, but seeing the planes come and go all day long resonates…

When Tom was at primary school, he did an interesting homework project tracing the River Mole upstream to its source. It flows past the ridge our forge is on (where people were already settled in the Iron Age, leaving earthworks and a gold coin, and where archaeologists have recently revealed ancient ironfounding activity from an era as yet undetermined), and we are heavily involved in conservation work on one of its islands and two of its tributaries. I recall our surprise at finding that its source was so close to Gatwick Airport. Ecology is all about connections and wildlife corridors – we obviously transported this sculpture by road, but as we join more and more dots between our site and Manor Royal, it is almost as if we simply sent it upstream!

Crows are enigmatic and clever. They are magnificent and feisty. They also have that glorious sense of shade about them – a dark side. They make me think of the ploughed chalk fields of the South Downs; of old, old Britain; of literature; of folksongs, myths and legends; of gorgeous old black and white wood engravings. In many ways, they are as far from a modern corporate setting as one could imagine, but in this instance they are so relevant and perfect. I am incredibly grateful to Steve Sawyer for his enthusiasm for the serendipitous shift from generic bird form to characterful crow (he has been a dream client, allowing us to think flexibly and to be inventive, but also making things happen and ensuring we had all the logistical help we needed; the numerous challenges in bringing a seemingly simple physical structure in a public space to fruition are difficult to appreciate unless one lives them – it’s easy to have good ideas but always much harder to implement them. This is a happy example of imaginative big business looking out for small business and keeping older trades and different ways of working alive and visible for the good of all). Our work has become more and more like book illustration in recent years, and it shifts increasingly away from the clean and abstract installations and towards the pictorial and the Romantic. The crows for me represent that connection we all have with our long and difficult but atmospheric human past; with our ancestors and with our land, and with all that we share that land with. Birds, strong and healthy, with their petrol-coloured plumage, flocking energetically and a little chaotically around a refulgent rising sun. Life goes on.

It feels wonderful to finally put these birds in their ‘clearing in woodland’, with trees planted by Manor Royal BID and thriving around them. I hope people like them – whether they smile as they simply see birds flying up around a sun (as if someone has just clapped their hands at the edge of a field), or whether they see more than that and take time to make their own personal connections (people always find connections we hadn’t made – public art involves and evolves…). My greatest wish is that someone stressed with workload or struggling with personal circumstances might just glance out of a window, or walk past, or sit with a sandwich close by, and feel a little restored by seeing the sculpture. We know that public art lifts people and places – it’s been our job for many decades – and at a time when a great deal in built environments is breaking down and intricacy in anything new is so often sacrificed, hats off to Manor Royal BID for aiming so boldly for well-being and an environment rich in high quality, detail and meaning.”

- Lucy Quinnell

Our thanks to Manor Royal BID and Steve Sawyer

– and to Waterman Group; Shawn Grantham; Blastreat; Cirrus Laser; Structural Steels; Kenward Groundworks & Plant Hire; Calder Metal Spinning.