The Contemporary Without Art

Raymond Mason’s ‘Forward!’, Centenary Square, Birmingham 1991 (destroyed 2003)

©David Patten 2011 [v4 29.03.2011]

Note: unless otherwise identified all quoted texts are from either the Public Art Commissions Agency Archive at
Birmingham City University, or ‘At Work in Paris: Raymond Mason on Art and Artists’, Thames & Hudson, 2003.
Detailed sources and additional content at http://raymondmason.wordpress.com/.

1. Artist’s Brief – Description of the Art Work

“Figurative sculpture cast in stratified polyester resin...treated with polyurethane paint.”

400cm high X 350cm wide X 850cm long

2. Introduction

“Fascinating like a procession of clouds, the ocean waves, the diabolical dance of flames, a crowd by
its human significance, transcends all these to attain its drama”.

The crowd that jostled so uncomfortably on its “climb-up” towards Birmingham’s new International Convention
Centre ignored too easily the social and cultural differences between its chief characters. The ‘empire-ism’ of the
Chamberlains juxtaposed so casually with “the coloured doctor” and “not forgetting a young Pakistani couple,
bringing a good deal of grace to our city”. The “industrial workers and workshop craftsmen” and the “stalwart
blacksmith” divorced from the essential backstory of toil and turmoil, strike and strife, that perhaps gave some
meaning to “the doings of humble folk, les petites gens”.

History is a naming process. When the task of research becomes too demanding, the unrecorded nameless are
simply the “anonymous crowd [that] disappears with the mists of smoke and...the past, you see”. And that
ambition for an art “of a mind hungry for grandeur and humanism” gets lost between “pleasing everybody” and
“this red brick town which, in my eyes when I was a boy, was so beautiful.”

‘Forward!’ was the flat-cap-tugging Birmingham that respected its betters and feared any greater uncertainty than
that of paying the rent and putting food in its mouth. Instead of being forward-facing, the city, as portrayed, was
a history of its constituent parts in uncontested relationship (arts and labour directed by civic paternalism in the
service of capital).

But this is Raymond Mason, the artist who drew the May ’68 demonstrations in the 13e arrondissement and who
lived above the (‘metro-boulot-dodo’) poet Pierre Béarn’s ‘Librairie du Zodiaque’ in Paris. The artist friend of
Giacometti, Balthus, and the other post-War greats of Paris. The artist who had so elegantly expressed ‘The De-
parture of Fruits and Vegetables from the Heart of Paris’ in 1969, and explored “[t]he ‘spectacle’ of the street” so
successfully in ‘The Crowd’ bronzes for both New York and Paris a few years earlier.

The artist who pleaded for a “maximal art”, an art of “complexity and multiplication” deserving of “long, long
examination”. Instead, ‘Forward!’ was “the Lurpak sculpture” (“because it appeared to be carved out of butter”
- Birmingham Post 19.02.2010) that missed its moment in Birmingham’s regeneration agenda of the early 1990s.
And Mason became the artist “who regrettably proved that forward thinking can lead to backward behaviour”
(Birmingham Post 19.02.2010).

3. A Work of Art

“...a work of art in the public domain is seldom perceived and debated as a ‘thing in itself’, a self-con-
tained entity... The modernist stance has been abandoned, with critical discourse focusing [instead]
on the setting and on the real, or assumed, responses of the public.” [Halina Taborska: ‘Current Issues in
Public Art, Roehampton Lectures’ 1998]

At the time of its unveiling, ‘the Lurpak sculpture’ was the centre piece of Birmingham’s new Centenary Square, so
called to mark the anniversary of Birmingham gaining its City status in 1889. Centenary Square was a quick win
flagship project in the ‘City Centre Design Strategy’ (incorporated in the Unitary Development Plan in 1993) that
came out of the 1988 ‘Highbury Initiative’ proposal to reconfigure Birmingham’s city centre as a connected se-
quence of public squares with improved pedestrianised links.

Although the ‘City Centre Design Strategy’ provided a coherent urban design vision for how Birmingham might
raise its image as an international city and major European destination, it was, essentially and beyond the more
obvious rush to attract new investment, an aesthetic response lacking any real content.

This lack of real content carried through into the commissioning of Raymond Mason’s ‘Monument for Centenary
Square’. Whilst the new city-building agenda was informed by a singular ‘politics of vision’ (to do with reversing
economic decline and resolving other structural failings), it did not begin to point at what the new Birmingham was
about.

4. Forward

“The city’s known as “Forward” –

A motto that means well:
‘Tis that what makes them anxious”
[John Bryan: ‘Cable Car’s Farewell’ circa 1911]

In taking the city’s motto as the title for his ‘Monument for Centenary Square’, Raymond Mason was attempting to
fill the content void left by the city’s leaders, planners and regeneration advisers. The task was to identify what
constituted ‘Forward’ in the new Birmingham projected into the 21st century.

Mason failed to deal with this question and, early on in his presentation to the City Council’s NEC/ICC Committee
in early 1988, he clearly demonstrates this failure:

“Whatever ambitions one entertains for the future of the city, whatever pride can be found in the
present, it is impossible to forget our glorious past when for a moment in world history we were
unique.”

The future is entertained, there is pride in the present, but it is the past (“our glorious past”) that would become
the content for his ‘Monument for Centenary Square’. It is only the past that has “direct appeal to the public
because it speaks in terms of human sentiment.”

So whilst the overall form of the monument “would climb up at an exciting slant accelerating the movement
‘Forward’”, its iconography would be drawn from personal memory and a few days research in the City’s Archives.

Of course, this was a strategy that risked falling short of expectation. If a city’s history, its myths and meaning,
are subjected to constant review and re-interpretation, what chance that a city’s future story can be identified,
captured and recognised in a single art work based on memory and research? Certainly, the new city image as
“Europe’s Meeting Place” wasn’t to be found in ‘the Lurpak sculpture’.

5. Backward

“A major work is a totality. A great theme fires the artist’s first thoughts. More often than not,
literary and historical because in this way he has precise knowledge by which he can deal – and by
history I mean the moment lived by man, this very day, as well. Throughout all the vicissitudes and
difficulties of creating the work over months and perhaps – but nowadays rarely – years, this theme
will be held up and maintained like a standard in battle, until it can be delivered in material form to
public appreciation.”

In an interview on the BBC West Midlands’ Ed Doolan Show (07.08.1991), Mason confirmed his thinking: “What I
am saying is that Birmingham has a present, will certainly have a future but most decidedly had a past. For one
moment in world history we were unique, at the beginning of the nineteenth century we were the first industrial
city in the world and it’s absolutely essential that Birmingham should not forget it. They shouldn’t forget this red
brick town which in my eyes when I was a boy was so beautiful.”

Raymond Greig Mason was born in Birmingham in 1922. His childhood memories of the “red brick town” were of
“a general flow of happiness” found in “the simplest of working-class areas” (Lee Bank), the “all red-brick terraces”
with “common courtyard and the common lavatories and wash house” opposite “a giant red-brick factory” (the
outputs of which he never discovered). He attended the (red-brick with decorative blue-brick) George Dixon
Secondary School on City Road before attending (the red-brick with terracotta detailing) Birmingham School of
Arts and Crafts on Margaret Street.

After volunteering for the Royal Navy at the start of World War 2, and then, after being invalided out in 1942,
short periods in London and Oxford, Raymond Mason made his permanent home in Paris a few months after his
father’s death in 1945. Raymond Mason was a Birmingham artist, but he was also the Birmingham artist in exile
for whom “the symbolic process that fixes” is banished as all links are cut [Nikos Papastergiadis: ‘Modernity as
exile, the stranger in John Berger’s writing’ 1993].

Mason’s first significant return to Birmingham was in 1958, to “sell the furniture and close up the [family] house”
 following the death of his mother at the start of that year. He noted that, “My mother was dead and clearly the
city I knew was dying. Around me the bulldozer had cleared away the houses I had known. Looking down Lee
Bank Hill, all was waste ground.” On the last night of this visit, he commented: “All day it had rained but now the
clouds rolled away and suddenly a great sunset lit up the redbrick city. With emotion, I realised that when that sun
sank, the moon of modern times would rise and all would be white concrete.”

With the death of his mother, Mason saw the death of his childhood “red brick town”, and, living in Paris with no
reason to return, he missed Birmingham’s first post-War redevelopment. The redevelopment that was very much
about white concrete and the “my kind of town” that took away Telly Savalas’ breath in the famous 1979 ‘Quota
Quickie’. As ‘Kojak’ said, Birmingham is “exciting, the modern buildings reflect its position as the nation’s indus-
trial powerhouse. You feel as if you’ve been projected into the 21st century.”

Projected into the 21st century. This is the bit of Birmingham’s forward-ness that Raymond Mason didn’t
experience (and nor did Telly Savalas, who recorded his voice over in a London studio). Mason missed the
scorched-earth marriage of engineering and economics that replaced ‘slumdom’ with the “transatlantic city...a
glimpse of the future, the shape of things to come” [Sutcliffe & Smith: ‘Birmingham 1939-1970’] that finally hit
the buffers with the collapse of the city’s manufacturing base (with 29% associated job losses) between 1971 and
1983.

Raymond Mason was in Paris. The city of the Haussmann Plan. All boulevards and controlled facades, city parks,
civic monuments, and public facilities, “the sweep of the Paris scene” so admired by Mason. Like the winning but
unrealised scheme proposed for Birmingham’s new Civic Centre in 1927 by Paris-based architect Maximilian Ro-
manoff.

As Mason said in a letter at the start of 1989, “...a major city demands great formal architecture and planning
which does not condescend to tickle the public in the ribs” and he loathed the “desire to dinky-up” that he felt
characterised the design of Birmingham’s new Centenary Square.

What Mason failed to recognise was that the design for Centenary Square (“moth-eaten lawns” and all) was a
direct consequence of the “worst excesses of bastardized architectural modernism and the failures of utopian
planning” [Parker & Long: ‘The Mistakes of the Past’] so evident in Birmingham’s initial post-War attempt at city-
building in the 1960s and 70s.

This failure to engage with the design rationale for Centenary Square meant that ‘Forward!” became isolated,
simply trapped in the red-brick memories of the artist’s Birmingham childhood and informed only by what art had
been in other times and in other places. Particularly Paris. Did any of this offer enough substance for a centre
piece sculpture in a flagship public square in a city trying to escape its bastardized failures? Possibly not, and not
for the only time did Mason begin to doubt himself:

“I am wondering if my project is really what you would like in Birmingham’s new centre. Certainly its
realism and (I hoped) poignancy is far removed from the generally prevailing decorative style.”

6. “Forward - with a kiss to the past” [drawing notation PA/PR/5/19/86]

“...the radical event of art precipitates a crisis of meaning or, rather, it exposes the void of meaning at
the core of a given social situation, which is its truth.” [Jean Fisher: ‘Francis Alÿs’ 2007]

Mason’s early drawings for the ‘Monument for Centenary Square’ mix the expected nods towards the
Chamberlains, Josiah Mason, and “the founders of the Soho Works themselves” with the “advancement of
Birmingham
people across the ages” disappearing backwards “in the mists of smoke and time.” For Mason, “historical time”
was to become “sculptural space” in the “double axis of the mounting present and the diminishing past.”

There were also self-indulgent arty moves that acknowledged what, for Mason, constituted “modern art” (de
Chirico, Max Ernst and Man Ray) and allowed him, in the figure of the “stalwart blacksmith”, to “add the study of
the male nude”. The mysterious “giant red-brick factory” opposite his childhood home found its place, as did (in
what may be a subliminal monument to his own Scottish-born father, a sometime motor mechanic and taxi-driver)
the “age of the motor-car” with something that Noddy may have been familiar with.

Within the crowd climbing towards the future, four individual figures located the sculpture to its setting. A “tuba
player walking towards the Symphony Hall” and “a figure of human comedy [bowing] to the Rep” (which later
became an actress “offering her bouquet”) are the most obvious. But in the “great figure of a man” with raised
hand (facing West towards the new International Convention Centre) and the “Lady of the Arts” (facing East),
Mason may have been attempting to deal with the re-development agenda’s content void.
7. The Raised Left Hand

“Culminating this onward march a great figure of a man, his hand placed on his chest where a
criss-cross of fingers and folds would emphasise the heart [as a] denomination of Birmingham [as]
‘the Heart of England’. His other hand is held aloft where it would capture the regard from all points
of view. The hand, after all, has been employed to as great a use in Birmingham as in any other
famous centre of artistry in the history of the world.”

Whilst the criss-crossing of the hand placed on the chest may be an obvious reference to Birmingham’s geographic
location (and the importance of canal and railway networks to the city’s rise to prominence in the late 18th and
throughout the 19th centuries), the raised left hand has particular meaning in the history of city-building.

As he said in his original proposal, “throughout his career” Mason had “made a special study of the hand”. A 1967
dated drawing of his left hand (a right handed artist can only draw his left hand) and a slightly later bronze
sculpture of the same hand are precedents for the raised left hand of the “giant at the front” of ‘Forward!’.

Although Mason referred to the raised hand of ‘Forward!’ as “the industrial hand”, it showed none of the wear and
tear or damage or deformity one would expect to see on a hand engaged in Birmingham’s industrial manufacturing
and “artistry”. Instead, it is the left hand of the sculptor, studied “throughout his career”, the inheritance from his
own blacksmith forebears.

This “industrial hand” is shown with splayed fingers. It is an open hand, and, as such, should be read in the
context of Le Corbusier’s ‘Open Hand’ at Chandigarh, India.

“This sign of the Open Hand is a sign of peace and of reconciliation,” Le Corbusier said. “The Open Hand is meant
to receive the created riches, and to distribute them to the peoples of the world. That should be the symbol of our
epoch.” [Peter Blake: ‘Monument to Mankind’]

Le Corbusier’s brief for the Chandigarh project required him to create a new city “free from the fetters of the past”,
something that Mason failed to achieve with ‘Forward!’. But the raised open hand of Mason’s sculpture addressing
the International Convention Centre (“one of Europe’s premier conference and meeting venues” on the site of the
world’s first purpose-built exhibition hall, Bingley Hall 1850) has some correspondence with Le Corbusier’s “com-
mon man’s monument, a place where people could come, discuss the problems of the city and work out solutions.”
[‘Raise your hand!’, Indianexpress.com 04.01.2010]

Whilst Le Corbusier’s ‘Open Hand’ monument at Chandigarh has been closed to “the common man” for the last 25
years (because of Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code which forbids “unlawful assembly of more than five
people” in the north of the city), it is possible that Raymond Mason’s use of the raised open hand was in hope that
the new ICC would be “a place where people could come, discuss the problems of the city and work out solutions.”
Such an aspiration would be in keeping with Mason’s humanism and genuine commitment to “the human theme”.

8. Proskuneo

“...you will see there’s a giant woman turning around to throw a kiss to the past. Now she, she’s the
Lady of the Arts you find on the coat of arms.”

The figure of “the Lady of the Arts”, companion to the “stalwart blacksmith” on Birmingham’s Coat of Arms, kneels,
with her back to the ICC, and throws a kiss with her right hand. ‘Proskuneo’ [kuneo = to kiss + pros = toward]
means ‘to throw or blow a kiss, to kiss the hand towards, in token of reverence’ and is one of the two earliest
recorded human gestures (dating back to the ancient Sumerians of the early Bronze Age). It is the same gesture
Marilyn Monroe famously employed in 1956, right hand raised flat to the mouth with eyes directed towards the
intended recipient of the kiss.

The “Lady of the Arts” throws her kiss towards the East, towards the Hall of Memory (which Mason considered
to be “one of the few impressive monuments of Birmingham”), the Library, the City Museum and Art Gallery, the
Council House, and to those districts where the City of a Thousand Trades first took shape.

There is something in Mason’s “Lady of the Arts” that recalls Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Paul Klee’s
‘Angelus Novus’ which shows:

“...an angel looking as though [she] is about to move away from something [she] is fixedly contem-
plating. [Her] eyes are staring, [her] mouth is open, [her] wings are spread. This is how one pictures
the angel of history. [Her] face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, [she]
sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of [her]
feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But
a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in [her] wings with such violence that the angel
can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels [her] into the future to which [her] back is
turned, while the pile of debris before [her] grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
[Walter Benjamin: ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ 1940]
The storm of progress that blows through Birmingham, time and time again, has never fully engaged with the
“question of contemporary art” (and certainly not in the way an artist like Raymond Mason would have hoped for)
but has, instead, entertained only “the contemporary without art” to be found in “the pile of debris” that “grows
skyward”.

“The work must be half-sculpture, half-public. This doesn’t at all mean that the artistic contribution
has to be minimalized or watered down. I have never sought, in my sculptures destined for the gen-
eral public, to make a ‘popular’ art. Art must give lasting satisfaction, permanent spiritual nourish-
ment... The work must be riveting and permit this long, long examination. How many contemporary
works respond to this imperative? Almost none. Why? Because it is not a question of contemporary
art, but of the contemporary without art.”

9. “Technique”

“My original model in plaster 1/3rd size would be enlarged by the famous Haligon Studios, enlargers
and casters in synthetic art resins at Brie-Comte-Robert, near Paris. It enlarged for Rodin in his day.
This No. 1 casting house in the world for resins has produced monuments for Miro, Jean Dubuffet and
many others.”

In the chapter on Rodin in ‘At Work in Paris’, Mason describes the Haligon enlarging process:

“At this very moment, one of the machines which was made by Louis Haligon for Rodin’s work in 1895
is enlarging my pieces for two big outdoor sculptures for Washington, D.C. The machine is simple.
Suspended by pulleys and free to move, it consists of a pivoted steel bar with a point near the pivot
which caresses the surface of the model and a second point inscribing a bigger arc at the further end
of the bar which, in the hands of the workman, scratches into a block of dead plaster or clay the larger
version. In truth, it is not a machine but a tool where the craftsman’s skill is paramount. It is said
that, once enlarged, the forms are broadened and generalized.”

‘Forward!’ was cast by Olivier Haligon, the great grandson of Lewis Haligon “who was the principal enlarger of the
‘Statue of Liberty’”. Olivier Haligon is now based in Miami, Florida, where he is casting the head of the ‘Statue of
Liberty’ in a limited edition of twenty-five “in fibreglass...[with a] patina [of] semi gloss paint usually green but can
be customized”, and advertising the opportunity (“Amazingly Realistic! Unique Souvenir!”) to mould “your hand in
just 10 minutes and then cast it for only $180.”

Mason’s original plaster model for ‘Forward!’ (as presented to the City Council’s NEC/ICC Committee in early 1988)
had some of the energy of his drawings of crowds that found sculptural expression (“sudden gashes in the mass”)
in the lively surfaces of ‘The Crowd’ bronzes of the 1960s (now sited in New York and Paris). Probably as a conse-
quence of the enlarging process, the full-sized version of ‘Forward!’ installed at Centenary Square in 1991 retained
none of this surface energy. It did, indeed, look like it had been “carved out of butter”.

Mason continues his description of the Haligon process by saying:

“If...a sculpture is blown up three times, it suffices to step back three times to see the work as it was
originally. Closer to, it looks grosser and, to permit a normal, close examination, the surface should be
entirely reworked by the artist.”

It is unlikely that Mason reworked the surfaces of the full-sized ‘Forward!’ (“grosser can also mean stronger and
Rodin did not rework his surfaces”), but in the cream-coloured, glass fibre, “Lurpak” surfaces of his ‘Monument
for Centenary Square’ Mason had, some how, severed his links to Rodin and Giacometti. He had lost “the actual
drawing and indentation of...surfaces” and, as a consequence, the sense of movement that “occupies space better,
is more alive, more surprising” than mass. “Forward!’ was a mass.

10. “Lusty Boys” and “engulfed in flames”

“...it’s the lusty boys running along the top who will, of course, destroy all the image of the sculpture,
you can’t look at the sculpture seriously and think about the history of Birmingham when you see five
chaps running on the top.”

From the day Centenary Square opened (June 1991), ‘Forward!’ attracted mixed feelings. It was loved and hated
in equal measure. Loved because it was “clearly dedicated in its every inch to Birmingham, its history and its
celebrities”; and hated because of its appearance and the simple fact that it wasn’t made in Birmingham. But
what troubled Mason most were “the lusty boys”. He commented on them on more than one occasion, and,
predicting trouble ahead for his sculpture, advised the City Council to put in place an appropriate security strategy.
Questions on how the sculpture’s material would perform over the long term had been hotly debated during the
commissioning period. In Septmeber 1989, the client side signed-off on the materials Mason was proposing to
use:

“GRP (glass reinforced plastic) is normally relatively resistant to minor damage and it would take a
concerted effort to do anything more serious. The resin is classified as fire retarding, and will only
burn as long as a flame is applied to its surface, that is to say, if an attempt was made to light a small
fire of the surface of the statue a hole would be burned through the resin rather than the entire statue
being engulfed in flames.”

Within its first year, the sculpture had lost a head. In April 1992, Mason wrote (in a letter to Birmingham City
Council), “...how could I imagine that this carefully thought out work would be treated so casually by both citizens
and city officials. Monsieur Haligon and myself will be arriving in Birmingham on Friday May 15th with a new head
to be fitted on the vandalised monument.”

In April 2003, ‘Forward!’ was destroyed by fire. Commenting on the destruction of his sculpture, Mason said [BBC
News 23.04.2003] “I am absolutely staggered. I thought there would be parts we could retrieve. I imagined the
back could be cleaned and painted up and put in some public building to remind people of the sculpture. But, of
course, the whole thing is a total disaster. There is nothing to be saved whatsoever.”

“The destruction of representational images is the destruction of a hierarchy which is no longer

recognized. It is the violation of generally established and universally viable and valid distances. The
solidarity of the images was the expression of their permanence. They seem to have existed forever,
upright and immovable; never before had it been possible to approach them with hostile intent.” [Elias
Canetti:‘Crowds and Power’ 1960]

Four years after ‘Forward!’ was “engulfed in flames” an employee of a nearby souvenir shop was quoted [Sunday
Mercury 03.06.2007] that postcards of the “blaze-wrecked statue [were] still selling like hot-cakes.”

11. The “Slippery Slope”

“We must pull ourselves together. We cannot continue sliding down this slippery slope of intellectual
stupidity.”

The great 19th century industrial cities were a consequence of emergence that accentuated difference. Liverpool
had its docks, Manchester its cotton mills, and Birmingham its ‘Thousand Trades’ at the crossing point of canals
and railway.

Today, city-building is a crazy game of one upmanship in which the biggest, widest, longest, and brightest hog the
foreground to shade out the richer possibilities. We now build thin cities. Thin cities in search of a photo
opportunity. As some old painter (Sir Joshua Reynolds) once said, art which depends for its “existence on...the
fluctuation of fashion, can only be coeval with that which first raised [it] from obscurity.” And such an art is too
inconsequential to get us off the “slippery slope” of Birmingham’s constant re-blanding.

The “Lurpak sculpture” at Centenary Square was probably not Raymond Mason’s finest work. It lacked more than
it had, and it attempted more than it could deliver. It failed to gain the confidence of the City Council, and on at
least one occasion even its maker lost his nerve in trying to match the depth of art to the thinness of competitive
and speculative city-building.

“But the temptation of the great and the complex, even if this means failing, would be far more salu-
tary in an age which oversimplifies everything.”

The lessons of ‘Forward!’ are, indeed, salutary.

Footnote

It is worth noting that any issues with the content or material of ‘Forward!’ should be seen in the context of Nick
Monro’s 1972 sculpture of ‘King Kong’, commissioned through the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation’s ‘City Sculpture
Project’ and subsequently sited in Birmingham’s Manzoni Gardens. Monro’s 21 foot high painted glass fibre
sculpture (cast by Fantasy Decor of Scunthorpe) of the fictional film monster was hugely popular despite its
obvious irrelevance to Birmingham. It simply looked good with The Rotunda in the background. Munro’s ‘King
Kong’ was the perfect thin city photo opportunity.

Once the initial sponsorship dried up, Monro’s sculpture was sold (for £3,000) by the City Council (despite a ‘Keep
King Kong’ campaign) to the King Kong Ko (previously the ‘Camp Car Company’) in Camp Hill, and subsequently
 sold on again (for £12,700) to Ingleston Market in Edinburgh. Nearly 30 years after the sculpture first arrived in
Birmingham, the City Council now want to bring back Monro’s ‘King Kong’ despite it having been damaged (bro-
ken arm), “patched-up” and painted, at various times during the intervening period, black, pink, and tartan. It is
currently painted grey and in the ownership of Spook Erections of Penrith, but will not be released back to the city
unless its present owners are granted permission to open a market in Birmingham.

There are lessons to be taken forward equally from Mason’s experience at Centenary Square and King Kong’s suc-
cess at Manzoni Gardens.

©David Patten 29.03.2011 v.4 [4858 words]