London’s Public Art: South of the River by Bernard Schottlander

In 1924 a man was born in Germany. In 1939 he fled to the UK as a refugee. In 1976 he designed a large steel sculpture for London, and on the centenary of his birth, it’s still there.

Bernard Schottlander was a German-born designer and sculptor but fled to the UK in 1939 to escape Nazi Germany. During the war, he worked in a factory as a welder before taking a course in sculpture at Leeds College of Art and subsequently – with the help of a bursary – at the Anglo-French art centre in St John’s Wood.

He studied sculpture for a year and later said that his training as a welder heavily influenced his work.

Bernard Schottlander described himself as an interior designer and an exterior sculptor. Although best known for his interior design lamps, in 1963, he decided to concentrate solely on sculpture. He has several outdoor sculptures around the world, but only one in London.

This is “South of the River”, and you won’t be surprised by the name to learn that it’s on the south side of the river, close to Waterloo station, outside Becket House.

Becket House was built in 1972-74 to a design by the Slovak-born, British-based modernist architect Eugene Rosenberg. The architect then commissioned Schottlander to design a sculpture for the building, looking for something curvy that would contrast with the office block’s granite clad straight lines.

The sculpture was cast by British Steel and installed in March 1976 and given heritage listing protection in 2016.

There’s also a maybe unexpected Africa link in the sculpture – as Schottlander’s inspiration for this piece came from the anthropologist Eva Meyerowitz. Her photographs of ethnographic artefacts included ceremonial earrings worn by the Fulani women of Western Africa – jewellery crafted by the tapping of metal as it is twisted.

However, to my mind, it looks far more industrial, almost like a turbine or propeller in inspiration, but in a good way. The squirrel didn’t comment.