Three canal sculptures for the City Road

Three sculptures next to Islington’s City Road Basin remind visitors of the area’s faded but still visible canal cargo heritage.

The City Road Basin was a large cargo-handling “dock” that was constructed next to the Regents Canal and opened in 1820. It quickly became London’s busiest inland cargo-handling site. As with most of the canals, it fell into disuse from the 1950s, and an attempt to fill in the entire dock was successfully opposed in the 1970s.

Although today still visible on the north side of the City Road, what many may be less aware of is that the basin used to extend further south, and although the northern end was saved from being filled in, as a compromise, they lost the southern quarter of the dock. That’s why the City Road still has a hump in the area, as it’s the former bridge over the filled-in basin extension.

In recent years, that southern rump, which had been filled in by the 1980s and used for light industrial warehouses, has been redeveloped again, this time into blocks of flats.

A few years ago, the first of three sculptures by Ian Rank-Broadley commemorating the canal heritage appeared, and more recently, two more were added.

The first shows two men pushing on a dock gate arm, accompanied by their dog who is watching rather than helping. A small sign nearby explains its significance to passersby.

If you head down the steps, you’ll see a modern miniature of the old dock basin, although it is a decorative feature rather than for actual deliveries. Two new sculptures were recently added here.

One next to the water feature shows a canal worker with rope over the shoulder looking up at the two men we just passed.

The main sculpture is in the middle of the mini-park and is supposed to represent one of the horses that used to pull barges along the canals in the days before coal and oil engines replaced them.

There’s something awkward about the placement, and it took ages to figure out what was wrong. It looks temporary as if it was just put there for a while, waiting for the correct location to become available. The base seems to accentuate that, giving the whole thing an appearance that reminded me strongly of the green plastic soldiers that many of us played with as children.

Instead of a small plastic horse, we have a life-sized bronze horse instead.

While artistically, it’s a very fine sculpture, the weird, disconcerting disconnect with its surroundings was oddly unsettling.