The art of street furniture

It was possible to stand in the middle of the road during the lockdown without being run over. In Willow Place, near Victoria Station, I crouched over a narrow grating of stout grey iron, and caught a glimpse of light reflected from moving water deep below, as though at the bottom of a well. This was the River Tyburn, on its way from Hampstead via Buckingham Palace to the Thames.

During the endlessly sunny lockdown days, I wandered the streets near my office in Victoria. The bright unpeopled silence (like a landscape by de Chirico) brought to my attention details unnoticed before. With all the galleries closed, this was street art.

Hidden rivers are romantic, and commuters are often astonished to learn that the fat green-painted iron pipe above their heads, crossing the tracks of the District Line, is the River Westbourne. But the interest for me in that grating in Willow Place (beneath which is more of a sewer than a river) is the ironwork from which it is made.

Iron provides beautiful and durable furniture for the street. ‘Look up!’ said John Betjeman in a good piece of advice to lovers of architecture, but for the past few years I have also been looking down, particularly at coal plates. These are the cast-iron covers for coal holes that for 170 years or so have been set into the pavement above cellars. Like the ironwork of drain-gratings these are not rusty affairs.

Coal plates have their beauty, though the geometric patterns (with the names of the makers or ironmongers in relief) were incised, not for the sake of art, but to stop pedestrians slipping on them. A medical student called Shephard Taylor sketched 150 patterns in 1863 (published in a booklet called Opercula), and some are still to be seen today.