This wonderful Romanesque entrance doesn't lead into a cathedral but to my favourite London building, the Natural History Museum, on Cromwell Road. The temporary barriers don't enhance the appearance, but are sometimes necessary for crowd control in a building which has almost five million visitors each year.
I was first taken to the Natural History Museum when I was just five or six and I fell in love with the building before we even got inside. The exterior of the building is covered with statues, gargoyles and plaques of creatures which were hand-modelled and then cast in terracotta. I was fascinated by the plaques around the gates which depict mice and squirrels.
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Plaque depicting three mice on a gatepost
outside the main entrance. |
No creature is too insignificant, everything from mice and beetles to wolves and sabre-toothed tigers are sculpted.
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| Pterodactyl plaque on the roof |
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Large statue of a Sabre-toothed cat
on the West tower, stylised to appear
heraldic - the head was cast separately |
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Small plaque of a crab on a mullion between
lower ground floor windows |
The designs were individually sketched by Alfred Waterhouse, the Liverpool architect who was responsible for the whole building. His sketches were then sculpted and cast by a firm of terracotta manufacturers Farmer & Brindley. The named sculptor is M. Dujardin,
his first name was possibly Oscar or Hubert. He is thought to have been French but little is now known about him.
The building's two wings depicted different groups of creatures, those ornamenting the exterior of the West wing were extinct, those on the East wing were, at the time they were modelled, still surviving. Some larger sculptures had to be cast in more than one piece and certain creatures were given heraldic stylisation.
Today the building is in a much better state than when I first saw it. The exterior was cleaned of a century's worth of London soot and grime in the 1970's, I remember it as being all black. Now the detailed terracotta can be enjoyed in all its glory.
This squirrel is feasting on fat balls, which most of the birds love too. There is usually a backbird or pigeon on the ground below the feder, picking up all the scraps which the squirrel drops. The smaller birds avoid the squirrels.
In limestone caves stalactites can take hundreds of years to grow to the size of these hanging above the platform at Sowerby Bridge station in Calderdale. On concrete they can grow hundreds of times faster. Rainwater mixes with calcium compounds in the concrete mix to form a calcium hydroxide solution. This runs over and through the concrete to form calcium carbonate where it comes into contact with the air. This solidifies into white staining and, where the solution drips, stalactites.
