Say a prayer for the City’s new Wing

Whilst we City folk pray that the current deal-boom continues, a call is out for a ceremony to mark arrival of the City’s latest artwork. 

City bouyant on a wing and a prayer

It arrived with stealth, a giant diurnal bird of prey that embedded itself this week in the pavement outside our offices at 125 Old Broad Street, only its right wing showing above ground. 

Christopher Le Brun’s “City Wing” (pictured, right) stands around eight metres tall and sets the newly re-glazed office off very well.  It seems a shame not to allude to diurnal or raptors in the title if that’s where the concept came from - it marks the former site of the London Stock Exchange which is, of course, active in daylight hours and is at the top of the City food chain. 

But within sight of Brasserie Blanc, La Bourse and L’Entrecôte, will the Wing provide too much temptation to a budding climber?  Unlike Le Brun’s Wing Column monument to Victor Hugo in St Helier, the City Wing could offer three grades of climb to the light-headed, a challenging South face, a slightly easier Northern aspect with ledges and toeholds, and to the West, a 17-step stairway to heaven, which is where the hapless might well end up. 

Anyway, given Le Brun’s brilliantly creative and fantastic work - he was elected President of the Royal Academy in 2011 - and the effort that went into installing it, surely it deserves a proper blessing after four years in the making, as do those that will no doubt fall from it.  A City chaplain, a prayer book and a wing all in the same frame will also keep the City diarists and sub-editors busy! 

We won’t however be using it much for photo shoots - too easy for clever Charlies to make puns about our prized IPO clients winging it on to the Exchange...!

Julian Bosdet

 


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