“Salford was workaday but optimistic and go-ahead, a place where technology would be the future..
.. My Minute Men brought the atmosphere of the stars and space travel with them – to show the way.” William Mitchell, Self-Portrait: The Eyes Within (2013).
The above quote encapsulates the spirit in which the architectural sculptor and designer William Mitchell’s bold concrete trio of ‘Minute Men’ sculptures was conceived. They appear both futuristic and ancient, revelling in their modernity at the same time as acknowledging a deep cultural heritage through the incorporation of Aztec-style imagery.
Installed outside a new building for Salford Technical College in 1966, they face onto Pendleton, an area that, like other areas of inner-city Salford, was in the process of being transformed from an old Edwardian and Victorian cityscape into a planned environment of high-rise, high-density blocks of flats aimed at creating new ways of living. Such was the ‘Minute Men’’s impact at their time that, on arriving to open the new building in June 1967, Prince Philip famously proclaimed: ‘What the hell is that?’
Sited close to the main A6 road that runs into central Manchester, each piece is subtly distinguished by the use of coloured aggregate to give it individual character, and carefully positioned by Mitchell so their faces catch the sun at certain times of day. At the same time, the use of moulds to create texture and the inclusion of mosaic detail invites prolonged and repeated exploration close-up by those who are regular visitors to the site: its staff and students.
Inside the building, too, Mitchell designed a large textured sculptural wall. On its opening day, university dignitaries lined up to greet Prince Phillip beneath this playful backdrop; in a contemporary photograph, the solemn uniformity of these institutional figures, in black suits and matching white pocket squares, is in marked contrast with the abstracted expanse of swirling shapes, amidst which the viewer can pick out recognisable features such as sun beams, architectural columns and strange faces.
Despite this apparently odd juxtaposition, Mitchell was a particularly apt choice for an establishment specialising in technical education. Throughout his career he demonstrated a commitment to bringing art to the places in which people lived, worked, shopped, socialised and were educated, from schools, hospitals and housing estates to markets and libraries, as well as corporate commissions for office blocks and hotels.
At Manchester University, for example, William Mitchell collaborated with the practice BDP to create sculptural panels in pink-grey concrete which clad the new Humanities Building of 1964, creating a sense of warmth and liveliness.
As well as collaborating with architects and developers, Mitchell’s work was characterised by a desire to innovate and experiment with new materials and techniques; he even appeared on the popular science TV programme Tomorrow’s World in 1966, demonstrating an innovative system for creating large-scale advertising on the side of buildings using photoelectric cells.
Although the Salford sculptural wall is now mostly now covered, one small section remains on view today in what is now known as the Allerton Building. The ‘Minute Men’ were Grade II listed in 2012 and remain a highly visible landmark of the campus. They encapsulate the ambition and expansion of the institution, which became a university the year after they were installed. They can also be seen as the starting point for a campus art collection; the university continues to collect and commission work for the campus today.
The University of Salford Art Collection was started in 1968 for the benefit of staff, students and the public, initially focusing on northern artists and printmaking. In buying and commissioning art, it followed in the footsteps of other educational establishments, including notable collections at the universities of Leeds and Hull which are displayed in dedicated galleries.
The precedent for collecting contemporary art for educational purposes lay partly in the ideas of influential educationalists like Henry Morris, Director of Education in Cambridgeshire, who sought to create beauty in educational environments – and believed in the potential for the places by which people were surrounded everyday to be visually and aesthetically educational. In the 1930s Morris commissioned renowned architects such as Walter Gropius to design school buildings, and after the Second World War he worked with the planners of new towns. He also advocated displaying works of art in educational buildings, believing that they would act as a ‘silent teacher’.
After the Second World War, many local authorities became patrons of art, alongside education committees and schools. At a time when many new schools were required, and had to be built quickly and cost-effectively, architects, educators and administrators collaborated in the design of schools, using technological solutions such as modular building methods and prefabricated panels. The incorporation of artwork was recognised as a way of adding a ‘humanising’ element into what could have otherwise been uniform environments.
Schools and local education authorities were also joined by teacher training colleges and some universities in creating art collections that were part investment and part expression of prestige and modernity at a time when Britain was changing rapidly, not just physically but in the way in which its citizens experienced it socially, culturally and educationally.
In addition to widespread changes to primary and secondary education, the post-war period saw an expansion in higher education. The Robbins Report of 1963 led to the creation of new universities in Warwick, Kent, Essex, East Anglia, Sussex and York: the so-called plateglass universities. This enabled a rethinking of the university environment, landscape and location, as well as its role in society. In his book The Post-war University: Utopianist Campus and College (2000), the architectural historian Stefan Muthesius has described how these universities advocated not just the development of specialist skills, but the development of ‘cultivated men and women’ and what the Robbins Report termed the transmission of ‘a common culture and common standards of citizenship’. The plateglass universities were built in a strikingly modern style, on campuses on the edges of cities. They were designed by some of the leading architects of the day, incorporating cultural facilities such as theatres, and were often set in landscaped grounds with works of art.
One of the most ambitious art collections of this era is at Warwick University, which was designed by the architect Eugene Rosenberg. Rosenberg was committed to public art and put large, modern colourfield paintings in corridors, foyers and seminar rooms. The collection was amalgamated with another educational art collection, built up by the City of Coventry teacher training college, when the college became part of the University of Warwick in 1978, and artworks from that collection are now displayed in the teacher training departments of the university. In 1980, the university opened its own gallery, the Mead Galley, and appointed specialist curatorial staff. Today, the collection can still be seen around the campus, and continues to actively acquire work by contemporary artists, aiming to:
“Contribute to the creation of a distinctive and stimulating campus environment through the development of displays, interpretation and opportunities for meaningful engagement with works of art.”
Many of the older universities own collections of artworks too, including the Cambridge colleges, however these were often acquired through benefactors such as former staff and students, or dependent on the tastes of wealthy patrons who donated their own collections as a starting point. Although this means that some collections have lacked a coherent collecting policy, others have taken a specific approach, for example thematic or regional in either artists or subject matter.
In the 1950s, the collector Jim Ede, whose former home is now the art gallery Kettle’s Yard, started lending paintings from his collection to students at Cambridge University on a termly basis; students from both Cambridge and Anglia Ruskin universities can still borrow work today, for a modest cost. Ede believed that there should be ‘a Kettle’s Yard in every university’, and gave the University of Essex some work to start a collection. The university has since also developed a specialist Latin American art collection, which is displayed in the Art Exchange gallery on campus.
Another important development in post-war higher education was the creation of Universities of Technology from Advanced Colleges of Education. These would act as a ‘new’ kind of institution’, offering what Muthesis termed ‘practical-professional-vocational teaching’.
One such institution was the University of Loughborough, in the Leicestershire market town. Originally founded as Loughborough Technical College in 1909 to promote engineering, it became a college of Advanced Technology in the 1950s and a university in 1966 (it was known as Loughborough University of Technology until 1996).
In the post-war era, Leicestershire was renowned for embracing patronage of the arts in educational settings under its longstanding Director of Education, Stewart Mason, who had been previously worked as a schools inspector in Cambridgeshire and been inspired by Henry Morris’s work in the county. As well as purchasing and commissioning site-specific works for individual schools, Leicestershire built up a large collection of artworks for loan to schools, that was one of the biggest such resources in the country. Working closely with Bryan Robertson, Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery – where work from the collection was exhibited in 1968 and 1980 – enabled Mason to keep abreast of developments in modern art, as well as supporting artists early in their careers, some of whom later developed significant profiles.
Mason advised and guided Loughborough University in purchasing artworks, which punctuate the campus; his influence is acknowledged in the university’s Stewart Mason building. Wall-mounted artworks, such as prints, paintings and textiles, are displayed in boardrooms, corridors and waiting areas, including pictures by Bridget Riley and John Piper, as well as a number of portraits of university grandees. The adjoining Loughborough Training College was one of the main institutions for training teachers of handicrafts, with links to the Cotswold ‘Utopian Craftsmen’, so there was also a tradition of students producing their own furniture, much of which is still in use today.
Many well-known and lesser artists of the post-war period are represented on the Loughborough campus. While the collection represents a broad range of styles, from neo-Romantic artists such as John Piper, and social realists such as Peter Peri, to kinetic artists, there is a strong theme of science and technology in many of the artworks, particularly around the science buildings, which feature a number of steel sculptures by Paul Wagner dating from the 1990s.
The first artwork encountered on approach to the campus from the town centre is the ‘Spirit of Adventure’ (1958) by Willi Soukop, an émigré artist who undertook many commissions for public and educational settings. Resembling an aeroplane, the sculpture points the way to a place of learning, discovery and enquiry. Another artwork by Soukop, a trio of relief panels on the Brockington Building, features idealised depictions of students at work and leisure, from engaging in sporting activities to studying and discussing their work, to carrying out wood and metal work.
Another émigré artist, Peter Peri – who created work for the Festival of Britain as well as settings such as social housing estates, schools and other educational environments – features on the side of a student halls of residence designed by the architect Harry M Fairhurst (who later worked with artists such as Lynn Chadwick, Hans Tisdall and Antony Hollaway on artworks for the University of Manchester campus and the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST). In Peri’s ‘Spirit of Technology’, installed at Loughborough in 1960, the figure of a man leaps into the unknown from the exterior of the dining hall.
An abstract, angular trio of sculptures by Lynn Chadwick – a sculptor associated with the context of the Cold War and an informal grouping of artists that the art critic Herbert Read termed the ‘geometry of fear’ – contrasts with the representational style of Peri’s work. ‘The Watchers’ (1960/installed 1966), comprises three solemn figures commemorating influential figures in the history of the university. A kinetic sculpture by Austin Wright, ‘Fountain’ (1971), meanwhile, calmy bubbles in a quiet pond area between two buildings.
The Loughborough collection continues to develop, commissioning and acquiring work by students alongside established artists. Recent highlights include an interior design scheme by the artist and designer Giles Round drawing on the history of the campus and referencing its craft heritage through wallpaper incorporating images of tools from a historic catalogue. ‘Bathaus’ (2017), by Studio Weave, houses a colony of long-eared bats; its name appears to play on the Bauhaus ideals which underpinned many of the developments in post-war art education in Britain.
While it has not developed on the same scale as the University of Loughborough art collection, the University of Salford Art Collection also continues to collect and commission work. Artworks from the collection are on display around the campus, and the collection – which has two permanent curators – works with other museums and galleries to collect, commission and show work, including Salford Museum and Art Gallery.
The university has also commissioned large-scale public sculptures for new buildings, for example ‘Clasp’ (2007) by Karen Lyons, an artist based in Littleborough, Greater Manchester. Situated outside the nursing school, ‘Clasp’ looks like clay clenched in a hand, capturing a sense of the physical and the sensual. It makes a feature of its tactility, making a temporary gesture or fleeting encounter into something permanent, lingering and material.
The most recent permanent sculpture installed on campus, ‘Engels’ Beard’ (2016) by the North West-based artist and activist Jai Redman, is a depiction of Friedrich Engels, who had a long association with Manchester and Salford. Made of fibreglass, it is situated outside the New Adelphi building, which houses the university’s art studios and creative courses as well as a small gallery showing changing exhibitions.
Whereas the moulds for William Mitchell’s ‘Minute Men’ were reportedly displayed in the modernist Didsbury bungalow of an architect who worked on the Allerton Building, a polystyrene model for ‘Engels’ Beard’ is displayed in the entrance to the New Adelphi building, giving users an insight into how it was designed and made.
Although ‘Engels’ Beard’ was installed fifty years after the ‘Minute Men’ sculptures, it emulates some of the spirit of play and fun seen in William Mitchell’s work and something of the ethos of the post-war period, by allowing art to be experienced outside of an art gallery setting. Also functioning as a bouldering wall, it encourages interactivity, asking the visitor to climb on it and play with it, at the same time as giving a sense of place and heritage to a setting that is very new and modern.
‘Engels’ Beard’ is not a triumphant statue or monument to a dead figure from the past; it appears as something that is half-formed, something that is in a state of becoming or perhaps already in ruins. An extract from a poem responding to the statue, ‘Thinker’ by Jackie Kay – who was the Chancellor and writer-in-residence for Salford University from 2015 to 2021 – is set into stone to give context about Engels’ words and ideas and their local significance, as well as how they have been used and interpreted in different ways over time.
Today, the University of Salford Art Collection continues to challenge and question the form and purpose of an educational art collection, showing how a university art collection can look and function in the 21st century. While post-war art collections often focused on collecting work by leading contemporary or public artists, or those who were considered to be a good investment, the University of Salford Art Collection is now taking an approach that is far more integrated into the life of the university and the city, working with the local artistic infrastructure as well as providing opportunities for staff and students. It has embraced the digital age, collecting work that explores digital themes, as well as work made or designed to be encountered digitally. It is also using art as a tool to interrogate some of the most pressing issues of our time, including climate change, and working in collaboration with university departments and academics. Recent projects have included providing residencies for artists in the university’s ‘Energy House’, an innovative building designed to stimulate different climactic conditions around a typical redbrick terrace, an endeavour which feels entirely fitting with the institution’s technological and practical roots.
Archive images courtesy of University of Salford Special Collections and Archives. All other images by the author. View all of the images here.
Natalie Bradbury is a writer and researcher based in Greater Manchester. Her interests include education, social history, twentieth-century British art, architecture and design. She has recently written about the Chester Tapestry in the ‘Municipal’ edition of the Modernist.
References and further reading:
Growing Up With Art: The Leicestershire Collection for Schools and Colleges: An exhibition organised by the Arts Council of Great Britain and the Whitechapel Art Gallery (London: 1980)
Geraint Franklin, ed., England’s Schools 1962–88: A Thematic Study (Portsmouth: English Heritage, 2012).
Tony Jeffs, Henry Morris: Village Colleges, Community Education and the Ideal Order (Nottingham:Educational Heretics Press, 1989)
Donald K Jones, Stewart Mason: The Art of Education (London: Lawrence & Whishart, 1988)
William Mitchell, Self-Portrait: The Eyes Within (Dunbeath: Whittles Publishing, 2013)
Stefan Muthesius, The Postwar University: Utopianist Campus and College (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000)
John Penfold, ‘From Handicraft to Craft Design and Technology’ in Studies in Design Education, Craft and Technology, Volume 20, No 1, Winter 1987, 34-48.
Harry Rée, Educator Extraordinary: The Life and Achievement of Henry Morris (London: Longman Group, 1973)
Bryan Robertson, British Sculpture and Painting from the Collection of the Leicestershire Education Authority (London:Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1968).
Sarah Shalgosky and Michael Tooby, eds. , Imagining a University: 50 Years of the University of Warwick Art Collection (Warwick: Mead Gallery, 2015)
Gillian Whiteley, ‘A Sculptor for Our Time: Bringing Peter Peri into the Light’, in Sculpting Art History, eds. K. Eustace, M. Stocker and J. Barnes (London: Public Monuments and Sculpture Association, 2018), 388-404.
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