Henry Moore’s treasured ‘Old Flo’ sculpture has hit a snag this-morning on its long-awaited return to east London after 20 years because of Hurricane Brian at the weekend.
It’s all down to gale force winds that hit Britain with a threat of more to come.
That would make the crane operation a bit dodgy trying to lower Moore’s one-and-a-half tonne bronze ‘Draped Seated Woman’ in Canary Wharf’s Cabot Square.
So the attempt to unveil Old Flo has been put back till 11am on Wednesday.
It’s just the latest in a long timeline that Old Flo has had to put up with, first being shunted away from Stepney when the old Stifford housing estate was pulled down in 1997.
Old Flo had been ‘seated’ outside Wickham and Ewhurt tower blocks for 35 years, climbed on by generations of children, before being moved out to a field in Yorkshire for safe-keeping.
Former Tower Hamlets councillor Tim Archer discovered Old Flo’s whereabouts when he visited Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2009 and began a campaign to get it returned to the East End.
But then former mayor Lutfur Rahman decided in 2012 to sell it on the open market for hard cash, which led to uproar in the art and heritage world and a bitter campaign to keep it in the public domain.
The issue was even raised in Parliament, forcing the embattled mayor to withdraw the “fire sale”.
If that wasn’t enough, another battlefront opened in the High Court to decide who owned Old Flo.
It was claimed by Bromley Council in south London which was given custody of assets when the former Greater London Council was abolished in 1986.
But Tower Hamlets would have none of it, having taken over the Stifford estate from the GLC and therefore deeming the sculpture belonged in the East End.
After all, it was gifted to the GLC’s forerunner London County Council by Moore himself in 1960 as “a gift to the working people of Stepney” and placed on the estate when the Queen opened it in 1962.
Old Flo went to and fro in legal wrangles until the Appeal Court finally ruled last year that it belonged to the people of the East End.
Tower Hamlets mayor John Biggs said this week: “Old Flo is finally back home as an important part of the East End’s cultural heritage—that’s why we took the decision to cancel the previous mayor’s sell off and to return Old Flo to its rightful place.”
A search then began for a spot to go on public display and tenders were put out by the council.
Canary Wharf Group won a five-year deal to house Old Flo at Cabot Square with round-the-clock security, amid fears that it could be stolen for its bronze value.
The inspiration for ‘Draped Seated Woman’ created in 1957 came during the Second World War with Henry Moore as an official war artist observing people huddled in air raid shelters.
But that’s not the last chapter in Old Flo’s troubled story...
A final ‘new home’ is likely to be in Whitechapel at the new civic centre now being fitted out in the old London Hospital complex when Draped Seated Lady gets permanent council housing—unless someone else attempts to put in a claim!
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