The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Tunnel vision of a shy genius
When he died from a brain haemorrhage in November 1941, Frank Pick was hailed by the art historian Nikolaus Pevsner as “the greatest patron of the arts whom this century has so far produced in England, and indeed the ideal patron of our age”.
And, yet, Pick, a draper’s son from Spalding who rose to become the first chief executive officer of the London Passenger Transport Board and, in 1940, director general of the Ministry of Information, remains a shadowy figure today. This is all the more remarkable given that more than a billion people a year rely on the legacy of Pick’s greatest work: the world’s finest and most fully integrated urban public transport system.
At its zenith, London Transport was not just a byword for efficiency. Pick, a lay Congregationalist preacher for whom work was devotion, ensured that every bus, tram and trolleybus, every Underground train, station and litter bin along with advertising, signage, maps, seat fabrics, staff canteens, lamps and armrests were designed and produced to the highest quality. This was art for all, conceived by a man who wanted the best not just for his company or for London, but for everyone.
On Monday – the 75th anniversary of Pick’s death – a new memorial designed by the London artists Langlands & Bell will be unveiled in the concourse of Piccadilly Circus station, an architectural and engineering marvel masterminded by Pick and opened in 1928. Commissioned by Art on the Underground with the London Transport Museum, Beauty < Immortality places Pick in the very centre of London among millions of scurrying passengers. It is made of the same travertine marble Pick’s architect, Charles Holden, chose for the station. Johnston lettering – the justly famous sans-serif Underground font designed by Edward Johnston and commissioned by Pick in 1913 – cast in bronze spells out words that Pick jotted down before a lecture in 1917 to the Art Workers Guild: Beauty < Immortality Utility < Perfection Goodness < Righteousness Truth < Wisdom These words might seem enigmatic, but not to Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell. “To us they demonstrate Pick’s thinking with the brevity and precision of a scientific equation,” says Bell. “They’re a clear attempt to reduce what he believed in, and what he was trying to do, to the absolute essential minimum.”
And, yet, even Langlands & Bell admit that their knowledge of Pick had been shaky before they were asked to design the memorial. “Although we’re both Londoners, we weren’t well aware of Frank Pick,” says Langlands. “In our minds his name was distantly conflated with those of Harry Beck [designer of the world famous Underground map], Edward Johnston, and Charles Holden. He means a great deal to us now because we understand that he was a utopian and polymath who believed that by improving our surroundings we can transform our lives. Even more importantly, he believed that quality is always worth the effort, and that quality belongs to everyone, everywhere.”
Langlands & Bell have a longheld fascination with travel and the connections it offers. One of their most memorable works, Frozen Sky (1999), is a ring of neon-lit airport name codes – LAX, CDG, LHR – evoking the idea of global relationships in a way that is both hypnotic and meditative.
Quite naturally, then, they admire Holden’s Piccadilly Circus station. “Holden’s disciplined take on modernism and classicism allowed him to use comparatively exotic materials such as travertine and bronze, while also working with the typical materials of 20th-century London, such as brick, plaster, concrete, glass and steel, in an elevated way that is simultaneously pared-down and utilitarian,” says Langlands. “His work is wholly pragmatic, authentically English and entirely appropriate for London.”
Holden worked on almost 50 Underground stations. For each, he applied a subtle reworking of classical design, just as Johnston’s lettering was a fresh way of interpreting the Roman lettering that, for example, adorns Trajan’s Column in Rome. For Pick, London was the new Rome. Everything he commissioned had to live up to the classical tradition.
Pick was an early patron of Henry Moore and Man Ray, along with the inventive textile designers Enid Marx and Marion Dorn. The innovative trains and peerless buses he commissioned from his chief engineers, the American-born William Sebastian Graff-Baker and Eric Ottoway – the 1938 Tube stock for the Northern, Piccadilly and Bakerloo Lines and the RT double-decker – were masterpieces of modern design. They were also long lived, the former running for half a century, the latter gracing London’s streets for 40 years.
Pick’s life was cut short at 62. What he achieved, though, was
Jonathan Glancey celebrates a forgotten pioneer who believed good design was for everybody – not just the elite