The pride of Norwich
QUESTION Did the two lions passant guarding the entrance to Norwich City Hall come from the 1938 Empire Exhibition in Glasgow? The pair of bronze lions guarding the entrance to City hall opposite the Market Place in Norwich were not those displayed at the empire exhibition, though they were installed in the same year, 1938.
The Norwich lions are the work of London-born sculptor Alfred hardiman (1891-1949). he trained at the Royal College of Art and was influenced by classical Roman, etruscan and Greek works of art.
hardiman created three figures of Recreation, Wisdom and education outside the council chamber.
his colleague, James Woodford, designed six bronze doors, incorporating 18 roundels showing the history and industry of Norwich.
Many Art Deco buildings have lost their hallmark fixtures and fittings, but Norwich retains its original features.
hardiman’s best-known work is the earl haig Memorial on Whitehall in London. he was elected Associate of the Royal Academy in 1936, and a full Academician in 1944.
Jacob Smith, Lowestoft, Suffolk. IN MAy 1938, the grand empire exhibition was opened by George VI and Queen elizabeth in Bellahouston Park, Glasgow. It attracted 12 million visitors and acted as a showcase for Scottish industry as it struggled to recover from the Great Depression.
Dotted among the fountains, lawns and terraces were pavilions dedicated to individual countries throughout the British empire. herbert James Rowse (1887-1963) was one of the outstanding architects of his generation who shaped the inter-war cityscape of Liverpool.
he was commissioned to design the United Kingdom pavilion, the grandest at the exhibition, and designed the golden lions that guarded the entrance. Sadly, they were demolished shortly after the exhibition closed that December.
Only two structures from the exhibition were designed to last: the Palace of Art, designed by Launcelot Ross, which is a leisure centre today; and the 470ft Tait Tower, named after the exhibition’s chief architect Thomas S. Tait.
however, it was demolished in July 1939 because it was feared it would be a sighting post for German bombers during the war.
Alan Courtenay, Stamford, Lincs. QUESTION What defines an empire? Does it have to be a certain size? What is the smallest entity defined as an empire? IN TeRMS of scale, empire does not have a specific definition. The U. S. international relations expert Michael Doyle describes an empire as ‘ a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society’. early empires were smaller than later ones, as advances in technology enabled the ruling of larger swathes of land. The empires of the Levant and the Fertile Crescent were tiny.
Other early Middle eastern empires are the hittites, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Jebusites and Nabateans. One particularly small empire was the empire of Trebizond (now Trabzon, in Turkey), which held power from 1204 to 1461.
This was a narrow strip of land composed of the south-eastern Black Sea coast, a portion of the Pontic Alps and the southern part of the Crimean Peninsula, which in total was only the size of Wales.
It was a Byzantine Greek successor state established after the fall of the eastern Roman (Byzantine) empire in the Fourth Crusade.
It is considered to be an empire because it gained great wealth from the taxes it levied on the goods traded between Persia and europe via the Black Sea, and was home to diverse groups of people including Georgians, Greeks, Armenians and Venetians.
The Zulu empire (1887-97) in Southern Africa was just over 10,500 square miles in area and contained a diverse range of tribes.
In contrast, at its peak, the British empire of the Twenties was more than 13 million square miles (24 per cent of the earth’s area) and included territories in every continent.
Charles Gray, Stourbridge, W. Mids.