BAA Heathrow Terminal 3 Collection
Under the BAA Art Programme, we undertook a series of commissions in 1995 that formed part of the Heathrow Terminal 3 art collection. In close consultation with our clients, we identified the circulation spaces at Heathrow Terminal 3 that took business class passengers to the airline lounges as suitable sites for the commissions. With the majority of business travellers through T3 visiting London for business, it was decided that scenes of London would make the most appropriate theme.
Four young, emerging artists were invited to celebrate famous London landmarks. ‘Man Walking His Dog: Trafalgar Square’ by Guy Noble; ’The Epic and the Everyday’ by John Bartlett, a view of the City of London near St Paul’s Cathedral. For London’s markets, Soho, Portobello and Covent Garden we commissioned Haydn Cottam, while Jonathan Waller’s paintings depicted the quiet, calm leafy greenness of many of London’s parks and gardens with his ‘Queen Mary’s Garden: Regent’s Park’ and a typical summers day in ‘Hyde Park’.
‘Man Walking His Dog: Trafalgar Square’ by Guy Noble and ‘Hyde Park’ by Jonathan Waller have since been relocated to the Compass Centre, Heathrow’s head office and form part of the Heathrow Art Collection.
Museum of London Collection
We worked in close collaboration with the head of collections at the Museum of London in 1997 to help them acquire a large scale work for their new London Now gallery. This was the Museum of London’s first attempt to explore both the postwar period and contemporary London, concentrating on London life at the end of the twentieth century and was designed to have a provocative edge, stimulating visitors’ views about the state of Britain’s capital city as it approached the millenium.
Through close consultation with the Museum of London, we assisted them to engage with a broader audience in a dynamic way and recommended John Bartlett’s ‘History Painting’, depicting the Poll Tax riots in Trafalgar Square in 1993. ‘History Painting’ was reproduced in most national newspapers and magazines and became an unexpected focus for debate about the nature and responsibilities of representational art.
