Sometimes information on a space, an object, a thing is easy to find, sometimes it isn’t, and in the latter camp is very definitely the mosaic on the ground in Flaxman Court.
This is the little passageway in Soho that runs from Wardour Street (on the corner of The Ship pub) round to St Anne’s Court (where the former Trident Studios operated, and which has a blue plaque to David Bowie).
The mosaic – a rather lovely black and white device that radiates like palm fronds – seems to commemorate the 19th century sculptor John Flaxman (more on him later) after whom the alleyway is presumably named. But it doesn’t appear on any reference sites, not even the usually reliable London Remembers (“aiming to capture all memorials in London“).
It took a reverse image search for it to come up, on the web pages of Kit Kemp, the firm that turned the old Soho NCP car park between Wardour Street and Richmond Mews into the Soho Hotel in the early noughties. Here it’s mentioned as a commission from Maggy Howarth.
She was (she died in 2024) an artist who produced pebble mosaics, working with stones rather than the tesserae of traditional mosaicists. The major challenge of this process is that the artist works from ‘underneath’, placing pebbles into a bed of sand with the final work only being revealed after the section has been cast and turned over. There are some rather splendid examples on the Maggy Howarth Studio website, but nothing about this one. (I’ve emailed them to ask about the inspiration for the Flaxman mosaic, but not heard back so far.)
Flaxman himself – a hugely celebrated sculptor in his time (1755-1826), but little known now – had connections to Soho, if not to this little alleyway. He was a leading figure in neo-classical sculpture, but started out designing decorative figures for Josiah Wedgewood’s pottery factories, one of which was on the corner of Greek Street and Soho Square.
Flaxman lived in Wardour Street in the 1780s, and was a friend of William Blake (another Soho habitué) and became the first professor of sculpture at the Royal Academy. Some of his large sculptural works in the capital include the memorials to Nelson and Joshua Reynolds in St Paul’s Cathedral, and the huge memorial (all 29 tonnes of it) to Lord Mansfield in Westminster Abbey. There is also a Flaxman gallery in UCL.
The court predates the sculptor of course. On the 1745 Rocque map it is Swan Alley, and in 1910 has become Ship Yard (after the pub on the corner, which once had the splendid name of ‘The Ship in Distress‘). It seems to have been part of the London County Council renaming of streets that took place in the ’20s and 30’s, probably (according to this website) between January 1936 and January 1939. It certainly appears on the WW2 Bomb Damage Maps under its new (and current) name.
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