Step through the west door of Westminster Abbey and you almost immediately walk across a green marble memorial to Winston Churchill (“Remember Winston Spencer Churchill” it says). There are statues of the wartime leader both inside and outside parliament, and blue, green and brown plaques to the man adorn numerous London buildings.
But St Paul’s Cathedral, scene of Churchill’s state funeral on 30 January 1965 has a set of gates.*
Obviously, I’m doing them a disservice for comic effect. Known as the Churchill Memorial Screen, the ‘gates’ stand in the cathedral’s crypt (separating the section with the shop, cafe and loos from the bits of the church that you have to pay to visit) and are elaborate sculptural metalwork, made from textured mild steel with patinated bronze details, and are some 3.5m high with a 8m wide span.
They were privately funded (at a cost of £260,000 in 2004 prices) and the competition to design them was contested by virtually all the artist-blacksmiths in the UK. The winner of the commission was James Horrobin, who devoted some 7,000 hours to the making of the final work.
They seem almost aggressively martial in their design, with pikestaffs and spearpoints punching into the air, but Horrobin designed the horizontals to represent the bayonets of muskets becoming hoes and harrows – “swords into ploughshares” indeed – as he said at the time that the screen should be seen as a “celebration of peace, brought about by Churchill’s efforts”.
*There is also a plaque, unveiled by his widow Clementine in 1974, that marks the spot under the dome where his coffin stood during the funeral service. Unfortunately tis is now covered by the wooden steps and flooring of the Dome Altar.
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