Paul Day's "The Meeting Place" was one of the statues commissioned for the recently refurbished Victorian railway station of St Pancras in London.
Day shows himself and his half-French wife Catherine representing a French woman reunited with her English lover, symbolising the meeting of two cultures and the romance of travel. This is a station that the French and English do meet because the Eurostar trains
departs and finishes here, travelling back and forward from the two countries under the Channel Tunnel. The statue is huge 20 tonnes and 9 metres high, it needs to be because the William Barlow's St Pancras shed of 1868 is on a monumental scale. The statue is one that is both loved and hated. I'm now going to leave the luscious St Pancras architecture, glimpsed in the background, for later in this round of ABC Wednesday but instead show some of the reliefs around the frieze at the bottom of the statue, all continuing the theme of people meeting in a public spaces
The men who built the railways
I think this is supposed to be a railway driver and two people waiting on a station
The underground rush hour commute, and lastly
meetings on stairways.
