Building record 0638200001 - Corn King and Spring Queen, Wexham Springs

Sculpture. 1964 by William Mitchell for the British Cement Association, originally the British Cement and Concrete Association. Bonded cast concrete sections in red and grey, with incised and applied decorations; materials stuck into concrete include ceramic, mosaic, flints and pebbles. About fourteen to fifteen feet high, in two sections. Two principal figures formed of cast pieces stuck together and decorated, with similar third figure set back and smaller, more abstract forms freestanding. The figures are primitive and totemic symbols of mythology and fertility, perhaps with a debt to Native American traditions. The Corn King and Spring Queen is the most imaginative and principal surviving element of the BCA's former research station, founded at Wexham Springs in 1947 and largely demolished in 1995. The most distinguished single element of well designed grounds by Geoffrey Jellicoe, Sylvia Crowe and others which made an artistic feature of simple cladding panels, bollards and pavings, which have otherwise largely gone, it successfully demonstrates that concrete could be an imaginative medium as well as an attractive and practical one. William Mitchell specialised in the casting of concrete relief sculpture, in 1959 commissioned by the London County Council to work with architects and thereafter working with Basil Spence, Frederick Gibberd and others. This is his principal freestanding work, a piece of powerful and bizarre imagination. (The Buildings of England: Nikolaus Pevsner and Elizabeth Williamson: Buckinghamshire: 1994~: 743-4)(B2).