And so to happier things. The experiment Boris Johnson inherited with the Trafalgar Square Fourth lint has finished and it has been a great triumph. One & Other did everything that was expected of it, and more, and we can forget that the mayor was at first against it when he came to City Hall last summer. He wanted the conventional monument on the plinth, one dedicated to Sir Keith Park, the head of Fighter Command at the time of the Battle of Britain. But that’s a thing of the past, he was persuaded to go ahead with the competition to find
the artist to decorate the plinth and Antony Gormley won it, with Yinka Shonibare to follow, and so Yinka’s ‘Ship in a Bottle’ will be the next to delight us. Well, not exactly. The next piece of art to go up in Trafalgar Square will be… a bust of Sir Keith Park. It will go up on November 4 ‘to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the start of the Second World War’, says his press officer. But fear not. Normal service will resume ‘in the middle of 2010’.