Acton Storm Tanks
Sarah Staton, Colin, Sybil, Sir Joseph Bazalgette
Sarah Staton was commissioned by Tideway to create a series of three freestanding cast stone and bronze sculptures, located in the compound of Acton Storm Tanks – an existing Thames Water pumping station and storm water tanks site.
The permanent Tideway commissions are conceived in response to Tideway’s Heritage Interpretation Strategy (HIS). The theme for the West section of the tunnel is ‘Recreation to industry: Society in transition’, with the site-specific narrative for this site referencing the manufacturing industry located in the area. In the 1860s the South Acton area adjacent to Stamford Brook, became known as ‘Soapsud Island’ and was characterised by the female-led home-based laundry businesses servicing the new large houses of Kensington and Notting Hill. Over time, the bigger laundries became factories with power washing machines while the smaller laundries declined. A number of these efficient ‘factory laundries’ are retained in the area to this day.
Sarah’s sculptures at Acton depict distinctive historical figures associated with the site, their heads mounted on tall, slim cast Jesmonite columns, each standing approximately three metres high. Responding to the material palette, architectural forms and details of the adjacent Bedford Park, the sculptures echo the triangular plan of the Acton site.
On one column Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s head with distinctive moustache celebrates Acton as the western starting point of the Tideway tunnel system. The second column is topped with the face of an unknown washerwoman, ‘Sybil’, which is cast in bronze, and refers to Soapsud Island, Acton’s entrepreneurial 19th-century home laundries. The third column features ‘Colin’, whose sculptural presence stands for all the unsung heroes, public sector workers and ordinary people of Acton who find the way to make a difference against the odds. ‘Colin’ was co-developed with young people from Bollo Brook Youth Centre.
The artist has said:
It's all about scale! The three totems that I've created at Acton stand taller than us, surveying the locale like silent interlocutors, announcing the new Tideway infrastructure. The vent column here reaches towards the heavens, yet also connects us deep into the bowels of the new super sewer. Acton Storm Tanks is where this tunnel begins, it is its most western extent; on account of this gateway situation, one of the characters that is depicted on the totems had to be, and is Bazalgette, the brilliant Victorian engineer who saved London from its lavish effluence via the complex system of brick conduits that remain in use to today. Bazalgette is accompanied by Sybil, a fictional laundress from the time when the area was threaded by small streams and waterways which formed the rationale for the development of laundries here, often started by women in their homes. The last totem is Colin, created to honour Acton's legendary youth worker from Bollo Brook, and standing as representative of the very many essential service workers whose incredible collective energies and dedicated labour got us through the pandemic.
