The waymark coordinates are for the statue of Sir Row;land Hill on King Edward Street, one of the talking statues encompassed by the an art project funded by the National Lottery.
From The Sunday Times of London: (
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It's Queen Vic, talking Statue, on the line
Dipesh Gadher Published: 6 July 2014
Smartphone owners will be able to listen to monologues about the lives of famous people cast as statues
WE are very much amused. Statues of Queen Victoria and other historical figures are to be brought to life by a star-studded cast of personalities as part of a new arts project.
People will be invited to swipe their smartphones next to a statue and receive a personal “call” from the figure in which they recollect their achievements or simply pass on their musings on life.
The actress Prunella Scales has lent her voice to statues of Queen Victoria in London and Manchester, while Sir Patrick Stewart will regale passengers on platform 1 at Paddington train station with the story of the Unknown Soldier.
The actors Dominic West and Simon Russell Beale have respectively recorded monologues for statues of the Greek hero Achilles and Sir Isaac Newton, the mathematician who first explained gravity.
Writers, including the children’s novelists Anthony Horowitz and Dame Jacqueline Wilson, were asked to imagine what a particular statue might be thinking. A narrator then recorded the words.
The subjects chosen for the Talking Statues Speak Their Minds project combine real and fictitious characters, with even the odd animal thrown in, such as Dick Whittington’s cat.
Horowitz, the creator of the Alex Rider spy novels, has written the script for a brooding bronze of Sherlock Holmes outside Baker Street Tube station in central London.
Wilson has penned the thoughts of a statue at Manchester’s central library called The Reading Girl. The marble figure is the work of a 19th-century Italian sculptor, and Wilson imagines the girl wistfully plotting her return to Rome and escaping the “coldest, rainiest place on the planet” where locals survive on “microwaved pizzas”.
Some 35 public statues in London and Manchester have been chosen for the new initiative, which launches next month and aims to connect people to their surroundings in an entertaining and educational way.
In many cases, there is a professional link between the statue and the writer or narrator. Alan Johnson, who worked as a postman before entering politics and becoming a Labour home secretary, has narrated a monologue for a statue of Sir Rowland Hill, the inventor of the Penny Post.
Jeremy Paxman, the former BBC Newsnight presenter, has written and recorded a bawdy voiceover for John Wilkes, the 18th-century politician and journalist who campaigned for a free press. Paxman’s monologue, for a statue in the City of London, makes reference to an “erect penis” and charges of pornography levelled at Wilkes. It starts: “It’s the ugliest man in England here. But leave me alone with your wife or daughter and you’d better be back within 20 minutes or I’ll have talked my face away and we’ll be upstairs.”
“I like the idea of the Talking Statues project,” Paxman said this weekend. “We’re surrounded by statues in London, but we’re profoundly ignorant about who they were and what they achieved.
“If you look at Trafalgar Square, everybody knows there’s an empty fourth plinth. But I guarantee you that fewer than one in 100 people could tell you who sits on the other three plinths.”
The project is the brainchild of Colette Hiller, artistic director of Sing London, a non-profit arts organisation. The group has previously laid out pianos in public spaces for people to play and mingle around, and has set up outdoor ping-pong tables across Britain.
“Most of us hardly notice the statues that surround us — and yet, there they are,” said Hiller. “I found myself thinking ‘If these statues could talk, what stories would they tell us?’ Like all our projects, Talking Statues aims to connect people with their surroundings.”
Passers-by will be able to listen to a statue speak by using the latest smartphone technology. Those with Android-run devices, such as a Samsung Galaxy, will be asked to swipe their phone against a plaque containing a near-field communication tag, while those with an iPhone can scan a QR code.
Users will also be given the option of typing a short web address directly into their phones. In each case, a sound-file will be downloaded to their device, giving the impression that it is ringing. When the “call” is answered, the statue’s monologue will begin.
The project, which will run for a year from August 19, has mainly been financed by Nesta, a charitable trust funded by the National Lottery."