This is the fourteenth volume in the series titled the Public Sculpture of Britain put together by the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association (PMSA). The history of urban sculpture and commemorative art is one of those hybrid subjects which crosses several disciplines: a specific variant of art history combined often with urban history or, more specifically, the study of public art which is merely a sub-discipline of the study of sculpture. How art might fit in with cities and their institutions is a question few in England seem to ask. Judging by the short bibliography for urban sculpture outside this volume, attitudes and academic fashions remain remarkably narrow: overviews which manage to address nineteenth-century ‘statuemania’ as well as the post-World War II renaissance of public sculpture remain rare outside architectural guides like the Buildings of England or in-depth survey like volumes of the Survey of London. Detached attitudes are equally uncommon – perhaps urban sculpture is seen as too specialist, too ephemeral or just an adjunct to ‘proper’ monographs on artists, but even the not inconsiderable bibliography for a major artist like Elizabeth Frink proved to be useless when one of her most substantial public works was threatened a few years ago with potential removal from a regency square in Worthing in Sussex. Her vast heads, the Desert Quartet, like an echo of Easter Island, were actually an integral element of planning permission, so when their removal was threatened they were, unusually, given listed status less than 30 years after erection – they are clearly part of urban history even if attached to a structure. Public art audits like this PMSA volume can help to rectify and inform local and national contexts to the vast population of sites, yet librarians, conservation officers and local authorities lack the tools needed to assess the extraordinary diversity which has largely appeared since Henry Moore. Of course, only a minority can or will reach the status of Moore or Frink, so how does one begin to weigh these values beyond the gallery? How can one judge what has been put up with the intention to enhance the built environment?

This volume is the latest in the PMSA series which tries to fill this largely urban gap. Volumes combine a scholarly familiarity and objectivity without presuming that public art history ended in 1914 or 1945 or can only be found indoors: here the time-lag in academic attention is brought up to the present so Nelson Mandela can sit on the page along with Disraeli or Lord Kitchener. The PMSA series and the same author have already addressed the City of London, other sections of the capital and a dozen other cities or regions in England and Scotland. An online audit is also being rolled out, but apart from English Heritage and a few enlightened funding bodies, such attempts at definition (unlike indoor art) receive little support. These volumes thus create the vital context in what can only be described as an urban audit absence: no governmental or national body exists in Britain whose remit is to define or control this ubiquitous topic, so apart from minor charities like the PMSA, founded in 1991, the only way this absence can be rectified is by asking your local authority whether they can make available a public art audit simply defining online these public assets. Such access is strangely rare, which only goes to prove the conspicuous inconspicuousness of the invisible public monument as defined in the 1930s by Robert Musil. When monuments are not ignored, the fickleness of taste is very evident in this volume: the Office of Works were ‘unable to get anybody to agree to take responsibility’ for a prominent fountain by a prominent sculptor situated on Park Lane which was taken down in 1948 as ‘an awful example of the depths to which design, technique and taste had sunk in 1874–5’. This would never have happened inside a museum or gallery, so Ward-Jackson is right to observe the ‘failure of government to come up with a coherent plan to control the surge in statues’.

The sheer variety (if not serendipitous anarchy) shown by the modern surge in public art starts to become evident through these volumes: there is still almost no awareness or apparent interest in creating a national picture of this aspect of contemporary art, yet commentators persist in calling for some weird form of art police to get rid of or shunt around ‘unsuitable’ pieces, and keep uttering a stimulating variety of patronizing attitudes not unlike those of 1948 towards the Victorians. The author concludes this fascinating census by stating that ‘despite the best efforts of officialdom to control our environment, it is to be hoped that the future of public art will remain unpredictable’.