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There can’t have been an issue of this Newsletter over the past couple of years that hasn’t featured the controversial plan to demolish the string of Co-operative stores on Carr Street to the east of Cox Lane in order to build a school.
Apart from the range of periods reflected in the shop facades, the mural often called Harvest would have been threatened with destruction by the development. Created in 1963-4 by Hungarian émigré artists Gyula Bajo (1907-1984) and Endre Hevezi (1923-2017) working for Co-operative Wholesale Society Architects Department, it is one of only four such Co-op murals in the UK. This colourful mosaic is 9 by 3 metres in size and is in modernist style. Two Greek mythological figures are shown: Demeter, goddess of the harvest and agriculture holding a sheaf of corn and the messenger Hermes, who was sent to the underworld to save Demeter’s daughter Persephone from Hades, so that the seasons could be restored and famine prevented on earth. Hermes floats horizontally; he has a winged helmet and white wings on his boots at the left. The wheatsheaf is a popular emblem of the Co-operative Movement, as ‘a stalk of corn cannot stand alone, but many stand together’
The provision of distinctive public art was a notable initiative in the post-war period by major retailers such as the Co-operative Stores. The Co-operative movement is an important product of working-class culture during the late 19th and 20th centuries. With the movement’s general decline across the United Kingdom, monuments such as these have significant social and historic interest, and every attempt should be made for them to be appropriately conserved.
On 12 April 2023 it was announced that the mural has been listed Grade II, the proposal supported by the 20th Century Society. The news represents another success for the 20th C. Society’s long-running Murals Campaign, which has seen upwards of 30 murals nationally listed and others saved through relocation, since it launched in 2009. The listing designation only covers the mural, with the former department store building being deemed of insufficient architectural and historic interest.
Whether the costs of removal and conservation of the delicate mosaic will be borne by the Department of Education is yet to be seen. Perhaps it may deter the development of the school.
RG