Worcester Museum and Art Gallery honours library with month-long version of Fourth Plinth

In 1894, the Duke of York (and future King George V) laid the foundation stone for a magnificent building to house Worcester’s Museum, Art Gallery and Library.

Two years later, to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, this epicentre of a town’s culture opened to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria. And 116 years on, as the public library prepares to move to a new space which integrates it with the university collections and an archives centre, its former roommates are hailing the history of the area with a public project in the space it has left behind.

Based loosely on the high-profile concept of the same name in London’s Trafalgar Square, Worcester’s Fourth Plinth has so far welcomed placard-carrying, baseball-capped men in shorts, sharply-dressed ladies taking tea, skulls in jars and a digital sculpture on the changing face of communication, each given a day to entertain.

They’ve got plenty of inspiration to work with. Even before the century-plus of change the building has been a part of, an enterprise with aims as grand as The Great Exhibition – the Worcestershire Exhibition – raised funds for its construction with more than 600 works of fine art, specimens of salt, a ship anchor and two pairs of eight-ton railway wagon wheels, coming away with a hefty profit of more than £1,867 from hundreds of thousands of visitors.

And the architects of the venue, JW Simpson and EJ Milner Allen, would later give a similarly astonishing design to Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, which remains one of the finest architectural achievements in Glasgow.

• Worcester’s Fourth Plinth continues for another three weeks, with a closing celebration on July 20. Visit fourthplinthworcester.com for more.

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