In a subway in Lisbon, there’s a 2024 cork artwork by Sagmeister & Walsh that spells out a sentence, repeated on a nearby plaque for much easier reading:

If a newspaper would only come out every fifty years, it would report how life expectancy rose by twenty years.

I scoffed to Wendy that this couldn’t possibly be true. In the UK, life expectancy has increased by about a decade since the 1970s and is now in decline. Surely Portugal couldn’t be so different?

With her usual sagacious wisdom, Wendy suggested that it was probably not meant to be taken literally. We were probably supposed to contemplate the negativity bias in the news and note how poorly it reflects the long-term improvements that I talk about regularly in a professional context.

But I couldn’t let it drop, so I did the research. Astonishingly, the artwork is reasonably accurate.

In the fifty-year period between 1970—when, of course, Portugal had yet to return to democracy—and 2020, life expectancy grew from 63 years for men and 71 years for women to 78 years and 83 years, respectively. It’s not quite a twenty-year increase, but it’s in the ballpark.

In 1920, the average life expectancy in Portugal was about 40 years, so the increase from there to the 1970s exceeded the artwork’s claim.

In 1870, the average life expectancy was around 29 years. The fifty-year span to 1920, therefore, delivers less than a twenty-year increase, but again, it’s in the right ballpark—and proportionately, it is astonishing. An extension of the average lifespan by a third in fifty years.

Exactly as the artwork (and Wendy) tried to tell me, it’s easy to underestimate gradual changes.

In 1983, King Olav V of Norway presented this rock to King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden. It symbolises Noway’s thanks for Sweden’s support in the Second World War, because nothing says ‘thank you’ like moving a 15-tonne rock 300 miles. It sits near the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Stockholm.

Not far away, there’s a very different rock: Space Seed by Bigert & Bergström. This bronze sculpture, inspired by a meteor shower, is intended to reflect both the destructive power of meteorites but also their suspected role in the origin of life. While the outside is burned and dark, the inside has a shiny golden finish. I rather liked it.

Apparently, Bigert & Bergström envisages people sitting on and crawling through their rock. I suspect the same behaviour would be frowned upon for the memorial rock. It’s so hard to keep up with rock etiquette these days.

When I came across this Peter Linde sculpture in Djursgården in Stockholm, I understood it to be called ‘woman of peace’ and assumed it to be an anthropomorphic representation of the idea of peace. I liked it, but I had a sneaking sense of discomfort at the underlying gender politics of representing ‘peace’ as a woman: it felt very vaguely misogynistic for a sculpture created as recently as 2016 in a country as forward-thinking in gender equality as Sweden.

I should have known better.

The English title is, in fact, ‘statue of the lady working for peace in the world’. It was presented by Swedens Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. It is dedicated to the memory of Alva Myrdal and Inga Thorsson, both Swedish women who did notable work in the field of nuclear disarmament. They are pictured on the base. The statue also serves as a tribute to all women—known and unknown—who are working for peace in the world.

This miniature statue, high up on a building, has the dubious honour of being Newcastle upon Tyne’s only statue of a non-royal woman. In fact, I can be even more specific: it’s Newcastle’s only statue of a woman who isn’t Queen Victoria.

The subject is Dame Eleanor Allan, who died in 1709. She is commemorated as a philanthropist who founded an eponymous school, initially for providing for the education of sixty poor local children per year. Remarkably for the time, these weren’t all boys: a third of the places were reserved for girls. These days, her schools charge about £15k per year.

As with many historical figures, Dame Allan doesn’t necessarily live up to the moral standards of the twenty-first century: her wealth came from the tobacco trade, which was of course money earned in large part of the back of slave labour on American plantations.

Dame Allan is, perhaps, an unfitting choice given that Newcastle’s most famous statue is probably that of Charles Grey, most famous for the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. But then, to only have a single woman recognised in a city with such a storied history of famous women is also unfitting. But who am I to say?

Thirty years ago, King Carl XVI Gustaf ordered and funded the construction of these obelisks in a square in central Stockholm. They were later moved to a less conspicuous location on the quayside.

Let’s not pretend that we can’t see why they were moved: they’re ugly. Terrazzo concrete does not sit well with plexiglass covered waves of brightly covered lights. Concrete monuments are explicitly designed to last centuries; electronic gizmos and light bulbs are not. It’s very 1990s.

The symbolism, though, is interesting. The flashy do-dahs are there to show data on the air and water quality in Stockholm, and to remind us of the impact of humanity on nature—and vice versa. King Carl XVI Gustaf is a very similar age to King Charles III, and this is a topic that clearly interests them both. Perhaps expressing environmental concerns are part of the role of a modern European monarch.

This artwork by the Belgian couple Tom and Lien Dekyvere was part of Canary Wharf’s festival of winter lights, but has since been adopted into the permanent collection.

It is a boulder made from discarded circuit boards. It lights up, but I vastly prefer it in its daytime mode, where it looks much more like a boulder and much less like a twinkly trinket.

When I’ve seen this work previously, I’ve taken it as a commentary on the impact of technology on the earth’s natural resources: all those rare earth metals returning to the rocky form from whence they came. The growth of artificial intelligence, with its outsized carbon emissions, felt like it lent the sculpture extra contemporary relevance.

In the course of writing this blog post, though, I’ve discovered that my interpretation does not align with the artists’ intention, which is more about highlighting the imperfection of digital representations of the physical world—which, I suppose, explains the garish light display.

I also thought the label was misprinted, and should have been ‘El Antica’, which I assumed to be Belgian for ‘the antique’, but that’s a load of rubbish too.

Sixteen years ago, I completed one of my medical school rotations at the Tranwell Unit for psychiatric patients at the QE Hospital in Gateshead. I really enjoyed it, and very nearly applied to specialise in psychiatry a few years later as a result.

The front part of the unit is octagonal, with an enclosed octagonal courtyard in the middle. In this courtyard stands a 3.5 tonne granite sculpture which shows a staircase ascending through an archway leading to… well… nothing. Just a sheer drop.

I vividly remember a seminar in which one of the psychiatrists asked us what we thought of the sculpture, which he introduced as Inside Outside. Some people commented that a staircase to a sheer drop felt a little unnecessarily suicidal for a psychiatric unit. The psychiatrist helped us to reflect on the degree to which the answers reflected our preconceptions about psychiatry. I remember their suggestion that the staircase ascending through the archway symbolised people coming from being stuck in their inner world and rejoining the outside world, and ascending into happiness as they did so.

I hadn’t thought about that seminar in years. But yesterday, my eye was caught by the way that this sculpture at Northumbria University had been enhanced by the luscious planting surrounding it:

On searching the web, I learned that this has the slightly unimaginative title Book Stack, and was unveiled in 1992 to celebrate Newcastle Polytechnic’s transformation into Northumbria University. As it turns out, the artist, Fred Watson, is the same bloke who created that sculpture in the middle of the Tranwell Unit that I’d discussed all those years ago.

I was surprised that a sculpture as brazenly literal as Book Stack could be by the same artist as something as seemingly abstract and symbolic as Inside Outside… but perhaps I just don’t fully appreciate either of them!

This is Aeolian Motion by Phil Johnson, a sculpture that I could have sworn I’d posted about in the past. Located near the River Tees in Stockton. As its name implies, it’s ‘wands’ move in the wind.

It was plonked on its grassy verge in 2001. According to the plaque alongside it, it was ‘inspired by the rich history and industrial heritage of the Borough of Stockton on Tees, and the flowing movement of the river’.

It is very much not my kind of thing: I’d sooner have planted a tree.

This is one of the 1,000 cast iron Millennium Mileposts placed along the National Cycle Network. In 2020, about a quarter of the National Cycle Network was axed, which means that many of the mileposts no longer tally up with routes, which seems a bit of a shame.

This one was designed by the Scottish sculptor Iain McColl. Like most of the mileposts, it used to be black and had a circular disk attached with a coded message. The disk is long-gone, but the remaining post got a bit of jazzy re-painting in June 2023.