London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
Ok, let’s get stuck in.
Look up.
No, properly look up.
Not at your phone. Not at the bus coming at you. Not at the Zara window display. Up. High up. Just under the cornice of the great old Derry & Toms building on Kensington High Street.
There’s a whole civilization up there.
Men at work.
Men hauling. Hammering. Lifting. Building. Operating machines. Wrestling with gears and pulleys and modernity itself.
And almost nobody ever sees them.
That’s one of the first things we do on my Kensington Walk. We stop outside the old Derry & Toms building. And we look up at something the blinkered, chain-gangs of shoppers on Kensington High Street never see. That old London condition. The look but don’t see syndrome.
Well, we few, we happy few on our Kensington Walk – we certainly see.
Got so absorbed in what we saw that one of the walkers asked me a question I couldn’t answer.
Who did those sculptures?
Excellent question.
I love it when walkers ask questions I can’t answer because it means I get to go digging afterward. It means London’s still got secrets left. Which is reassuring. Imagine how dreadful it would be if one morning London simply shrugged and said, “Right then, that’s your lot, nothing left to discover.”
Anyway, here’s the answer.
The sculptor was Charles Henry Mabey Jr. Usually known as C. H. Mabey Jr.
And if I’m being perfectly honest, before now I knew almost nothing about him.
Which is extraordinary when you think about it because thousands upon thousands of Londoners pass beneath his work every single day.
He’s hiding in plain sight. Like so much of London.
And his work up there is magnificent.
The reliefs are collectively known as Labour and Technology. Which sounds rather earnest and Soviet and potentially not much fun. But don’t let the title put you off. These things are glorious.
Pure 1930s confidence.
Pure machine-age swagger.
The building itself opened in 1933. Art Deco London at full throttle. The Jazz Age. The age of ocean liners and chromium and cocktails and giant faith in the future.
And that’s exactly what those sculptures radiate.
Faith in the future.
The figures are quarrymen, blacksmiths, engineers, industrial workers, transport workers. Muscular blokes with sleeves rolled up. Men leaning into machinery as if machinery were the great adventure of human civilization.
Which, in 1933, many people genuinely believed it was.
You can almost hear the machinery humming.
Almost smell hot oil and steam.
The carvings have that streamlined Art Deco look about them. Everything slightly idealised. Slightly aerodynamic. Human beings transformed into symbols of progress.
There’s no misery up there.
No Dickensian despair.
No “dark Satanic mills.”
Quite the opposite.
The machine is heroic.
Labour is noble.
Industry is beautiful.
And all of it decorating a department store.
That’s another thing I love about this building. Department stores back then weren’t merely shops. They were cathedrals. Palaces of aspiration.
Derry & Toms was Kensington dressing itself up for the modern age.
And what an age it must have felt like.
Coming up to a century ago. The horrors of the Great War in the rear view mirror. The Underground expanding.
Cars multiplying.
Cinema everywhere.
Aircraft shrinking the world.
Electric light turning night into day.
You can feel all that excitement in those carvings.
Now here’s the frustrating bit.
There’s surprisingly little information about Mabey himself.
He’s one of those shadowy artists London is full of. You stumble across their work everywhere and yet the person behind it remains oddly elusive.
There are references to him doing architectural sculpture elsewhere, but biographical detail is thin on the ground. Which somehow feels appropriate for somebody whose work literally towers above us unnoticed.
But that immediately opens up another mystery.
How on earth did he do them?
Did he carve them up there high above Kensington High Street?
Mabey in a cap and overalls.
Clinging to the scaffolding.
Wind whipping round the façade.
Stone dust everywhere.
Buses growling below.
Kensington ladies in fox furs stepping delicately into the department store while high above them some sculptor clings to the scaffolding, carving heroic workers into the side of the modern age.
That’s the cinematic version anyway.
But all likelihood the reliefs were sculpted in sections down at ground level, probably in a studio, and then hoisted into place.
That was the standard practice for major architectural sculpture of this sort in that era. And there’s no question but it’s quintessentially 1930s.
Because the sculptures celebrate 1930s labour and technology, and the process of getting them up there would itself have been an act of labour and technology.
So realistically, yes, the reliefs were almost certainly sculpted in sections at ground level, probably in clay first, then cast or carved, and finally lifted into position by cranes and scaffolding crews.
Which means the whole building becomes self-referential.
Workers carving workers.
Machines lifting sculptures celebrating machines.
Very Art Deco.
Very modernist.
Very “onward and upward.”
And there’s another thing.
The reliefs are so high up that they almost acquire the quality of a secret society. You have to choose to see them. London doesn’t hand them to you. You’ve got to stop. Look. Notice.
Which is really what walking tours are about when you get right down to it. Or in this case, get right up to it.
Not facts.
Not dates.
Not even history.
Attention.
That’s the commodity.
Attention directed at London.
And suddenly a shopping street becomes a gallery.
Suddenly a department store becomes a manifesto.
Suddenly anonymous stone workers from 1933 start talking to you across nearly a century.
And here’s the lovely final touch.
The building itself was crowned by the famous Kensington Roof Gardens. An entire garden paradise floating above Kensington High Street.
Three gardens, in fact. A Tudor Garden. A Spanish Garden. And an English woodland garden. Also known as the Water Garden.
what a wonderfully bonkers combination it was.
A bit of Moorish Granada.
A bit of Merrie England.
And then suddenly an English woodland complete with streams, bridges, cascades, ducks and eventually pink Chilean flamingos. Which of course are standard fare for an English woodland garden.
All of it floating high above Kensington High Street.
That’s one of the great things about the Derry & Toms building. Nobody involved in it seemed remotely interested in moderation.
The whole glorious improbable shebang.
That’s 1930s London in a nutshell.
If you’re going to build a department store, don’t stop at a department store.
Put heroic sculptures on it.
Then put hanging gardens on top.
Go the whole hog.
And thank heaven they did.
Because ninety-three years later a walker on Kensington High Street looks up and asks a question.
And London answers back.
Here endeth your daily London fix for May 22nd, 2026.
See you tomorrow.