Plans are under way to restore a sculpture of Gulliver in Limehouse so children can climb, swing and slide on it once again, 68 years after it was first introduced to a Tower Hamlets housing estate.
The work, led by the Heritage of London Trust with Tower Hamlets Council, is timed to mark the 300th anniversary of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels on October 28.
The sculpture, by artist Trevor Tennant, was originally installed as the centrepiece of a children’s sandpit on the Locksley Estate. Designed as a play structure rather than a piece to simply look at, it once served as a focal point for play on the estate. In recent years it has fallen into disrepair and been fenced off, out of reach of the children it was made for.
The restoration will revive it as a place for children to enjoy, returning a piece of post-war public art to everyday use.
Dr Nicola Stacey, director of the Heritage of London Trust, said: “This restoration is about more than repairing a sculpture. It is about returning a unique piece of the city’s heritage to its community.”
“Its sculptor Trevor Tennant was a leading proponent of imaginative public art after WWII and with Gulliver brought back to life for children to play on, he’ll spark creativity and a love of history and literature. We can’t wait to see it in action.”
Gulliver arrived on the estate through a remarkable post-war idea: that new housing should come with art built in. Through the London County Council’s Patronage of the Arts scheme, more than 70 works by leading sculptors were installed into new housing across the capital. Tennant’s Gulliver, influenced by the abstract style of Henry Moore, reflects a time when play areas were being reimagined as places of creative exploration rather than rows of standard equipment.
That philosophy is what made the sculpture unusual. It was not fenced off as decoration but designed to be clambered over, a giant from a storybook planted in the middle of a sandpit where children could act out Swift’s tale for themselves.
Lutfur Rahman, executive mayor of Tower Hamlets, said: “By restoring Gulliver, we are bringing a much-loved community space back into use, giving local children a unique place to play, explore and be creative once again.”
Local schools will visit the restoration project and take part in creative workshop sessions inspired by Swift’s tale of Lilliput. Through the Heritage of London Trust’s Proud Places programme, the project connects literature, art and local history, giving pupils a way into a 300-year-old story through something they can touch and climb.
Swift’s satire, first published in 1726, has never really left the popular imagination. Its hero, ship’s surgeon Lemuel Gulliver, washes up in Lilliput, where he is a giant among people six inches tall, and later in Brobdingnag, where the proportions are reversed. The Limehouse sculpture captures the story at its most playful: a giant figure in a children’s world, built to be explored rather than admired from a distance.
Restoring it also restores a small piece of Limehouse’s own history. The Locksley Estate, like much of post-war east London, was built at a time when councils believed everyday surroundings mattered, and that a housing estate deserved art as much as any gallery or civic square. Gulliver’s return brings that belief back into use, in the place it was made for.
For the children who will play on it next, the sculpture will be both a climbing frame and a first meeting with one of English literature’s most enduring characters. For the estate, it is the return of a landmark that was always meant to be touched, climbed and loved, not locked behind a fence.
Community projects of this kind have become a hallmark of recent heritage work in the capital, from community-designed murals unveiled in Finsbury Park to new uses found for landmark buildings in Tower Hamlets.
