Dorothy Annan’s “striking and highly distinctive” murals
- London On The Ground
- Apr 12
- 4 min read
Updated: Apr 13
The 20th century ceramic murals in the Barbican Estate celebrate technological advancement.
The Ministry of Public Building and Works commissioned Dorothy Annan to create the nine panels in 1960. They were installed the following year on the front of the Fleet Building on Farringdon Street, which was then London's largest telephone exchange, and remained there until 2013.
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The subject matter of these painted stoneware murals links directly to the modernist building they were designed to adorn. They depict pylons, cables, telegraph poles, cabling, television, radio aerials and generators (see photos of all nine at the end of this post).
Stylised and semi-abstract, they are very much a product of their time.
The immediate post-war decades were characterised by a forward-looking spirit of a new and modern world, warmed by what prime minister Harold Wilson called the "white heat of British technology”.
Public art and murals became popular in the Festival of Britain in 1951 and the post-war building boom provided growing opportunities for muralists into the 1960s.
Annan was paid £300 per panel, each of which is made of forty tiles measuring c.30cm x 40cm. She visited General Post Office buildings all over London (the GPO was also responsible for the telephone network) and collected large numbers of photographs of telecoms equipment, wiring systems and keyboards for reference.
According to an information board next to the murals, the artist “skilfully hand scored each wet clay tile to her design” at the Loughborough studio where they were made by Hathernware Ltd.
After their first firing, Annan decorated, glazed and fired them in her London studio kiln. “The attention paid to the production of the tiles lends them an unusual painterly quality with clearly visible brushstrokes.”
Parallels have been drawn with the work of British Modernist artists such as Ben Nicholson and, in the panel titled Test Frame for Linking Circuits (number 3 below), the imagery of the Spanish Surrealist Joan Miró.
The central, and most abstract panel, Cross Connection Frame (number 5 below), ties the work together. It sits between Cable Chamber with Cables Entering from Street (panel 4) and Power and Generators (panel 6), both featuring dense black lines.
“Impressionistic interpretations of technological equipment are depicted in panels such as Cables and Communication in Buildings and Lines over the Countryside”, says the information board, “whilst the more representational panels showing aerials and cable buoys bookend the sequence”.
The Fleet Building on which Annan’s murals were originally placed was built by the General Post Office under the supervision of Chief Architect Eric Bedford, who later designed the BT Tower (originally the Post Office Tower).
Dorothy Annan was a painter and ceramicist, born in Brazil to British parents in 1900 and educated in France and Germany. Her early art was loosely post-impressionist painting and she began working with ceramics in around 1945.
She became a prominent member of Artists International Association, a radical left organisation combining politics and art, both modernist and traditional. Its members included Ben Nicholson, Frank Auerbach, Eric Ravilious and Edward Ardizzione.
Annan’s largest work was the Expanding Universe mural at the Bank of England, destroyed in 1997. Apart from the panels now at the Barbican, her only surviving public murals are at King’s College in Newcastle and at Caley Primary School in Limehouse, Tower Hamlets.
The IT and communications revolution of the late 20th and early 21st centuries made telephone exchange buildings redundant, including the Fleet Building, which was replaced by a large new office for investment bank Goldman Sachs (completed in 2019).
Goldman Sachs had no interest in retaining Annan’s artwork. Its survival was ensured when it was Grade Il listed by English Heritage in 2011 in recognition of its “high artistic quality, craftsmanship, and its testament to a period of social optimism and technological advancement”.
The listing praised the panels as “striking and highly distinctive” and said each one was “bespoke and beautifully made”.
In 2013, just before the old telephone exchange building was demolished, the City of London Corporation took ownership of the murals and moved them to their current site on Cromwell Highwalk in a publicly accessible part of the Barbican. This seems an appropriate location, since the Barbican Estate was another product of the post-war view of a new and modern world.
Dorothy Annan’s husband, Trevor Tennant, was also an artist. His works include architectural commissions such as murals, as well as figurative sculptures and portraits.
Dorothy Annan died in 1983 at the Sue Ryder Home in Snettisham, Norfolk. Thankfully, at least some of her public mural work has survived her.
In addition, a selection of the wide range of artworks by both Dorothy Annan and Trevor Tennant can be seen online at the DATTdb: Dorothy Annan Trevor Tennant database.
The nine panels of Dorothy Annan's murals
To read about another artwork commissioned to stand outside a London telephone exchange building, please see Seven Ages of Man: Shakespeare, BT & brutalism
Walks available for booking
For a schedule of forthcoming London On The Ground guided walks, please click here.
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