Victory Hill

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The sculpture was installed around Christmas 2005 during a flurry of snow when Rialto Homes new development at Winterthur Way was nearing completion. Parties involved were Basingstoke and Deane Council, AHA Architecture Ltd and Starberry who helped guide my ideas to the dots and dash of the Victory Morse code message.
The development and sculpture take their name from a nearby pub The Victory that was demolished during the sixties when Basingstoke became the capital town of roundabouts. The four piece installation comprises sanded stainless steel pyramids of various heights that are decorated with triangular copper sheet echoing the roofs of the buildings. At their apex are three 800mm diameter copper spheres and one lozenge that make up the Dot/Dot/Dot/Dash of the installation. The components for these pieces were spun from 3mm copper by Metspin near Emsworth but there were long delays in the supply of the parts on account of the first Gulf war; the firm involved being stretched to make pieces for the MOD and because the spinnings for Victory Hill were so large they had to be annealed several times. Later on further problems arose through using a wrongly specified adhesive 'strong enough to hold trains together' to join the hemispheres together. The problem of joining the hemispheres was resolved by Ron Neal a local model-maker and steam engineer after a chance encounter at a train model fair, who used countersunk brass screws into tapped holes, as fixings.
The sculpture is visible both from the access road to the residential units and the railway line that creates a direct link between Basingstoke and London. The project took around three years from start to finish and is probably the most architectural structure I have made.