Zemran by William Pye
Smoke stacks from industrial chimneys? The ghost of a steamship on the Thames?
Installed on outside our Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1972, Zemran is a beautiful stainless steel sculpture made by the English artist William Pye (b.1938).
The work was first shown in public at the Royal Academy exhibition British Sculptors ’72. Its owners, the ballerina Nadia Nerina and her husband Charles Gordon, then donated it to the Greater London Council to put on public display. In 2016, Historic England gave it Grade II listed status, along with the Bust of Nelson Mandela, also on our site.
Pye created it by combining metal from a decommissioned factory in north London and stainless steel tubing from Sweden.
He took its name from a Moroccan town in the Atlas Mountains, and said Zemran was inspired by the idea of wooden poles reflected in rippling water. But writing in 1972, New York Times journalist Bernard Weintraub described it as ‘a mammoth, stainless‐steel, science‐fiction object’.
Location
outside Queen Elizabeth Hall, Riverside Terrace