Public Art proposals that never made it

I got a link for the Guardian the other week because it had some interesting articles in it.
The new archive of proposed public art projects..
I had a look at the website and it had ‘Henry Moore Foundation to showcase public art proposals that never made it’.

Archives include the alternative Diana, Princess of Wales, memorial sculpture and scores of other detailed proposals.

‘The trust's archive has never been seen by the public, but has now been acquired by the Henry Moore Foundation in Leeds - a charity set up and endowed by Moore, who was one of the most successful 20th century British artists in winning public art commissions. Curators are working through the boxes and cataloguing drawings, paintings, maquettes, photographs and correspondence.’
Stephen Feeke, curator of the Art In Public Places exhibition which the foundation will mount in Leeds next month, giving the public its first glimpse of the contents, said: "I found Julian's one of the most surprising discoveries in the archive, because he's not the sort of artist you would associate with this kind of commission at all."
"The archive covers a crucial period in British art, and maps the shift from monuments which may be quite contemporary in style but are made in very traditional materials like stone and bronze, to ideas which may not impact on their surroundings in any permanent way - such as Anya Gallaccio's proposal for beds of white flowers at King's Cross," he said.


I really enjoyed reading about these projects that were never completed.

• Leonardo da Vinci spent years on drawings and models for a giant bronze equestrian portrait of the Duke of Milan. He promised the duke's son it would be "the greatest statue in Italy", but never completed it.

• In 1931 Sir Edwin Lutyens designed a stupendous Roman Catholic cathedral for Liverpool in Byzantine style, twice the size of Giles Gilbert Scott's Anglican cathedral and dominating the city skyline. Instead Merseyside's Catholics had to wait for "Paddy's Wigwam", the 1967 concrete tent by Sir Frederick Gibberd.

• Albertopolis in London was planned as a memorial to Prince Albert, a parade of gardens and fountains linking the great museums of south Kensington: only the dank Victorian tunnel under Exhibition Road, originally leading all the way to the Albert Hall and once used as a shooting range, survives.

• The columns on Calton Hill in Edinburgh were to be part of a building of Parthenon grandeur, a monument to the Scots who died in the Napoleonic wars: the money ran out, and it remained a picturesque ruin.

• Marc and Isambard Kingdom Brunel's 1843 tunnel under the Thames, the first in the world, was planned as a dual carriageway for horse-drawn commercial traffic: the money ran out, the vital spiral ramps within 250-foot diameter shafts were never built, and it became an underwater street market with an unsavoury reputation, until it was changed to a rail tunnel in 1865.