The Wote Street Willy

Walk from Festival Place towards the Top of the Town and you will pass it: a tall, rounded, silver-grey stone standing in the middle of the pavement on Wote Street. Ask a local what it is and there is a good chance they will tell you, with a slightly guilty grin, that it is the Wote Street Willy.

The Church Stone on Wote Street. Photo: Basingstoke Local.

So, does it?

We have stood in front of it for longer than is strictly comfortable, and honestly: not really. It is a tall rounded column of granite with a broader top. Look at one side and there is a carved face in profile, which rather spoils the joke once you have noticed it. But Basingstoke decided otherwise a long time ago, and the name has stuck.

What it really is

Its real name is the Church Stone. It was carved by the sculptor Michael Pegler and installed in 1994. It is a single block of silver-grey granite, almost three metres tall and weighing several tonnes, and it took two years to carve by hand.

It was made for this spot. According to the council’s public art guide, it commemorates Emmanuel Church, which stood nearby until 1969. That puts the church’s disappearance right in the middle of the decade when London’s overspill rebuilt the town centre, and a good deal of old Basingstoke went with it.

Rising out of the street

You might notice that it has no plinth. That is deliberate. In the artist’s own description, the stone is meant to look as though it is rising up through the street bricks, with four granite panels set into the pavement around it.

He also packed in a few references. The shape nods to the amphorae and pottery found at the Roman town of Silchester, a few miles north. There is a bit of Stonehenge in there too, and of standing stones generally. Seen that way, it is less a joke and more a memorial to a church that disappeared more than half a century ago.

The artist doesn’t mind

Atlas Obscura reports that Pegler is relaxed about the nickname. He sees it as a sign that the town has adopted the sculpture as its own. Which is a generous way of looking at it, and probably the right one. Plenty of public art gets ignored. Nobody in Basingstoke ignores the Church Stone.

Go and see it

It is on Wote Street, close to the Festival Place end, so it is easy to find on the way to The Haymarket or the Top of the Town. Look for the face, look for the panels in the pavement, and remember the church it stands in for. Then, by all means, call it what everyone else does.