Objectives: to pursue PMSA’s main projects – the National Recording Project, Sculpture Journal, Save our Sculpture and Marsh Award for Public Sculpture. Recording, informing, preserving, promoting.

The PMSA is a registered charity, which relies on the voluntary work of its members. Its many projects and publications are funded by subscriptions and by the generosity of a number of individuals, institutions and grant-giving bodies.

The PMSA, established in 1991, aims to bring together individuals and organisations with a mutual interest in public sculptures and monuments, their production, preservation and history. The Association intends to encourage public awareness of Britain's monumental heritage - past, present and future - through activities, publications and dialogue; and it campaigns for listing, preservation, protection and restoration. The period of interest, beginning from around the Stuart period, extends to new commissions of the present day and also includes the three 13th century Eleanor Crosses that survive in Geddington, Hardingstone and Waltham Cross, as well as other medieval work still surviving in public places.

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THE ORGANISATION AND THE FOUNDING MEMBERS

The PMSA's founding members were Jo Darke (now PMSA Chief Executive), with the writer, lecturer and broadcaster Paul Atterbury, Ian Leith of the National Monuments Record, and Catherine Moriarty, then Co-ordinator of the National Inventory of War Memorials which was founded in 1989 to create a database of war memorials throughout the UK.

From the beginning, the PMSA was actively encouraged by the writer and sculpture scholar Benedict Read, and by Andrew and Janet Naylor, metal sculpture conservators. Subscriptions were opened in May 1991 and membership has now stabilised at around 250. Since 1991, the PMSA has initiated the National Recording Project and collaborated with the publishers Liverpool University Press on the acclaimed series Public Sculpture of Britain, and has established the much respected bi-annual Sculpture Journal. It has set up events, conferences and publications in collaboration with English Heritage, the UK Institute of Conservators, University College Dublin and many other similar institutions. The PMSA operates an advisory service and distributes newsletters and newsheets to its members.

The latest projects includecollaboration with a number of organisations and individuals to oversee production of the Custodians Handbook, published in 2005 and occasionally updated. It was designed to give guidance to families and individuals who inherit sculptors' works, studios, archives and memorabilia; and the campaign Save our Sculpture (SoS) was set to to encourage concerned members of the public to keep watch over their neighbourhood sculptures, and to report damage or negligence to the PMSA.

The Association is a charitable company which is run by its Board of Director/Trustees, known as the General Committee, whose Chairman is Loyd Grossman. Sub-committees, when necessary, are established to organise events, projects or campaigns.

PMSA - Public Monuments and Sculpture Association
Company no 3415961
Registered Charity no 1066451/0.

PUBLIC SCULPTURE: WHAT COUNTS

What counts as public, or outdoor, sculptures and monuments in the PMSA? We count landscape or urban features that are sculptural and/or commemorative, or both. Not buildings, although we count commemorative clock towers, fountains, road markers (if they are substantially commemorative or sculptural). Because the prehistoric period is a different specialisation, we date the works roughly from the Stuart period.. However, Oxford and Cambridge show medieval sculptures over college gateways, and a small number of medieval sculptures can be seen in London. The three remaining Eleanor Crosses, their bodywork and sculptures heavily restored, date from the thirteenth century. But earlier sculptures – Celtic, Anglo-Saxon or Roman – do not come into the PMSA’s field.

We do not count church monuments, or sculptures and monuments in cemeteries and churchyards unless they are publicly-subscribed, commemorative pieces that happen to have been sited there. We are conscious of the great importance of these latter examples but for the time being the PMSA is content for the specialists in these extensive subjects to support their own.

The PMSA recognises, also, the importance of war monuments as part of the tradition of public commemorative sculptures and monuments. We have a sister-relationship with the National Inventory of War Memorials and with the War Memorial Trust (see Links).

There are, and always will be, anomalies. Some of us, for example, feel that Epstein's superb St Michael and the Devil on the front of Coventry Cathedral has such an impact on the street scene that it should count in the PMSA as a public sculpture. Some would count the contents of sculpture parks and the landscaped surroundings of stately homes open to the public, such as Rousham (Oxfordshire) or Stowe in Bucks. Some sculptures on private estates such as Sandringham, where Adrian Jones's sculpture of Edward VII's favourite race horse Persimmon can be seen from the public highway, could be counted as public sculpture, since they too are in the public eye.

Note In the National Recording Project volumes, these criteria vary slightly from volume to volume.