It is a terrifying monument to the problem of knife crime on the streets of the UK… and it looks like a gorgeous, benevolent angel.
Created by 25-year-old sculptor Alfie Bradley in Oswestry, Shropshire, at the British Ironwork Centre, this towering exhibit uses around a 100,000 knives confiscated by police or donated by the public in recent amnesty initiatives and “knife bins” as part of the Save A Life, Surrender Your Life campaign.
It looks great – a beautiful sculpture that hammers home the scale of the issue – and could soon be set up on the Fourth Plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square.
Clive Knowles, the chairman of the British Ironwork Centre, said of the work: “The project started two years ago and it started with us seeing a documentary where the police were being criticised for not being proactive on reducing knife crime figures.
"We offered to build 150 knife amnesty banks for British police forces free of any cost. And the only proviso was that they would have to give us the weaponry in order to build a national monument against violence and aggression.”
Mr Knowles also added that there was no set date for when the statue would appear at Trafalgar Square, as a submission for the site would require the piece to be weighed.
Now that’s some art we can get behind.
