As lead body of the Landmark Wales Project, Monmouthshire County Council is making good progress in its bid to win a slice of £140 million towards building two iconic landmarks in the county. Landmark Wales is an ambitious plan to mark major entry points to Wales at key Welsh transition points. With a potential budget of £18m, the project is a Public Art Programme of unprecedented scale and ambition in the UK and has been shortlisted along with 29 other UK applicants for Phase 2 consideration. The Landmark Wales partnership of seven Local Authorities, Capital Region Tourism and North Wales Economic Forum has been given development funding from Big Lottery's Living Landmarks Fund and the promoters are launching 2 parallel appointment processes to recruit artists/design teams. A total of eight sites are being considered across Wales as part of the application for development funding, two of which are in Monmouthshire - The Second Severn Crossing and the A40 at Monmouth. The Second Severn Crossing forms part of the Phase One process, and potential design contributions have been sought from designers and architects across the world. The deadline has now passed for Phase 1 which comprises three of the eight Welsh sites and over 90 submissions have been received - including interest from as far afield as Australia, USA, Holland, France, Germany, Finland, Slovenia, Poland, and India. Five artists/design teams will be appointed shortly and will be commissioned to produce five separate concepts by the end of March that will be subject to public exhibition in April. Monmouth, along with four other sites forms part of Living Landmarks Phase 2 which will be conducted in the form of an open competition with a deadline of 21st March for entries. Once again these concepts will be the subject of a public exhibition, with a prize of £5000 being offered for the successful design chosen to form part of the application for development funding at the end of May 2007. Phase Two of the project is open to artists, architects, designers, engineers, multidisciplinary teams, students and non-professional applicants. For both stages there will be an opportunity for local residents and all interested in the scheme to give their views at stakeholder meetings being arranged for the beginning of February. The Project is being managed on behalf of Monmouthshire County Council by the 'Working Parts' consultancy. Geoff Wood, director, explained the background to the project "Wales is asserting a sense of nationhood after a long period when it was simply an adjunct to its larger and dominant neighbour. These differences are most evident in festivals, in song, literature and of course through the language. "This sense of cultural identity and independent nationhood is however not so evident where the infrastructure crosses the borders, probably because it was never originally meant to be. "There is little sense of entering a different country and when one is moving through Wales on some the key routes there is little sense of how Welsh culture has affected these transition points" he said. "These new icons can help draw people's attention to all the other qualities of Wales; its cultural and industrial heritage, its diversity, the extraordinary natural environment and the social structures that have shaped the country and its people".
