Pump Room Door - University of Birmingham

Artist: Bettina Furnée (b.1963)
Date: 1993
Medium: Bronze
Lent by Birmingham City Council
Location: Green Heart. To find this sculpture, you can either use its what three words location or use the campus digital map.

This carved bronze door, sculpted by Bettina Furnée, was originally created to be displayed on the pump room for the sculptural fountain found in Victoria Square in Birmingham city centre. However, it was never installed. As part of the expansion of the new campus parkland, the Green Heart, the architects created a home for the door on the pump room to the newly installed water feature, the rill. The door is carved with an excerpt from T.S. Eliot's poem Little Gidding from the Four Quartets series, which examines the theme of past, present, and future, and humanity's place within them.

Sculpture through a green lens: waterways past, present, possible

Flowing through continents, cities, and communities, water connects us all and few places tell that story as clearly as Birmingham. With more canals than Venice, the city grew around water as a working network. The canals were once tools of industry; today, they are lifelines for nature, movement, and reflection. On campus, this evolving relationship with water is reimagined through the Green Heart. Here, sustainability guides design: the rill recalls the city’s historic waterways while supporting biodiversity and climate resilience. Swallow hotels, beehives, and carefully planned planting transform water from a purely functional resource into a shared ecological system. The bronze door anchors these ideas. Artist Bettina Furnée originally created this door for the sculptural fountain in Birmingham city centre, but it was never used. Now, frames a new water space, linking past intentions with present action.

Visual Description

This is a large bronze door set back from a small path which follows the side of a tiered moving water feature called a rill. The path is along the right side of the rill and then turns a right-angled corner to the right and leads down a gentle slope to two doors. This slope is cut into the side of a tall grass verge with long grass and wild flowers all around it. There is a metal railing which rises up around the path to separate the paved area from the plants on the grass verge. There is a walkway above behind the railings. The sculpture is the door on the right-hand side as you stand facing it. The door is dark brown-bronze in colour. The surface is smooth apart from words cut into the surface. It is intricately carved with words from T.S. Eliot’s poem Little Gidding which reads:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, unremembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river

The voice of the hidden waterfall