Dorothy Annan

Born in 1900, Annan exhibited with the Artists' International Association, and once featured in an art show in an air-raid shelter beside work by Augustus John during World War II. In 1949 she taught at the Bath College of Art. For a time they lived in a single-decker bus. She died in 1983 at the Sue Ryder Home in Snettisham, Norfolk. Examples of Annan's paintings are held in many national collections and she is also known for her many mosaics and tile murals, several of which have been destroyed in recent decades. The largest single example, the Expanding Universe at the Bank of England, was destroyed in 1997. Only three of her major public murals are believed to survive. == Fleet Building telecom murals ==

In November 2011 the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, DCMS, granted Grade II listed status to Annan's murals on the front of the Fleet Building, 70 Farringdon Street, formerly the largest telephone exchange in London. The murals were commissioned at a cost of £300 per panel in 1960. Annan visited the Hathernware pottery in Loughborough and hand-scored her designs onto each wet clay tile, her brush marks can also be seen in the fired panels. The listing was supported by the Twentieth Century Society and the Tiles & Architectural Ceramics Society, artist Frank Auerbach and Penelope Curtis, Director of Tate Britain. The building is owned by Goldman Sachs, who wished to redevelop the site and opposed the listing of the murals. In January 2013, the City of London Corporation agreed to take ownership of the murals, and in September 2013 these were moved to a permanent location in a publicly accessible part of the Barbican Estate. They are displayed in their original sequence within an enclosed section of the Barbican Highwalk between Speed House and the Barbican Centre. The family of Annan and Tennant donated their archive to the Archive of Sculptors' Papers at the Henry Moore Foundation. ==References==