How the mighty have fallen: why a 155-year-old statue of Prince Albert can be found in a lock-up garage

 They are the works of public art that millions walk past every day, but rarely notice.

Thousands of monuments across the UK are at risk of decay, according to the charity Art UK, which says sculpture is seen as “the poor relation of ‘flat art’”.

The charity is launching an ambitious project to catalogue 16,000 works that occupy outdoor public spaces.

Together with 150,000 works housed in museums and collections, they will form the first national database of sculpture.

The archive will be free to access, offering photographs and 3D images of every public sculpture in the country produced in the last 1,000 years.

It “will shine a light on sculpture hidden in plain view” and follows a similar initiative last year to catalogue over 200,000 publicly owned oil paintings.

Katey Goodwin, project manager for Art UK, said: “We chose sculpture because it often receives less attention than other art forms. It is also at risk - from exposure to the elements, accidental damage or theft.

“So often we’re too busy to stop and look at the things around us. There is a statue of the great 19th century navigator Matthew Flinders - and his cat - at Euston Station, but how many people notice it? There are statues of cats dotted around York, but a lot of people who have lived there for years have never seen them.”

One example of a public sculpture now in a state of decay is the statue of Prince Albert that once graced a memorial clocktower in Hastings.

Commissioned in 1862, the memorial was demolished in 1973 after being damaged by fire. The statue of Albert spent many years languishing in a greenhouse in a local park, and can now be found in a lock-up garage in St Leonards-on-Sea waiting to be restored.

The database will take four years to complete and is supported by £2.8 million of Lottery money.