Amazing Structure In Thailand Pays Homage To Isle Of Wight

A man living in Thailand has completed his eye-catching labour of love in homage to his homeland, while simultaneously helping to keep local beaches tidy.

The building of a giant two tonne plus sculpture of the Isle of Wight took Julian Croswell one month to construct and many of the 142,000 figures that were used on the construction had been hand made in the previous two years.

The sculpture, which weighs more than two tonnes took around six weeks to complete.

Julian explains:

"We have done beach clean-ups in the UK and Thailand and we regularly lock up this waste material into the figures in the project.

"We will be expanding the scale and scope of our beach cleaning works in the coming months and years."

This is the first giant sculpture map in what will be a series of giant geographical sculptures Julian plans to make, with other areas of the UK close to his heart planned.

Julian faced some unforeseen challenges during his mission, as he explains:

"We had two very large storms hit us whilst the map was under construction.

"The first one was by far the most powerful and fortunately it did not do too much damage to the map only because I just had the map outline built at the time and this is pretty robust.

"The storm lifted a 50 kilogram pile of steel near us and hurled it through the air with ease. There is no way I would have been able to have kept on my feet had I stayed outside."

"The rain removed the top layer of clay on several thousand of the figures, but very few were destroyed completely. All in all - the Isle of Wight proved pretty resilient to whatever was thrown at it!"

Julian grew up in Reading, but found himself fascinated by the Island during trips to the area, specifically recalling memories of Blackgang Chine and the Isle of Wight festival.

He subsequently became close friends with Isle of Wight musician Les Payne - the rock legend who played more than 6,000 global gigs during his lifetime before passing away seven years ago.

It was Les who took Julian on a tour of the Isle of Wight and pointed out all the places that held memories for him.

The Isle of Wight is the first of a series of giant sculptures for the Youtararmy Project.