Sculpture tribute to deputy who helped create Boris's London

A City worker who gave up his career in IT to become an artist is to sculpt a memorial to one of London's most influential politicians.

Bruce Denny is to create a bronze life-size image of Sir Simon Milton, Boris Johnson's former deputy mayor who died in April aged 49 after fighting leukaemia for 20 years.

The sculpture will be erected in Paddington Basin, one of London's largest regeneration projects and a significant part of Sir Simon's legacy. In his time as Westminster council leader, he was instrumental in transforming a wasteland around the rail station into one of Europe's largest urban developments.

One of his last outings was to Denny's current one-man show in Soho Square for a Westminster council sculpture festival. Denny, 44, said his work would pay tribute to Sir Simon's "visionary approach" to urban planning and reflect his "quiet exterior and inner strength".

The artist has access to personal photographs belonging to Sir Simon's partner of 23 years, Westminster council deputy leader Robert Davis, to create the tribute. Denny said: "We want to create his essence."

He is considering portraying his subject in a relaxed pose "surveying" Paddington Basin. It may lean against a new canal bridge and will be near a new skyscraper dubbed the "Cucumber".

Mr Davis said he had suggested Denny to Paddington Basin developer European Land as the sculptor was a friend of Sir Simon's.

He said the developers wanted a memorial to "someone who was so crucial and instrumental in the development of Paddington", and added: "I would like it to look like him, as if he was there...being relaxed."

Sir Simon became Mr Johnson's deputy mayor for policy and planning and, latterly, his chief of staff. During the past three years he oversaw the process of revising the London Plan, the Mayor's key document in guiding the future of the city. The Mayor said of the sculpture: "This is a fitting tribute to a man whose passion for improving this great city knew no bounds."

Denny, a Londoner became an artist "by accident", he said, bored with his job in IT. Six years ago he enrolled on a sculpture course at Morley College in Lambeth and discovered a talent for depicting the human body.

His piece The Conversion Of St Paul was commissioned to mark the cathedral's 300th anniversary.