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Live coverage of the Republican presidential campaign as conservatives gather at annual CPAC conference in DC

12.25pm: Yes we've been amused and then bored by the whole "Shit [insert name] says" thing.

And just to flog that last strips of flesh from that dead horse, here's a Democratic party Super Pac with "Shit Mitt Says". It's semi-funny.

12.14pm: The highlight of CPAC so far has been Marco Rubio, who wowed the crowd on the controversial subject of the healthcare mandate and contraception provision:

You may not agree with what that religion agrees. That's not the point. The point is, the First Amendment still applies. This isn't even a social issue, this is a constitutional issue. The federal government has no right to tell religious institutions to pay for things they believe are wrong.

Oh and Rubio joked that teleprompters were "hard to find in this town" because Obama had them all:

Oh dear Marco Rubio. The "Obama uses teleprompters" is a Republican meme since a clunky appearance by the president before an audience of school kids in 1973 or something, but it's getting tired – especially since Mitt Romney appears unable to exhale without a teleprompter.

11.39am: Here's the CPAC schedule for tomorrow. It's being held at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel for those of you planning glitter-bombings (note: the Guardian does not endorse glitter-bombing even if it produces hilarious photographs).

10.25am: Rick Santorum
12.55pm: Mitt Romney
4pm: Newt Gingrich

Today Rick Santorum is preparing for Super Tuesday on 6 March by campaigning in Oklahoma, which is said to be full of evangelicals, although you wouldn't know it from Rogers and Hammerstein.

Anyway, Santorum is holding a rally at the Mabee Center in Tulsa at 1.30pm central time, if you want to pop along.

11.27am: Oh CNN has a "delegate calculator" for you to play with. Knock yourself out here.

11.20am: The Financial Times's Edward Luce is a contender for introduction of the year with this deconstruction of the GOP presidential field:

If the Republican presidential candidates were your neighbours, Newt Gingrich would be in a bitter dispute with you about your fence. Ron Paul would keep foisting weird books on your teenagers about Austrians and gold. And the electronic gates to Mitt Romney's residence would barely be visible through the rhododendrons.

Only Rick Santorum would fit the type who mowed your lawns and dropped off pecan pies. He may preach a bit and wear off-putting V-necked sleeveless sweaters. But it would always be with a cheery smile.

On this theme, here are the GOP candidates in terms of popular television characters:

Rick Santorum = Ned Flanders (The Simpsons)
Mitt Romney = Conrad Grayson (Revenge)
Ron Paul = Ron Swanson (Parks & Rec)
Newt Gingrich = Jack Donaghy (30 Rock)

On reflection that is too kind to Newt Gingrich. Leave suggestions in the comments below, why not?

10.45am: Would you like to have your photograph taken with Mitt Romney? Well, who wouldn't? Apart from most people.

Well, good news: just take a cheque (or a check) for $2,500 along to the Marriott Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC at 5pm tonight, and your dream will come true.

10.24am: Rick Santorum spent yesterday in Texas meeting people with lots of money and asking them to donate some of it to him.

Santorum's campaign claims to have raised more than $1m in donations in the 24 hours since his Midwest night of triumphs. When Mitt Romney heard the news he lit a cigar with a $100 bill and then wrote a cheque to "cash" for $1,000,000.01 just to prove a point.

10am: There's no rest for the Republican presidential candidates as they criss-cross the country raising money and preparing for a showdown at the annual Conservative Political Action Committee conference in Washington DC this weekend.

CPAC kicked off today – down the road from the National Zoo, perhaps appropriately – and it will hear from Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich tomorrow, with Rand Paul appearing as a proxy for his father Ron, who is campaigning in Maine.

The FT's Anna Fifield spots a fashion trend at CPAC, perhaps related to climate change denial and/or thermal underwear.

Meanwhile the implications of Rick Santorum's triple victory on Tuesday night continue to sink in, although the received wisdom is that Mitt Romney remains in the strongest position.

In reality, a $25bn mortgage deal with banks is a drop in the ocean – given US homeowners' $700bn of negative equity

Big announcements of breakthrough legislative deals during election campaigns should be taken with huge grains of salt. Generally more rhetoric than reality, they sometimes contain real concessions made by politicians seeking votes. So it is with Thursday's Washington announcement of $25bn to help homeowners. Something significant is happening, but it lies below the surface of the headlines.

Typically, modern governments intervene in two ways when – as has been true since 2007 – free-enterprise capitalist economies produce particularly bad versions of their recurring economic "downturns". One economic policy is aptly called "trickle down" economics. It involves throwing heaps of money at the top of the economic pyramid – to mammoth banks, insurance companies, and other corporations at or near economic collapse. Policy-makers hope that such help for these institutions will revive their activity and thereby trickle down – as credit and orders for medium-sized and small businesses, and then, finally, to jobs and maybe wage increases for the majority of workers.

The alternative is "trickle up" economic policy. It involves government financial aid aimed chiefly at helping the mass of workers. That policy's goal is for the assisted workers to resume purchasing, which will, in turn, boost business revenues and so rebuild prosperity.

The historical record is quite clear: trickle down is no better or more effective a policy to end deep recessions and depressions than trickle up. In the last great capitalist downturn of the 1930s, the Roosevelt administration first tried trickle down. Its poor results, coupled with profound political pressures from below – the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) membership drives that brought new millions into labor unions and the surging socialist and communist parties – forced Roosevelt to add major trickle up policies. They worked better, but not well enough to overcome the Great Depression.

Of course, large corporations, their shareholders and stock markets prefer trickle down. They get bailed out and they "recover", while the rest of us watch to see what may or may not trickle down. The US working class has been waiting for over four years. Precious little has yet trickled down. The majority of citizens prefer trickle up and for parallel reasons. Which kind of policy prevails depends on which side wields more power over the policy-makers.

Under Bush and Obama, trickle down has dominated overwhelmingly since the current crisis began in 2007. There were a few trickle-up measures: modest individual income tax cuts, repeated but very ineffective efforts to help those subjected to foreclosure, and extensions of unemployment compensation benefits. However, they were utterly dwarfed by what the Treasury and the Fed poured out in trickle-down bailouts. By 2011, it was clear that the Bush-Obama trickle-down policy had failed to end this second-worst economic downturn in a century.

The Obama team was beginning to learn what the Roosevelt team had learned sooner in their Great Depression. It turns out that bailouts for the top of the economic pyramid, which never trickle down, leave an economically depressed mass at the bottom. Governments that also try to pay for trickle-down policies by imposing "austerity programs" on the bottom only make matters worse. Sustained depression at the bottom eventually threatens the top: first economically and then also politically.

That happened sooner and more powerfully in the more depressed and more politically mobilized conditions of the 1930s. But the Tea Parties and the Occupy Wall Street movement, in their radically different ways, suggest something comparable unfolding now in the US. In Europe, the process is further along, as the Greek example shows.

The Obama team began in 2011 to supplement a wholly inadequate trickle-down approach with some limited trickle-up elements. The biggest of these have been the reductions in the social security deduction on paychecks. Another small step is this week's modest help for homeowners facing foreclosures. It will not help the majority of those in such danger – for example, the 50% of mortgages owned by Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac are ineligible. It will help the rest, but not much.

Consider simply that the negative equity of US homeowners is estimated now at $ 700bn. That is how much more they owe on their homes than those homes are worth. This new bill proposes $26bn in aid for that problem. No such timidity attended the trillions provided for the trickle-down bailouts since 2007. The banks are happy with this proposed settlement's low cost to them.

While the government's help to homeowners is far from adequate or just, it represents a partial and late recognition of trickle-down economics' inadequacy as policy. It further concedes the need for some trickle up. What happens next depends on the evolution of this crisis and of the political forces gathering strength.

Those factors will determine how long the beneficiaries of trickle-down economics can sustain the policy's dominance and continue to shift its costs onto the mass of people through austerity programs. Those same factors will also determine whether we see next a further shift to trickle-up economics – or a more basic challenge to an economic system whose instability is so severe and so socially costly.

Leveson inquiry hears anonymous allegations of hacking and bribery in testimony quoted by NUJ's Michelle Stanistreet

Journalists have submitted testimony to the Leveson inquiry recounting a culture of bullying and stress at the News of the World, and making new allegations of wrongdoing by the paper's reporters.

Michelle Stanistreet, the general secretary of the National Union of Journalists, recounted allegations of computer hacking, bugging, and bribery at the newspaper and elsewhere on Fleet Street.

Quoting from the anonymised testimony of 12 journalists who has spoken to the union, Stanistreet gave an account of newsroom culture at the News of the World.

Paraphrasing a journalist who had spent three years at the paper, she said: "There was a real military chain of command … you did what you were told, when you were told, and it took a pretty brave person to take a stand.

"Life was made miserable, and he goes on to say: 'You quickly find yourself out of work. You grit your teeth and put up with it. If you want a career in the future, you shut up and you keep quiet. There's a lot of that about at the moment.'."

Another reporter said "three or four [News of the World] staff suffered physical collapses at the office, almost certainly to some extent as a result of the stress".

The same individual's testimony outlined the pressures facing then royal editor, Clive Goodman, who was imprisoned for four months in 2007 for phone hacking.

"Mr Goodman enjoyed a high salary and big title as royal editor and came in for a lot of flak. He'd been publicly lambasted for a lack of stories or ideas in conference, probably more than anyone," Stanistreet quoted.

"I am not suggesting this excuses his later actions, far from it, but there is no doubt in my mind that he was under intense pressure to perform."

One experienced journalist admitted personally engaging in installing trojan horse viruses on computers, bribing and stealing to obtain information, and said the "dark arts" were in use across his time on "mid-markets, on red-tops and in broadsheets"

With regard to the journalist's own admitted use of trojan horse viruses, used to collect information from individuals' computer use, Stanistreet quoted: "I know from direct experience that [X] [Newspaper name removed by the Leveson enquiry] have also used trojan programmes and I have it from good first-hand information that the News of the World also utilised such techniques."

When asked by Lord Justice Leveson, Stanistreet agreed that "first-hand information" in this context amounted to hearsay.

A freelance photographer who worked for the paper recounted to the NUJ a specific incident in which he or she believed information had been obtained from a police official.

"This is a News of the World journalist who took the mobile number begin to her – him or her – by a homeless man and then said wait a minute … called the number, gave that person on the other end of the line the mobile number that she had just been given," Stanistreet paraphrased.

"Then within 15 minutes somebody called back and gave the name and address of the woman who the phone was registered to. And the journalist notes that this information could only have been obtain from a policeman or someone working for a mobile phone company, but it was unlikely that it was the mobile phone company."

The inquiry agreed to admit the secondhand testimony of journalists recounted through the NUJ after asking Stanistreet about how the information was collected during her testimony, and having the inquiry's counsel review Stanistreet's notes in advance of her appearance.

References to specific journalists were removed from the statements, as were references to all publications except the News of the World.

At the time of writing, the full written evidence from the12 journalists had not been published on the Leveson inquiry website due to ongoing redaction.

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Pakistani textile billionaire Alshair Fiyaz now the frontrunner to buy the failed 600-store fashion chain

Edinburgh Woollen Mill has pulled out of the bidding for Peacocks, putting the Pakistani textile billionaire Alshair Fiyaz in pole position to buy the failed fashion chain.

Sources close to the talks said Fiyaz, who is working with Solstra Capital, a Danish investment fund, had put the most credible offer on the table for Peacocks' 600-store chain.

Administrators at KPMG are considering second-round bids for the group in the hope of selling the business as a going concern and saving 9,500 jobs. Two other bidders are believed to be interested in buying Peacocks, including an unnamed Indian manufacturer without a presence in the UK. The administrator is aiming to get a sale agreed by next week.

Sources said a buyer was likely to have to pay up to £25m for Peacocks and find about £50m of working capital. Edinburgh Woollen Mill, which last year bought the Jane Norman chain out of administration, is understood to have been interested in a "substantial parcel of Peacocks stores". But the privately owned company said it had decided it would no longer be pursuing a bid. It did not give any reasons.

Fiyaz is reported to be working with Peacocks' managing director, Tim Bettley, finance director Roy Ellis and Neil Burns, chief operating officer. He is also rumoured to have Peacocks's former chairman, John Lovering, on board.

Previously unknown in the UK, three years ago Fiyaz bought Magasin du Nord, an upmarket Danish department store, which he went on to lease to Debenhams, the department store where Lovering was previously chairman.

Peacocks went into administration last month after talks on restructuring part of its massive debts collapsed. It owes £750m in total according to KPMG, about the same as the overall sales of the group.

Although the underlying retail business was profitable, Peacocks struggled to cope with complex loans put in place by its hedge fund backers.

KPMG has previously announced 249 job cuts from Peacocks' head office. Further jobs were cut at the Bonmarché chain, where 160 stores closed before a further 230 were sold to private-equity firm Sun European Partners. The collapsed chain is the largest retail casualty since the demise of Woolworths in 2008.

Peacocks traces its history back to 1884, when Albert Frank Peacock founded Peacock's Penny Bazaar in Warrington, Cheshire.

Wang Lijun's visit to US consulate triggers speculation of political power struggle with local party chief tipped for Beijing promotion

The Chinese police chief at the heart of an unfolding political drama is under investigation after spending a day at a US consulate, state media has reported, following widespread speculation that he attempted to defect.

The terse, one-line statement about Wang Lijun from official news agency Xinhua - issued at around 11pm Beijing time on Thursday– came one day after the announcement that he was receiving "vacation-style treatment" owing to stress.

The fall from grace of Chongqing's vice-mayor and former police boss has triggered intense speculation of a political struggle because of his close ties to the city's ambitious party secretary, Bo Xilai, who had been tipped for promotion when a new generation of leaders takes power this year.

Wang's transfer to non-police duties last week led to suggestions that the two men had fallen out amid a possible corruption investigation.

Asked about Wang on Thursday, a top Chinese diplomat said it was an "isolated incident" and had been "resolved quite smoothly", AP reported.

Vice-minister Cui Tiankai, who was briefing reporters on the vice-president Xi Jinping's trip to the US next week, said it would not affect that visit.

American officials had already confirmed that Wang had visited the US consulate in Chengdu, which was surrounded by scores of Chinese police on Tuesday.

A US state department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, told reporters in Washington: "Wang Lijun did request a meeting at the US consulate general in Chengdu earlier this week in his capacity as vice-mayor.

"The meeting was scheduled, our folks met with him, he did visit the consulate and he later left the consulate of his own volition … Obviously, we don't talk about issues having to do with refugee status, asylum."

She added that to her knowledge, the consulate had not been in contact with Wang since then.

The South China Morning Post cited claims that Wang had since been flown to Beijing.

Wang, 52, began his career as a traffic police officer but soon rose through the ranks, earning a reputation as a gang buster – and, according to Chinese media reports, a 6m yuan (£600,000) price on his head from enraged triads.

Beijing-based political analyst Russell Leigh Moses said several recent remarks from Boy, attacking people who blew their own horns, might easily be taken as being directed towards Wang.

"Perhaps Wang saw himself as a political alternative to Bo should the latter leave for Beijing and his sudden departure was the result of being told that outcome was impossible.

"Was Wang concerned enough about his own future –at the hands of his p… offered his best protection against retaliation?" the analyst wrote in an article for the Wall Street Journal website. "Or did Wang have no intention of fleeing the country in the first place? Was he instead trying to signal others that he had something that threatened to bring down the political temple that Bo has built?"

While the party secretary's charismatic style and energetic leadership has won him many admirers, others in the party are said to be alarmed by his ambition. Observers suggest the fallout from events in Chongqing could recast the broader political outlook, potentially to the benefit of liberals alarmed by what they see as Bo's leftist tendencies.

"The first shiv was squarely stuck into flamboyant Chongqing party secretary Bo Xilai," wrote Arthur Kroeber of the Beijing research firm Gavekal-Dragonomics.

But Kerry Brown, head of the Asia programme at the Chatham House thinktank, said: "It's an incredibly risky time to mandate this kind of swoop on anyone – for everyone, not just for Bo. The party cannot have these scraps with themselves as the time towards the leadership [changes] goes by. If anything, I think the hands of people have been forced.

"He's got enemies and this plays into their hands … [But] there are other ways to deal with Bo's potential leadership than this way, which is pretty noisy."

It is widely assumed that Xi will become general secretary and president of China, with Li Keqiang taking over as vice-president. But in a system of collective leadership, the composition of the full standing committee is crucial and analysts have warned that competition for places is fierce.

"The growing openness of self-promotion campaigns by some of these ambitious politicians, their idiosyncratic initiatives and policy interests, and their respective strengths and weaknesses have made this upcoming political succession a particularly challenging one for the [Communist party] leadership," wrote the Brookings Institute analyst Cheng Li in a recent paper.

• Duo accused of vandalising cars in Newcastle's China Town
• Sunderland pair have missed recent games with injury

Sunderland's Nicklas Bendtner and Lee Cattermole have been charged with criminal damage after cars were allegedly vandalised close to the home of Newcastle United, their club's arch rivals.

The striker Bendtner and the midfielder Cattermole, who is club captain, will face magistrates on 27 February following an alleged incident in Newcastle city centre in December.

Northumbria police said the team-mates, who both live in Ponteland, Northumberland, will face five charges of criminal damage relating to cars parked in Stowell Street in Newcastle's China Town. The street is packed with restaurants and is a popular haunt with fans on their way to Newcastle's stadium. The damage was alleged to have been caused at around 10pm on 6 December, two days after Sunderland lost 2-1 at Wolverhampton Wanderers.

Bendtner, a 24-year-old Denmark international, is spending a year on Wearside on loan from Arsenal. Both he and Cattermole, 23, have missed recent games due to injury.

Naomi Watts takes leading role in Caught In Flight, the first serious feature biopic about the princess

There have been many films about 9/11, but surprisingly few about 8/31, Britain's own day of trauma – when Diana, Princess of Wales, died in a car crash with her boyfriend, Dodi Fayed.

The announcement of a new film, Caught In Flight, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel (who made Downfall) and starring Naomi Watts in the leading role, is the first serious feature biopic about the princess. It reportedly focuses on the last two years of her life.

Cinema hasn't been entirely silent on this subject. Stephen Frears's The Queen (2006) was all about the media-constitutional crisis in that frantic week between the princess's death and the funeral: but the focus was not on Diana, it was on Helen Mirren's shrewd yet troubled monarch and Michael Sheen's callow prime minister Tony Blair: the heroic survivors of this trauma. The sucrose French romance Amélie (2001) made a motif of Lady Di, the lonely heroine who died in a Paris underpass.

And last year a conspiracy-theory documentary called Unlawful Killing surfaced at the Cannes film festival, directed by Keith Allen and written by Victor Lewis-Smith, which appeared to take the line promoted by backer Mohamed Al Fayed, questioning the official version of events.

But really, it is notable how little there has been on screen about our troubled "queen of hearts". It's strange, given that she had such a movie star presence. She was our sloaney Monroe; in the 80s, when Diana was the jewel of a thousand photo-ops, Camille Paglia said that she was the last great silent-movie star.

It's hard to say why Diana's story has been relatively untouched by Hollywood. Royal themes go in and out of fashion: the success of The King's Speech has brought this mode back, and everyone in the US appeared to love the recent royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton on TV.

But Madonna's awful film W.E. about the Duchess of Windsor shows that the flummery of British blue-bloods can look stiff and brittle on screen. Incidentally, W.E. featured an actor sympathetically playing Al Fayed.

It could be that Hollywood has been nervous of all the conspiracy stuff that pours out of anyone's computer if they type her name into Google. Or perhaps producers are unsure of what sort of film it should be. Also, the horror of 9/11 overwhelmed the Diana death and the extravagant international display of grief about one woman may continue to embarrass people.

This was simply a mightily unhappy ending: a woman who did not fit into a Hollywood template, having met her end while in the company of a playboy who was not obviously sympathetic. Dodi Fayed was a kind of Aristotle Onassis to her Jackie Kennedy: rich, charming, supportive, but not exactly the handsome storybook prince that Hollywood prefers. And Diana's private life was messy and unhappy.

Well, enough time has gone by to give the Diana death a historical flavour. Hirschbiegel's Downfall famously concentrated on the final days of Hitler. Perhaps he will now bring that flair for claustrophobic unhappiness and Götterdämmerung to a more vulnerable, sympathetic subject.

Pakistani textile billionaire Alshair Fiyaz now the frontrunner to buy the failed 600-store fashion chain

Edinburgh Woollen Mill has pulled out of the bidding for Peacocks, putting the Pakistani textile billionaire Alshair Fiyaz in pole position to buy the failed fashion chain.

Sources close to the talks said Fiyaz, who is working with Solstra Capital, a Danish investment fund, had put the most credible offer on the table for Peacocks' 600-store chain.

Administrators at KPMG are considering second-round bids for the group in the hope of selling the business as a going concern and saving 9,500 jobs. Two other bidders are believed to be interested in buying Peacocks, including an unnamed Indian manufacturer without a presence in the UK. The administrator is aiming to get a sale agreed by next week.

Sources said a buyer was likely to have to pay up to £25m for Peacocks and find about £50m of working capital. Edinburgh Woollen Mill, which last year bought the Jane Norman chain out of administration, is understood to have been interested in a "substantial parcel of Peacocks stores". But the privately owned company said it had decided it would no longer be pursuing a bid. It did not give any reasons.

Fiyaz is reported to be working with Peacocks' managing director, Tim Bettley, finance director Roy Ellis and Neil Burns, chief operating officer. He is also rumoured to have Peacocks's former chairman, John Lovering, on board.

Previously unknown in the UK, three years ago Fiyaz bought Magasin du Nord, an upmarket Danish department store, which he went on to lease to Debenhams, the department store where Lovering was previously chairman.

Peacocks went into administration last month after talks on restructuring part of its massive debts collapsed. It owes £750m in total according to KPMG, about the same as the overall sales of the group.

Although the underlying retail business was profitable, Peacocks struggled to cope with complex loans put in place by its hedge fund backers.

KPMG has previously announced 249 job cuts from Peacocks' head office. Further jobs were cut at the Bonmarché chain, where 160 stores closed before a further 230 were sold to private-equity firm Sun European Partners. The collapsed chain is the largest retail casualty since the demise of Woolworths in 2008.

Peacocks traces its history back to 1884, when Albert Frank Peacock founded Peacock's Penny Bazaar in Warrington, Cheshire.

In her first permanent public commission, 1993 Turner prize winner to create huge frieze above gallery doors

Inspired by the Secession building in Vienna, and the ubiquity of a certain type of rapacious weed in Hackney, the artist Rachel Whiteread has designed a golden frieze that will finally solve a 111-year-old problem.

The Whitechapel Gallery in east London announced on Thursday what its director, Iwona Blazwick, called "the realisation of a dream" - a plan for a large and empty space on the front of its building to be filled by a permanent work of art.

In what is her first ever permanent public commission in the UK, Whiteread has been asked to fill the 8m by 15m space above the gallery doors on Whitechapel High Street, after the failure of the first attempt in 1901 when a planned mosaic by Walter Crane was judged too big and too expensive. Since then the problem has been kept "out of sight and out of mind", admitted Blazwick.

Whiteread said it had been a daunting task and one she had realised by installing a 1:1 model of the Whitechapel facade in her studio and working in wax to create a work of clusters of gilded leaves and branches.

"I find it quite difficult to work with computer generated images," she admitted. "I'm a sculptor, I like to work in three dimensions and not two dimensions."

Her influences for the frieze include the "tree of life" motif that is already part of the building as well as "the Hackney weed" she sees most days - Buddleia - which can be seen growing out of buildings or by the canal; the Secession building in Vienna with its "golden cabbage" roof and "then I went to the top of St Paul's and looked around and thought what is it that makes areas of London or just parts of buildings stand out?"

One answer was the use of gold. There will also be a more recognisable Whiteread touch to the work in that she's casting four terracotta reliefs of existing gallery windows as a counterpoint to the gilded leaves.

The work will be unveiled in June and forms part of the London 2012 festival running this summer as the culmination of the cultural olympiad.

The Art Fund is donating £200,000 to the project but Blazwick said it was too early to give further costing and funding figures as it was still "a work in progress".

The commission will fill a space that many did not even know was there to be filled; "it's part of invisible London," said Whiteread, who lives and works about five minutes' walk away from the gallery.

Her solution for the empty rectangle is quite a subtle work, although Whiteread said: "It's pretty ostentatious, there's gold leaf on it - it's the most ostentatious I've ever been."

Blazwick believes it will turn heads: "I think it will be a way of making people look up. Usually we're all busy, heads down running for the bus and the tube; this will be a way of celebrating the architecture in this part of town."

In her first permanent public commission, 1993 Turner prize winner to create huge frieze above gallery doors

Inspired by the Secession building in Vienna, and the ubiquity of a certain type of rapacious weed in Hackney, the artist Rachel Whiteread has designed a golden frieze that will finally solve a 111-year-old problem.

The Whitechapel Gallery in east London announced on Thursday what its director, Iwona Blazwick, called "the realisation of a dream" - a plan for a large and empty space on the front of its building to be filled by a permanent work of art.

In what is her first ever permanent public commission in the UK, Whiteread has been asked to fill the 8m by 15m space above the gallery doors on Whitechapel High Street, after the failure of the first attempt in 1901 when a planned mosaic by Walter Crane was judged too big and too expensive. Since then the problem has been kept "out of sight and out of mind", admitted Blazwick.

Whiteread said it had been a daunting task and one she had realised by installing a 1:1 model of the Whitechapel facade in her studio and working in wax to create a work of clusters of gilded leaves and branches.

"I find it quite difficult to work with computer generated images," she admitted. "I'm a sculptor, I like to work in three dimensions and not two dimensions."

Her influences for the frieze include the "tree of life" motif that is already part of the building as well as "the Hackney weed" she sees most days - Buddleia - which can be seen growing out of buildings or by the canal; the Secession building in Vienna with its "golden cabbage" roof and "then I went to the top of St Paul's and looked around and thought what is it that makes areas of London or just parts of buildings stand out?"

One answer was the use of gold. There will also be a more recognisable Whiteread touch to the work in that she's casting four terracotta reliefs of existing gallery windows as a counterpoint to the gilded leaves.

The work will be unveiled in June and forms part of the London 2012 festival running this summer as the culmination of the cultural olympiad.

The Art Fund is donating £200,000 to the project but Blazwick said it was too early to give further costing and funding figures as it was still "a work in progress".

The commission will fill a space that many did not even know was there to be filled; "it's part of invisible London," said Whiteread, who lives and works about five minutes' walk away from the gallery.

Her solution for the empty rectangle is quite a subtle work, although Whiteread said: "It's pretty ostentatious, there's gold leaf on it - it's the most ostentatious I've ever been."

Blazwick believes it will turn heads: "I think it will be a way of making people look up. Usually we're all busy, heads down running for the bus and the tube; this will be a way of celebrating the architecture in this part of town."