I have been alerted to a lovely article about St. Tyfrydog, Llandyfrydog, the latest church to be added to the roster of churches looked after by the Friends of Friendless Churches, a wonderful and much-needed organisation which does work all over the country with a tiny staff.  It keeps the churches open.

St. Tyfrydog feels in the middle of nowhere in the middle of Anglesey, somewhere we had never been in fifty years of visiting Anglesey.  That is it’s charm, but also the problem of its maintenance because one can’t really expect the parish to pay for it.

The article explains the problem only too clearly.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/ng-interactive/2026/apr/23/the-welsh-church-claimed-by-spiders-and-ivy-what-do-britains-derelict-churches-say-about-our-health-and-happiness?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

It was my second funeral of the week (actually, today’s was a memorial service).

Clare Gittings, who I knew both at school (briefly) and as a very energetic and charismatic Learning Manager at the National Portrait Gallery from 1989 to when she retired in 2013, died of a stroke just before Christmas. 

As always at funerals, I discovered things about her that I had not known.  I knew she had written a book on Brasses and Brass Rubbing, published in 1970 when she was 16.  I did not know it had sold 40,000 copies.  Then she published her Oxford M.Litt as Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England, a pioneering study of the rituals of death. 

She viewed portraits as a historian, not an art historian, and was admirable at introducing children/students and their teachers to the nature of portraiture, having previously taught in an Essex primary school. 

Here she is in her youth:-

I went to the award ceremony for Níall McLaughlin’s RIBA Gold Medal, an impressive occasion, not least for the number of younger architects who seemed admiring of McLaughlin’s extreme sensitivity to issues of architectural history and symbolism, as evident in his introductory remarks on archaeology and Gottfried Semper.

He started by showing a project I hadn’t spotted before – a small garden pavilion in Wandsworth:-

And a very beautiful project in Leiden:-

They showed a rather beautiful film about his work which gives you a very good sense of him as well as his work:-

I went to the funeral today of my aunt, Faith Raven, a remarkable person, who was an important part of my childhood, not least because we would stay every summer in Morvern, the first time I ever went to Italy was to stay with them in Asolo, and for Christmas we would sometimes be given a whole Wensleydale, the origins of my cheese addiction.

The church was full of flowers from her garden at Docwra’s Manor:-

I am not sure I had been there since my 21st. birthday, a while ago, apart from the funeral of my uncle in 1980.  I certainly hadn’t appreciated the scale, as well as the beauty, of its gardens and greenhouses:-

A week or so ago, I was asked if I would like to go round the Yard Theatre in Hackney Wick. To my shame, I didn’t know about it in spite of bicycling past it a hundred times and, indeed, have explored the yard it is in quite often.

Now, I read in the Tower Hamlets Slice. the very informative local online newsletter, that it has won an Olivier Award. So, I am posting the story in case there are others who, like me, are unaware of it:-

Tower Hamlets’ The Yard Theatre wins Olivier Award

I was invited to visit the Woolwich Rotunda, one of the great monuments of the Regency, designed by John Nash, the Prince Regent’s architect, in 1814 to celebrate the centenary of the Hanoverian Accession and moved to Woolwich in 1818 to become a museum for the Royal Artillery – yes, before the opening of the National Gallery in 1824.

When I first visited it in 1972, it was still a museum, but the museum closed in 1999, the building was vacated in 2010, and the new display, Firepower, had a short life span, closing in 2016.

So, what should happen to it now ?

I hope it can be acquired by the Rotunda Trust which has been set up specifically  in order to preserve a building of extraordinary architectural and more purely structural interest:-

We spent the day in Saffron Walden, a treat as it’s so remarkably unspoilt apart from far too much traffic.

We were encouraged to start at the church, close to the centre and light and airy:-

It’s surrounded by good old buildings:-

But the point of the visit was to see the Fry Art Gallery, which, to my shame, I have never seen in spite of the fact that it opened in 1985, 41 years ago, and shows the work of lots of artists whose work I admire, including Edward Bawden, John Aldridge and Eric Ravilious.

I was particularly intrigued to see a very early work by Grayson Perry, showing his origins in folk art traditions (I mean this as a compliment – it’s an Essex aesthetic, born in Great Bardfield, and fostered by Barbara Jones and Olive Cook in the 1950s):-

If you go, which I strongly recommend, then we were told – correctly – that the best place for lunch is Chater’s, worth going to just for lunch.

It’s hard to keep up with all things Vanbrugh: a mere four events this week, including Roz Barr talking this morning as part of a curatorial talk at the Soane about the experience of working at Castle Howard, staying there, and thinking about the relationship of the house to the landscape.

Also, the Chalke History Festival has just posted its event in June;-

I’m at risk of always posting the same photographs of Castle Howard because whenever I go, which has recently been quite often, I enjoy the same things.

1. The magic of the walk out to the Temple of the Four Winds, which I particularly enjoyed this time having just read Wendy Bishop’s excellent PhD thesis on eighteenth-century lakes, which documents Vanbrugh’s early – indeed, pioneering – interest in creating lakes: first in his plans for Welbeck; then at Blenheim; and in 1725, just before his death, at Castle Howard:-

2. The four Sibyls which Historic England (and Wikipedia) say are by John Nost, but my Castle Howard book say are by Andries Carpentière who certainly supplied a lot of work to Castle Howard:-

3. The quality of the stone carving (see Christine Casey, Architecture and Artifice):-

And the antiquities:-

I attach a link to the programme I did with Jools Holland broadcast yesterday about Vanbrugh’s involvement with music and opera – not a subject which is at all well documented and, indeed, the extent of his interest in Opera is mostly entirely speculative.  But I very much enjoyed doing it, not least because Jools Holland is himself so incredibly knowledgeable and enthusiastic about Vanbrugh: a true believer. 

Also, his producer had discovered the most amazing recording of Handel’s Eternal source of light divine – not the one which appears in the link on BBC Sounds, but Jestyn Davies singing on a recording for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee which you can find on Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/track/1zDyLvZULlalzNA7djc9ZK).

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002v1qx