The V&A organised an excellent, wide-ranging conference to commemorate the many activities of Peter Thornton, who was Keeper of the Furniture and Woodwork Department at the V&A from 1966 to 1984, when he went to be (part-time) Curator of the Soane Museum from 1984 to 1995. 

What came across was how dynamic he he had been: pioneering the study of upholstery when an Assistant Keeper in the Department of Textiles; installing the V&A’s collection of musical instruments on a mezzanine in the costume court, with a jukebox playing historic recordings (I remember loving this); pioneering the study of inventories and the re-display of Ham and Osterley; editing the series of studies of furniture for Faber & Faber, including himself translating Svend Eriksen’s Early Neo-Classicism in France. 

And his impressive internationalism, bilingual in English and Danish, serving in army intelligence in Austria after the war, always documenting his explanations with drawing, in touch with furniture experts in France, Holland, Stockholm and the USA.

There are surprisingly few pictures of him:-

I have been allowed a sneak preview of Sarah Ainslie’s admirable and moving photographs of women at work in East London in an expectation that I might know and recognise some of them.

Pauline Forster has been fighting a valiant campaign to save the George Tavern on Commercial Road:-

And I was at university with Diane Abbott who I have always liked:-

The book is a fine collection of images of the great range of work women undertake – from priests to striptease artists.

https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/sarah-ainslies-women-at-work-book

I have been following the Gentle Author’s project to publish a book of Sarah Ainslie’s photographs of local Women at Work (see the planned book cover below).

I am a long-standing admirer of all the work that he does, documenting the work and activities of the local community, not least in documenting the changes to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry – he has been one of the most effective people in the campaign to preserve it, with a particularly good knowledge of local politics.

One of the other strings to his bow (he has so many) is that he has a comprehensive knowledge of local documentary and historical photography, based on the archives of the Bishopsgate Institute.

So, this project is, like everything he does, very well worth supporting:-

https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/sarah-ainslies-women-at-work-book

I owe some readers an apology.  For some unfathomable reason, my website only shows a single blog post on St. George’s Pool which, not surprisingly, is enjoying an unprecedented readership.

I am trying to figure out why it has happened and how to fix it.

We went to a lone screening of a film about the Israeli architect, Ada Karmi Melamede, made by her daughter, Yael, similar in some ways to My Architect: A Son’s Journey, the film about Louis Kahn made by his son, Nathaniel, and the more recent Stardust, made by Jim Venturi about his parents.

But My Mother the Architect is different because Ada is so reticent, so unwilling to say much about her life and emotions, why, for example, she failed to get tenure at Columbia after eighteen years of teaching there.  She then won the competition with her brother to design the Supreme Court in Jerusalem, which looks like a remarkable project – a combination of monumentality and reticence.  

The film tells one a lot about the position of women in the profession as was, not least in New York, and what it is probably still like today.  And about some of the tragedies of the current state of Israel.

It is so rare to see a film about under-expressed emotion and the nature of the film – thoughtful, very carefully composed – matches its subject.

You may only be able to see it in the Barbican this week.  Or Crouch End.  Or (I’ve now discovered) JW3, the Phoenix Cinema and Cinema Lumiere.  But, as at the Barbican, only this week.

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