Annette Rubery, herself a scholar of Vanbrugh, has written an excellent, thoughtful review of the Soane Museum’s exhibition in exactly the spirit in which the exhibition was intended: an exploration of the status of Vanbrugh’s drawings and how they relate to Hawksmoor’s. Vanbrugh’s drawings were done at speed as outline sketches of ideas, often for small buildings, particularly at the end of his life. But the two he did of Castle Howard probably provide the best clue as to why he was commissioned to design it. He was able to convey the character of the building, if not its detail, in exactly the way that modern architects do – for example, David Chipperfield in his initial outline sketch of Hepworth Wakefield.

Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture – BSECS

Rory Fraser and I were on the first ten minutes of Front Row tonight – link as below – talking about Vanbrugh: the multifariousness of his talents; Rory on his plays; me on how and why he became an architect – I wish we knew; Rory on the role of the Kit-Cat Club and how modern he was; me on the exhibition at the Soane Museum and the glories of the three watercolour drawings of Blenheim done by Soane’s assistants to illustrate his lectures.

The exhibition closes on June 28th. so it’s more than half way through.  Do please go if you haven’t already.  And there are still lots of events planned for Vanbrugh300, including a conference in Durham on July 8th. on Vanbrugh’s work in the north east.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002w5v4

I haven’t been back to the Faith Museum since it opened in October 2023 and was impressed how well it has worn: dense displays downstairs and then an amazing Matt Collishaw installation in the beautiful, grand space upstairs – all of it contained in Níall McLaughlin’s stone wigwam/tent:-

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:-