A quick excursion in search of Stilton and a Christmas pudding took me to the Deli Downstairs, the headquarters of the Lauriston Road revival, past the long queue for the Ginger Pig and an opportunity to stock up on local ale from the Bottle Apostle:-
Monthly Archives: December 2014
St. Bartholomew’s, Brighton
A Christmas outing to Brighton gave us an opportunity to call in on St. Bartholomew’s, the huge, neo-Byzantine barn which dominates arrival on the railway line. Austere brick and drainpipes outside, it is huge and numinous within, high vaulted, with the dusk falling on Henry Wilson’s richly ornamented baldacchino and the mosaics on the wall behind. It was built for Father Wagner, a wealthy, old Etonian tractarian, a bachelor who spent his wealth building big churches for the poor:-
Cressy House
The east end is full of surprises. Yesterday morning I walked down a road I’ve walked down a thousand times not far from our house and wandered into a courtyard where I found myself in a time warp of 1890s communitarian social idealism: a well-cared-for courtyard full of plants, a small house for the caretaker, bicycles and beehives. It’s Cressy House, austere on the outside, designed by Davis & Emmanuel, architects of the West London Synagogue, for the East End Dwellings Company, with communal staircases leading off the internal courtyard:-
Albert Square
Just off Commercial Road, half way to Limehouse, is Albert Square, a square of nearly perfect, neat, early Victorian houses, laid out in the 1840s, with a garden in the middle by the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association and a sculpture of a ‘Shepherd Boy’ with sheaf and sickle, dated 1903 and bought in Paris:
Arbour Square
I often get in a muddle as to which of the east end squares is which and which was the model for EastEnders. Arbour Square is just north of Commercial Road, laid out in 1819 and built as a consequence of Commercial Road being driven through the neighbourhood to give direct access to the docks. Two sides of the square retain terrace houses:
Bishopsgate Institute
The Bishopsgate Institute was opened in 1895 to provide enlightenment to the east end and was designed by Charles Harrison Townsend, later architect of the Whitechapel Art Gallery and Horniman Museum too. It’s got fine, quite free art nouveau detailing on the terracotta entrance façade:-
Spitalfields (2)
After breakfast, I did some more exploration.
In Crispin Street, next door to what was Tracey’s shop, there’s the Convent of the Sisters of Mercy, with separate entrances for Men and Women:
Spitalfields (1)
After my Christmas haircut, I wandered round Spitalfields.
The church as majestic as ever, presiding:
Bush House
My eye was caught this morning by the sculpture in the pediment of Bush House, which is in a style of 1920s neoclassical idealism which is not often seen in England. Indeed, the architecture of Bush House is essentially American, like Canary Wharf, designed by an American architect, Harvey Wiley Corbett, for an American developer, Irving T. Bush, who employed an American sculptor, Malvina Hoffman, to produce a sculpture symbolising Anglo-American friendship:-
The Economist Building
A meeting in the Economist building this morning gave me an opportunity to try and analyse its place in the pantheon of early 1960s cool, Miesian modernism (I don’t see it as brutalist) and in the Smithson’s career. I remember visiting it in the early 1970s, Nairn in hand, and have never quite seen the point of it, the type of high spec modernism which is routine in New York, but was much more striking in impoverished, anti-modernist Britain, particularly in conservative St. James’s:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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