I had a drink tonight in Shepherd Market (named after Edward Shepherd, its architect and the site of the old May Fair) and felt a sudden deep wave of nostalgia for its old, scuzzy character in the days when I worked – rather briefly – as a delivery boy for Heywood Hill. I have resisted nostalgia for old Soho, preferring its new found smartness to its old seediness, but in Shepherd Market I found myself missing the old ambiguity between aristocracy and tarts:-
I was asked to take part in a conversation with Will Alsop held at Phillips as part of Frieze Week, organised by Surface magazine, and chaired by Sarah Thornton, the author of Seven Days in the Art World and 33 Artists in 3 Acts (very good on Ai Weiwei). Two things will stick in my mind. The first is the way that Alsop uses painting rather than drawing as a way of conceptualising a building project, often collaboratively. The second is why it is that Alsop has never been asked to design a museum in spite of his prominence as an architect and the fact that he has a genuine and deep interest in the practice of art. I remembered that he had been on the shortlist for Tate Modern. Nobody mentioned The Public in West Bromwich.
In clearing out my study today, an annual ordeal, I came across a curiosity, which I am not even sure I acknowledged when it arrived. Ever since I first met Anthony Caro in the mid-1990s, I have been intrigued that he told me that when he was an undergraduate reading Mechanical Sciences (ie engineering) at Christ’s College, Cambridge, he had done a bust of the then Master, my grandfather Charles Raven. It was Caro’s first – unrecorded – experiment in sculpture. I have often wondered what became of it, as did Caro. No-one, including the College, knew. Then out of the blue came a letter from one of Caro’s college contemporaries containing a misty, but perfectly identifiable, photograph of the undeniably noble, quasi-Roman bust with Caro himself gingerly holding the backcloth behind it. This at least makes it possible to document the bust, and might make it easier to locate it:-
We went to explore the new Norman Foster building which has been attached to the north side of Canary Wharf and will in due course house its Crossrail Station. It’s a mixture of ballooning high tech and craft detailing in the engineered wooden struts: currently a bit bland because it’s not yet functioning, but with an elaborate antipodean roof garden:-
We ended up at the new Wedgwood Museum out at Barlaston: hard to get to and in a brand new building cum visitor centre, but beautifully displayed and unexpectedly informative about Wedgwood’s origins, his relationship to his wife Sarah, the influence of his father-in-law, his development of Queen’s Ware at the Ivy House Works, and his meeting and working partnership with Thomas Bentley. I only had time to photograph the portrait of Bentley attributed to John Francis Rigaud:-
Immediately opposite the Potteries Museum is the Bethesda Chapel, known as the cathedral of Methodism, opened in 1798 after the establishment of the New Methodist Connexion, but not big enough as it only held 600 people, so reconstructed in 1819 for 2,000, with three services a day:-
I went on a tour today with the Omega Group of Emma Bridgewater’s factory in Hanley. Bought sixteen years ago at a time when all the traditional potteries were closing (they had wholly failed to adjust to changing tastes, continuing to produce porcelain long after people had stopped buying it), the factory was originally built for the Meakin Brothers (J&G Meakin), which had been established in 1851 to supply the American trade with cheap ironstone ware. It opened in 1882. It’s now, once again, a big operation, employing 250 people in all the various stages of production, highly systematised as in the nineteenth century, men doing the mould making and shapes, women the highly skilled transfer and sponge decoration. The design work is done by Emma herself and Matthew Rice, her husband and managing director, then translated in order to be reproducible.
This is the entrance to the factory:-
I walked past the old headquarters of the Daily Telegraph on Fleet Street yesterday morning and was impressed by its neo-Egyptian magnificence, once the home of right wing journalists, now of Goldman Sachs traders. It was designed by Charles Elcock of Elcock, Sutcliffe & Tait in 1928, more or less at the same time as Unilever House and with similar ostentation. The stonework carving was done by Alfred Oakley who became a monk:-
I thought I should start my day in Gough Square where I am due to give a talk tonight to a group of Johnson enthusiasts, if only to remind myself of the topography local to Samuel Johnson’s House and the fragmentary survival of eighteenth-century London as one takes a little alleyway off Fleet Street (Wine Office Court), up past the Cheshire Cheese tavern (rebuilt 1667) into Gough Square, where not only Johnson, but also Oliver Goldsmith lived. There is a quotation from Johnson on the wall of Wine Office Court: ‘Sir, If you wish to have a just notion of the magnitude of this great City you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and squares but must survey the innumerable little lanes and courts’. It’s a reminder of the tightly knit network of medieval alleyways and courtyards which still half survives in amongst the megalith office blocks north of Fleet Street; and also of the difference in surroundings between Johnson’s London, all alleyways and bookshops and taverns and the Inns of Court, and Reynolds’s London, a mile to the west, which was much more spacious, with workshops and shops and coffee houses in Covent Garden, close to the parks and the Court.
This is Johnson’s House:-
It was the opening night of the PRA’s small, but choice exhibition on the top floor of Colnaghi’s in Bond Street where the work looked really good in spite of the heat of the private view: big, bold, hotly coloured watercolours, red and orange, freely painted; monoprint woodcuts, all of which had been bought by the time I arrived; small-scale, table sculptures, most of which had also already been sold; and a single rug of three commissioned by Christopher Farr, one of which – the one in the exhibition – had been woven in Afghanistan:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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