I was on my way yesterday to see the new exhibition of work by Anthony Eyton RA and Julie Held in the newly built gallery behind Eleven Spitalfields.   Much as I admire Eyton’s work – the fact that he still goes out and paints every day aged 94 – I was also impressed by the installation by Clarisse d’Arcimoles in which she has painstakingly recreated the front room of an impoverished Irish hairbrush maker, as shown in a photograph of 1902.

This is the photograph:-

And this is the reconstruction:-

Before the discussion in the Comments section goes any further, I wish to declare – and have on other occasions – my deep and abiding admiration for the writings of W.G. Sebald.   I first came across The Rings of Saturn in the Travel Bookshop (I have long misrembered it as the Norfolk section of Stanford’s Map Shop in Long Acre).   I was so impressed by its qualities of deep rumination about history, memory and the past that I asked Robert McCrum, the then books editor at the Observer, if I could write about Austerlitz on its publication (https://www.the guardian.com/books/2001/sep/30/travel.highereducation).   I have looked the review up to remind myself of what I thought and felt when I first came across his writings and it is – rightly – a long eulogy, half written in the style of Sebald himself.   So, I have been influenced not just by Sebald’s style – the long rambling sentences – but also by his awareness and understanding of the relationships between people, places and history. 

One of my deepest regrets is that the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery turned down a commissioned portrait of Sebald by Michael Sandle and I have been trying to persuade the University of East Anglia – so far unsuccessfully – to commission him retrospectively.

If by any chance you’re interested, I’ve just been tipped off how to locate the programme I recorded a couple of months ago with several current residents of Spitalfields, including Dan Cruickshank, Marianna Kennedy, who lives in Fournier Street, the printmaker, Adam Dant, who lives in Club Row, and Tim Whittaker who runs the Spitalfields Trust.   It’s not straightforward to find.   You go to https://www.mixcloud.com/Resonance/ and enter Charles Saumarez Smith.   The programme is almost entirely about the politics of conservation, beginning with the battle to preserve Elder Street from its destruction by British Land in the mid-1970s, the establishment of the Spitalfields Trust in 1977, the gradual gentrification of Fournier Street, to the more recent battles over Spitalfields Market, Bishopsgate Yard and, most recently, Norton Folgate.   It’s a bit messy because it was unscripted and recorded live, but not necessarily the worse for that.

I’m sure that Fournier Street has featured plenty of times in my blog before.   It certainly appears in the book.   But I normally see it on winter mornings when the sun falls on the houses on the north side.   Tonight, I saw houses on the south side lit up by the evening sun, including Hawksmoor’s Rectory, commissioned as a minister’s house in July 1725.   It was originally expected to cost £800, was £1,000 a year later, and ended up costing £1,456 8s. 10d. by the time it had been completed in 1729.   Next door was Marmaduke Smith’s house, the largest in the street, lived in when I first knew it by Michael Gillingham.   The fine door case is from No. 14, known as Howard House and built for William Taylor, a ‘carpenter and gentleman’, then leased by weavers, Signeratt and Bourdillon-

I have spent a disproportionate amount of time this week meeting people for early moding breakfasts at The Ned, Nick Jones’s staggeringly opulent conversion of the old headquarters of the Midland Bank, bang in the heart of the City and within walking distance of our offices in Blackfriars.   It was apparently designed in 1924 and only opened in 1939, the last blast of the old Empire, the banking hall dominated by a forest of grand green African marble columns.   It’s also a monument to the pre-war Royal Academy, designed by Edwin Lutyens, who was President from 1938 to 1944, having been elected in 1913, and sculpture by Sir William Reid Dick, who was elected an ARA in 1921 and only died in 1961:-

I did a talk last night upstairs at John Sandoe’s bookshop off the King’s Road in Chelsea.   It was the most select and recherché audience, consisting mainly of blog followers (thank you for coming).   I realise in talking about how the blog began in a wholly accidental and unpremeditated way that it meets a psychological need as a wholly self-imposed mental discipline, a form of mental gymnastics, compelling myself to describe things at speed.   The weakness is that my photographs so seldom show people, as if East London is post-holocaust, vacuum-pumped.   Anyway, the point of the talk was to encourage people to buy the special edition, of which John Sandoe is the sole stockist, special because the quality of paper is subtly different, the binding allows the book to fall open more conveniently, the corners are satisfyingly rounded (http://www.johnsandoe.com/product/east-london-special-edition/).   Some people did buy the Special and I am especially grateful to them.

I finally made it to Thaddeus Ropac’s new gallery in Ely House in Dover Street, once the home of the Bishops of Ely, designed by Robert Taylor in the early 1770s, occupied in the early part of the twentieth century by the Albemarle Club and in the post-war period by Oxford University Press.   It has been beautifully and immaculately restored by Annabelle Selldorf, keeping all the original fireplaces, but with new flooring throughout.   I luckily arrived just as a performance by Oliver Beer was ending in which maybe six singers explore the acoustics of the building through the performance of the Diabolus in Musica:

We had a discussion this evening at the RA about East London:  not the East London which I know and have written about west of the River Lea;  but the large tracts of local authority housing and industrial wasteland which lies beyond in Stratford, Maryland, Romford, Barking, Dagenham and beyond.   The discussion was focussed on three grand projets:  Here East, the Olympic Media Centre which is being converted into tech units by Hawkins\Brown;  the development of Albert Docks by Terry Farrell;  and the creation of a new town on derelict land in Barking Riverside.   The mood was in some ways optimistic:  except that nobody had a solution as to how to provide effective quality and diversity in housing projects;  and how to ensure that affordable housing is affordable.   This is managed in the Netherlands, Berlin and Scandinavia.   Surely there are ways of ensuring that – as we were told – 50% of new housing is not in the hands of six private developers.

In all the years that we have lived in East London, I have – shamefully – never been to the Ragged School Museum which is normally open only two days a week, apart from the first Sunday of the month.   Today is the first Sunday of the month.

The warehouse was apparently built in 1872 for a lime juice merchant, but was taken over in 1876 by Dr. Barnardo as one of his ragged day schools, which offered church services, Bible and sewing classes to the local poor.   His Sunday School was said to be attended by 1500 children, with the added incentive of ‘lentil or pea souo and bread varied occasionally by rice and prunes or haricot beans’.   Not long afterwards he bought the local pub and turned it into a Coffee Palace.

It was packed:-

One of the pleasures of walking round the neighbourhood with people who are unfamiliar with it is that it has made me notice new things.

The detail of a shop front on the Mile End Road:-

The carved lunettes by the entrance doorway to St. Dunstan’s:-

And the old shop front on Durham Row:-