This morning’s reading should consist of a reading of the account by Nigel Taylor, the senior foundry man at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, of its closure (http://spitalfieldslife.com/2019/02/10/nigel-taylor-tower-bell-production-manager/). The Hughes, who owned it, had run out of the will to keep it going: the market for church bells is precarious; Whitechapel was not the easiest place to run an industrial operation; they were of retirement age; and their daughters did not want to take it on; so they accepted a very generous offer (said to be £5.1 million) from a local east end property developer on condition that they didn’t tell anyone until the sale had been completed. So, it was only after the sale that any of the historical agencies (Historic England, SPAB, HLF) were able to try to save it, which was arguably too late, because by then it had been sold on to Bippy Siegal, a New York venture capitalist for £7.9 million.

So, what is to be done ? In order for it to be turned into a hotel, which is what Siegal wants, Tower Hamlets has to allow change of use. In order to allow change of use, Siegal has to demonstrate that it can no longer operate as a bell foundry.

What Nigel Taylor perfectly demonstrates is that it can and should. There are two existing foundries happy and able to take it on as a foundry.

So, it will be scandalous if Tower Hamlets allows change of use and scandalous, too, that Historic England has not come out in public to object.

We went to the new production of Kát’a Kabanová last night at Covent Garden, directed by Richard Jones and designed by Antony McDonald: a wonderfully intense, pure two and a quarter hours of Moravian emotion, beautifully sung and performed by Amanda Majeski as Katĕrina on a beautifully minimal set, consisting mainly of a gyrating modernist bus shelter. I’m relieved to find that Rupert Christiansen agrees.

Peckwater Quad:-

And Tom Quad in the rain:-

I also went on a pilgrimage to see the Christ Church Picture Gallery, having an interest in, but inadequate recollection of, the way that Powell and Moya designed a set of well-judged, half subterranean, but daylit spaces under the Deanery garden in the late 1960s (it opened in 1968, paid for by a gift of £50,000 in October 1963 by Charles Forte).

Powell and Moya had previously been employed to design the Blue Boar Quad, squeezed alongside the walls of Blue Boar Street to the north of Tom Quad, a discreet, but effective intervention:-

The Gallery itself consists of two galleries – one small for early Renaissance paintings, one much larger for (mainly) later Italian paintings, with a print room on a half-level above. It’s clever because it’s both quite intimate, as befits an essentially eighteenth-century collection, but, at the same time, generously proportioned, with a long corridor acting as a spine and views out into the Deanery garden.

I had made an appointment to see the Bishop Edward King Chapel at Ripon College, Cuddesdon because it is an unusual attempt to solve the problem of a contemporary sacred space (I have rashly agreed to lecture on this topic in Salisbury in a fortnight’s time).

The brief was presumably how to create a sacred space for a relatively small, and unusual, congregation – the students of Cuddesdon Theological College, the traditionally élite seminary of the Anglican church (Robert Runcie was its principal before becoming Bishop of St. Alban’s). Niall McLaughlin was recruited as architect, then less well known than he has since become, not least through the publication of this building.

It’s a small-scale and quite intimate space, made special by a simple internal structure of over-arching roof trusses made out of pale, bleached wood – both simple and complex in a satisfying way and totally unornamented, relying for its effect on an appreciation of its harmonious method of construction, like a super-elegant piece of origami:-

I found the attached article in the New Statesman by Jonathan Powell (https://www.newstatesman.com/2019/01/rise-and-fall-political-class-0) one of the more effective critiques of the current apparent paralysis of the government and parliament in negotiating the terms of Brexit: powerful because it comes from someone who has been at the heart of government and knows how it does (and doesn’t) work. Leave aside the fact that some of the corrosion of trust surely came under Blair – the era of sofa government, the 24-hour news cycle, and the manipulation of data to legitimate going to war – it does suggest that we are facing a set of long-term issues in the management and dissemination of news, belief in its truth, and in government and its relationship to the civil service, not just a short-term crisis.

We went to a very interesting talk at Queen Mary on the role of women in the Arts and Crafts movement by Zoë Thomas of Birmingham University, who is publishing a book on Women Art Workers and the Arts and Crafts Movement.

Her argument is that all histories of the Arts and Crafts Movement have been dominated by members of the Art Workers’ Guild, which did not admit women till 1964 (it makes the RA seem relatively liberal), is still run by a Master, and calls its members Brothers.

She has based her research on the recently discovered archives of the Women’s Guild of Arts (they were found in an attic in Hammersmith), which was founded in 1907 by May Morris (William Morris’s daughter who remained its President until 1935) and Mary Elizabeth Turner, who died in February 1907. Its members included Christiana Herringham, the founder of the National Art-Collections Fund, worked in egg tempera, and was a student of Indian art (and a suffragette), the artist Annie Swynnerton and Evelyn de Morgan.

The other key (and neglected) institution supporting women artists was the Lyceum Club, which opened at 128, Piccadilly in 1903.

It’s a classic case of a hidden history, even in spite of fifty years of active research.

Once in Tate Modern, I had no time to see the art, only the residue of its previous industrial use:-

And the Herzog and de Meuron staircase in the Blavatnik building:-

I discovered, slightly counter-intuitively, that the quickest way to get from Hanover Square to Tate Modern is by way of St. Paul’s Cathedral, which is the only bit of the City I miss, particularly the quality of the stone carving (I’ve got a better telephoto lens):-

I happened to notice on Twitter that the Design Museum’s exhibition, 100 Mile City, was due to close today. It’s a topic I’m interested in: how one designs humane social housing; and I’ve admired the way that Peter Barber approaches the task in an intelligent way, through drawing:-

He is influenced (not surprisingly) by the work of Alvaro Siza (the Quinta da Malagueira), makes models, and was responsible for Beveridge Mews at the back of Stepney Green:-

He’s not afraid of castellation and brick, but uses materials in a creative, rather than historical way. Donnybrook Quarter looks better in photographs than in reality because the tail end of the Roman Road doesn’t necessarily lend itself to a kasbah, but it’s still much more interesting than most contemporary housing.