The Art Newspaper have just published the latest news about the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. For those, who do not have a subscription, the answer is NOTHING. After being sold in 2017 (I thought it was November 2016), and Historic England allowing, and even encouraging, it to be dismantled – one of the greatest sites of surviving craft industry in London – on the wholly spurious grounds that it would be a good example of their policy of ‘adaptive re-use’ and a long drawn-out planning enquiry, the Planning Inspector pooh-poohed the plans to keep it as a Foundry and approved those to butcher it into becoming a boutique hotel.

Since which we have had COVID, three new hotels have opened in the neighbourhood, and the developer, Bippy Segal, is rumoured to be concentrating on his New York investments.

Guess who it was who approved the scheme. None other than Christopher Pincher, then a junior minister, now the accidental author of the Prime Minister’s downfall.

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/07/21/east-end-london-foundry-redevelopment-still-ringing-alarm-bells-for-heritage-campaigners

Last stop on my architectural bicycle ride this morning was Orchard Park by Panter Hudspith, just south of the Elephant and Castle, one part of the redevelopment of the notorious, now demolished, Heygate Estate.

The honest truth is that most people would not register the elevations of this building on the Walworth Road since it can only really be seen and appreciated from the other side of the street.

In so far as I could judge, which was hard to do, it looked good of its type – and its type is important in terms of how the city is developed. But I have a suspicion that this may be as much a product of the masterplan (the masterplan was by Make) as of the big blocks of new development within it:-

Next stop was 100, Liverpool Street by Hopkins Architects, a smooth bit of re-engineering of an existing building – included presumably because retrofitting instead of demolition is such an important theme of our times (Marks and Spencer should be retrofitting their building in Oxford Street). I was even less welcome in a corporate HQ than in a primary school, so it was hard to judge exactly what had been done, except that it was high quality:-

After the announcement of the shortlist for the Stirling Prize at midnight last night, I thought I would go and visit the projects which are close-at-hand, including a combined Primary School and apartment block on the Kingsland Road by Henley Halebrown. Of course, it isn’t a great idea to turn up at a primary school on the last day of term and I probably looked a bit eccentric in bicycling shorts. So, I could only see the outside. The nomination describes it as pink which is odd because by far its most obvious feature is that it is powerfully and sculpturally brick red, including the concrete base which has been stained the same colour. It is included in Owen Hatherley’s recently published Modern Buildings in Britain dated 2019, so am not clear why it is included this year, but it’s an interesting combination of tower block cross-subsidising the adjacent school, commissioned by the Benyon Estate, who own De Beauvoir Square and big chunks of Birmingham:-

What is currently happening in Brick Lane is interesting. There is a battle going on between the existing local community, much of it Bangladeshi, and the forces of redevelopment, led by the Zeloofs, the family which bought the Truman, Hanbury and Buxton brewery site over twenty years ago.

One would have expected Tower Hamlets, a traditionally Labour council, to have sided with the local community. But it became over-enamoured of new development under its previous Mayor, John Biggs, as was evident in the debate over the Whitechapel Bell Foundry and decisions are frequently made by the planning committee, often with tiny majorities.

Hettie O’Brien wrote the best informed article on the Bell Foundry and has now written about Brick Lane, as below. I’m glad to see the Spitalfields Trust is involved:-

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/20/red-wall-labour-voters-east-london-tower-hamlets-brick-lane

I tried to post John Wilson’s interview with Maggi Hambling yesterday, but have only just worked out how. I strongly recommend it because she is so dry, so mordant, says what she thinks in such a gruff way, it’s a pleasure to hear her:-

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00159tb?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

We walked to the Mile End Hospital as it’s only a street away. The Alderney Street cemetery door was open, very unusually, as if making itself available for new takers. I don’t think I have ever experienced such burning heat, certainly in Britain, but even in Marrakesh and Florida, so we crept along the pavement as close to the wall as we could. I felt you could have fried an egg on my head.

Anyway, the nurses were charming and reassuring, administered some special elixir, so our anxieties, but not the COVID, are now over. Thank you all for your concern !

I am re-posting the attached admirable blog post on architectural education by Hana Loftus as a way of preserving it and, I hope, giving it wider exposure because it says so much not just about the nature of architectural education, but also about what is valued and esteemed by architects themselves: often too much about machismo showing off than intelligent and thoughtful design. Maybe it is already changing, but it certainly needs to change:-

http://virtualhana.blogspot.com/2022/07/on-architectural-academia.html?m=1&s=09

As a coda to my last post, it is surely worth remembering that the last time the Conservative Party performed this exercise, they managed to select someone who was absolutely brilliant at making up policy on the hoof and charmed all those tories in the shires and on their golf courses, but turned out to be absolutely hopeless at government and that almost everything he said was horseshit.

So, the one thing these debates make me think is that it could be good to have a Prime Minister who seems to be universally regarded as decent, but dull, as if this is a terminal handicap to his chances, but at least he might have the virtue of thinking before he speaks.

As a distraction from COVID, we have been watching the leadership debates.

I’m afraid that my principal emotion is one of despair that the choice of the next Prime Minister is reduced to a one-hour game show in which each of the contestants is required to answer big questions about the future of the country in sound bites, preferably with cheap shot jibes at the other candidates, all of whom are party colleagues and most of whom, apart from Tom Tugendhat, have been in government and so bear some degree of collective responsibility for the gigantic mess they are promising to extract us from, so come across as profoundly ill-equipped to solve the problems with the wave of their two-minute wand.

Oh, and I like Kemi Badenoch who comes across as smart and shrewd and plain-talking which can’t be said of at least two of her colleagues.

But then I don’t have a vote, so my views are worthless.