I was early for a meeting near St. Paul’s this morning and since I have been reading about Wren in honour of his Tercentenary, particularly James Campbell’s brilliant Building St. Paul’s (not stocked by the bookshop I noticed), I wandered round it, struck as I always am, by the sense of calm orderliness, everything worked out, which is perhaps not surprising given the length of time it took to build, the number of different schemes, and the requirement that it was as much a monument to the restoration of the monarchy as to God:-

Having endured three or four episodes of Marie Antoinette, it was both a relief and provocation to go and see Corsage – a more surreally, ahistorical film, much more sensuously beautiful, which faces the problem of how to film history by not trying to bother about being too correct, including, faintly ludicrously, showing the Empress’s cousin’s English estate (Althorp) somewhere deep in the Transylvanian countryside.

I thought it was a pretty brilliant performance by Vicky Krieps and many of the settings were memorably beautiful – a distant view of a swimming pool with the grassland beyond, an overgrown maze.

As beautiful a sense of a past as it’s possible to imagine, however fictional.

I bicycled to Egg this morning, the first time that I have been there since the death of its owner, Maureen Doherty, and missed her strong presence. Her taste and beautiful clothes survive, so specific to the shop: a back street, a mixture of bohemian and chic. She lived upstairs and would sometimes be sitting outside, friendly, but reserved. There can be few people who have maintained their sense of style and their aesthetic so consistently. I did not know that she worked for Issey Miyake, but am not at all surprised.

https://wwd.com/eye/people/maureen-doherty-70-founder-eclectic-london-store-egg-1235427276/

I spent an uplifting hour today being introduced to the Special Collections at the Bishopsgate Institute, an amazingly impressive public resource, usefully independent of the control of either Tower Hamlets or the City, apparently funded by a well managed historic endowment: very remarkable, particularly when I was taken down into the basement vaults.

Outside, there is fine, low relief decoration on the Townsend façade:-

I was interested to read the attached comments on the Policy Exchange paper advocating the establishment of a School of Place, an absurdly utopian proposal to answer a set of immediate issues – how to encourage and enable high quality housing which gets public support.

The suggestions from Claire Bennie, as attached (assuming you can open it), look much more sensible – informed by analysis and experience.

I was interested in reading the attached coverage of a planned new student development in Cambridge by Queens’ College: new graduate housing in a very sensitive site in water meadows towards Granchester, but which looks as if it has been planned with extreme care. But people are objecting because of the displacement of bats. It demonstrates the difficulties which new development faces – however well considered, there is always some reason to object, so we face a huge shortage of good new housing.

Not sure what the answer is.

https://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/cambridge-news/new-cambridge-university-flats-decided-25891291

Happy New Year to my readers !

I only half heard it from the noise of the explosions outside, but let’s hope that 2023 is a bit better than 2022: fewer catastrophes; less war; and the re-opening of the NPG in June to look forward to.