I had no idea how grand Stowe School is – an eighteenth-century house of extraordinarily grand scale, looking out over a park and with a huge entrance portico, apparently designed jointly by Robert Adam and Thomas Pitt, Lord Camelford, highly neoclassical in feel:-

The current school dining room is of staggering grandiosity, a room of sensational neoclassical magnificence, classical Roman in style and scale:-

Next door is the State Music Room, also very neoclassical, with Pompeian decoration:-

Quite somewhere to do your prep.

The painter, Anthony Eyton, was 100 today. We celebrated with a small gathering in the Eyton Gallery at Stowe School where he has been artist-in-semi-residence in recent years, recording the activities of the school and some of the garden buildings. He apparently still paints every day. How admirable to be so vigorous, so energetic and full of life at 100 ! He’s a curiously unsung hero of the contemporary art world.

I started the day being interviewed by Anna O’Neil on Radio London about the sad plight of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry: still apparently on the open market, but not available to the London Bell Foundry who are probably the only people with the skills, experience and capability to take it on and make a success of it. So, the situation is a total impasse, neither Tower Hamlets, nor Historic England apparently willing or able to take action against the developer who bought it with the intention of turning it into a boutique hotel. I just hope that someone listening to the programme might help break the impasse.

This is what it looked like in the early morning sunshine:-

In honour of London Craft Week, we went to an exhibition-cum-event held at The Sea The Sea, a small fish restaurant in an alleyway behind Sloane Square. Emma had created a very beautiful series of objects – objets d’art – opulent, ornate and neo-Victorian in feel, celebrating life below the sea:-

Rowan Moore does everything he can in the accompanying article to acknowledge the rationale and potential benefits of Herzog and de Meuron’s planned redevelopment of Liverpool Street Station, but in the end comes to the conclusion that too much of it is misconceived. Why, not least, have Network Rail allowed the station to fall into a state of neglect ? Why have they not already installed better lifts ? Why do they have to build two vast office blocks over the station just to perform what should be their normal statutory duties ?

Maybe they will revise it, but it’s hard to see how.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/may/13/liverpool-street-station-london-redevelopment-on-the-wrong-track-herzog-and-de-meuron-sellar?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

The new owners of 195, Mare Street, a big late seventeenth-century house (1697 for Abraham Dollins) set back from the street just short of Hackney Town Hall, generously allowed locals to see it before they start work on its restoration. It’s a big project:-

Indoors, it is surprisingly well preserved in spite of – actually maybe because of – being a Working Man’s Club (The New Lansdowne Club) from 1913-2004, when it was sold to a succession of developers who constructed flats in the garden at the back.

This is the entrance hall:-

Many of the rooms show fragmentary evidence of the original decoration:-

The basement is going to be turned into an arts centre.

A brilliant piece of sustained invective by Griff Rhys Jones, the chairman the Victorian Society, particularly excoriating about the lamentable so-called public consultation in which it was nearly impossible to see the principal proposal of the scheme which is to put an office block right smack on top of the adjacent Victorian Great Eastern Hotel. Instead, they show a completely ludicrous image of a fancy swimming pool as if the roof of their office block can be transformed into a perpetually sunny public Lido. There were no proper images of the nature of the proposed junction between the office block and the hotel.

No wonder, because it will look horrible – a horizontal office block plonked on top of a Grade 2* listed, gothic Victorian hotel.

https://spitalfieldslife.com/2023/05/12/griff-rhys-jones-on-liverpool-st-station/

An admirable review of the new biography of Jim Ede by Honor Clerk, formerly of the NPG.

I know I went to Kettle’s Yard my first week at Cambridge in late September 1972 and I have a distant, but it could be a false, memory of meeting its owner, who left for Edinburgh about that time. So, am looking forward very much to reading the book.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/jim-ede-and-the-glories-of-kettles-yard/

Readers of my blog will be familiar with what is proposed at Liverpool Street Station.  After my post yesterday, I was kindly asked to write an Opinion piece for Building Design which has just been published (but I fear may be behind a paywall).

Some people take the view that the station is already pretty down-at-heel, so refurbishment is necessary.  Refurbishment no doubt is, but it should not be done by plonking a mammoth office block on top of it.

https://www.bdonline.co.uk/opinion/why-are-herzog-and-de-meuron-risking-reputational-suicide-at-liverpool-street/5123120.article

For some reason, I was able to access the article below about the letter in today’s Times to which I was a signatory about the hideous proposal to put a brand new 18-storey tower block bang on top of the Victorian Great Eastern Hotel, as if this is somehow going to save it, instead of looking both monstrous and ludicrous.

I was only sorry that the signatories did not include the designer, Adam Nathaniel Furman, who asked the sensible question on twitter two days ago as to why on earth Herzog and de Meuron have agreed to do it, when as Furman rightly says, they ‘are usually such good architects’. ‘Don’t ruin one of our best railways stations, while simultaneously ruining your reputation’.

Good to see that he’s got 20,000 followers.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/45752d74-edb2-11ed-87b0-716b9284a2b0?shareToken=d5243251361613cb89c672972e7e1c41&s=09