Ages ago, I went to an event to celebrate the opening of the new Faith Museum in Bishop Auckland. By chance, I found myself waiting for the minibus with Niall McLaughlin which helped inform my analysis of it, as below:-

https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/november-2023/keeping-the-faith/

I wasn’t able to attend the Apollo Awards tonight, but was pleased, for reasons that will be clear below, that Reynolds’s great portrait of Mai was Acquisition of the Year:-

https://www.apollo-magazine.com/acquisition-winner-apollo-awards-2023/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=APAW%20%2020231122%20-%20WINNERS%20%20AL&utm_content=APAW%20%2020231122%20-%20WINNERS%20%20AL+CID_0f3029bc84688d8c24be5a3d47b6b062&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Apollo

I thought I had read that the city have given permission to James Sellar to build two office blocks on top of the Great Eastern Hotel, but now realise that they have given permission to a different scheme. 

I fear that the Liverpool Street scheme may indeed be given permission because the City is so heavily invested in the idea of endless growth. It feels as if it has found it difficult, if not impossible, to adapt itself to a new environment post-Covid when fewer people are working in mega-office developments and when the City needs to change its policies to be more environmentally friendly.

The great villains in the proposed Liverpool Street Station development are not so much the City authorities as Herzog and de Meuron who are being used by the developer to give a spurious glamour to a hideous project which they are presumably embarrassed by because it is nowhere advertised on their website and for which there can be no possible architectural justification.

If it is indeed given permission, we will need Michael Gove to call it in for proper and systematic evaluation as to whether it is truly needed.

This is a picture of the station as it used to be:-

This is a picture of the train sheds as they still are – so beautiful, a cathedral of Victorian engineering:-

I have been asked if the reason I said so little about the V&A Dundee was because I didn’t like it.  Actually, I did admire it.  The reason I was reticent was only because I am writing about it for my monthly column for The Critic and I don’t like to spill the beans in advance.

Here it is in the morning light, like the prow of a Viking ship:-

I couldn’t claim to be a great lover of tartan (our family tartan did well in Woolworth), but I loved some of what was on display at V&A Dundee.

An officer’s uniform c.1750:-

A Kingussie kilt and top from c.1820:-

A waistcoat c.1850:-

The latest on the cyber attack on the British Library (see below): all very frustrating and quite scary, but no doubt even more so for staff.

It reminded me of Nicholson Baker’s fine book, The Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, about the dangers of relying on microfiche for retaining runs of provincial newspapers. Paper is a good and durable medium, whereas, as we’re learning, cyber space is not.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/11/20/cyber-attack-british-library-criminals-ransomware/

A quick trip to Dundee to see the V&A Dundee, which I should have seen long ago, but it’s not too late:-

I am so sorry to hear news of the death of Antonia Byatt, who I admired greatly.

When I went to the V&A, my job was attached to its Education Department. In the summer of 1983, I was asked to arrange a series of lectures in connection with Roy Strong’s exhibition, ‘Artists of the Tudor Court’.   They were on a Sunday afternoon and I was told that no-one would come to lectures on a Sunday in August because they would all be in the country.   I asked Antonia Byatt.  

She was on the first list I drew up for the Board of Trustees at the National Portrait Gallery as to who might have their portrait painted. She wanted to be painted by Patrick Heron because of the portrait he had done in 1949 of T.S. Eliot. He hadn’t done a portrait since, apart from an oil sketch of Jo Grimond for the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 1985, and, after his death, it transpired that he had done hundreds of drawings of her, trying to catch her image. She wanted me to accompany her to St. Ives, so we stayed there for the best part of a week, eating sandwiches every day on the beach. I took a photograph of them in Patrick’s studio which I reproduce in her memory (© National Portrait Gallery, London). She was a wonderful person as well as a magnificent writer:-

And this:-

https://www.flowgallery.co.uk/exhibitions/showcase-romilly-saumarez-smith-us-at-work

Talking of Christmas shopping, it would be remiss of me not to draw your attention to this:-

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CzoOWbuIle0/?igshid=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng==