I have in the past done a post on Roy Strong’s birthday and am doing so again this year. He recently published a book on Stuart Portraiture and I hope there might be further volumes of his diaries to come. Next year he will be 90.
I admire the way he has kept on writing into his late eighties.
Here he is as he was when I first knew him as Director of the V&A, full of reforming zeal (photo by Jill Kennington):-
For anyone interested as I am in knowing more about Bronowski, I have found an excellent, very informative blog post about his life and The Ascent of Man. It’s clear that Jesus, where he was an undergraduate and honorary fellow, was not put off by any possible communist tendencies.
He was also pretty percipient in publishing poetry as a postgraduate by William Empson, T.H.White and Julian Bell.
We listened to the excellent programme about Jacob Bronowski last night (I have put the link to it below) – interesting for the light it shone on a mid-century mathematician and intellectual who, it turned out, had had a file kept on him by MI5 for no obvious reason except that he had been reported by a local schoolmaster for being ‘extremely left’ when he was a lecturer in mathematics in Hull before the war and then for attending meetings of the Left Book Club. This didn’t prevent him being employed as a statistician by the Ministry of Home Security working on calculations about the bombing of German cities, nor from appearing as a member of the Brains Trust in the 1950s, but may have stopped him from making programmes about atomic energy. It’s very sad that Lisa Jardine was unable to complete the work on her father which she was writing at the time of her death in 2015, which would presumably have explored his intellectual history, but at least we were able to hear her voice, as well as that of Bronowski himself in an amazing clip from The Ascent of Man.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00223sw?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile
Nice pure lettering on the outside of High Point. I forgot to check if the graphics inside have been redone to match.
I walked past the Piccadilly Hotel last week. There is something magnificently surreal that two of its side windows in the alleyway between Piccadilly and Regent Street are under wraps:-
I went to see the little display of Hazel Press books at the London Review Bookshop, a small way of commemorating Daphne Astor who set the press up during lockdown in a flurry of creative activity.
It encouraged me to watch the short film she made during lockdown of her thoughts and feelings – meditative and so incredibly responsive to her surroundings, beautiful as they were. She was astonishingly productive in a totally private, undemonstrative way, jotting down thoughts and ideas and images all through her life.
We went to see the exhibition of Mingei at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow – a nice, small-scale, thoughtful exhibition on a topic which I felt I should have known about, but didn’t (and highly relevant to William Morris): the interest on the part of a relatively small number of Japanese intellectuals, including Bernard Leach who seems to have been co-opted as an honorary Japanese craftsperson in spite of not being able to speak the language, in the crafts of rural Japan: textiles and pottery from areas of the country which had recently been annexed. There was an image of Bernard Leach wearing what looked like plus-fours. I wasn’t able to photograph it, but have now found it online:-
This is what he looked like at the time while in Japan:-
Since the weather is now finally so hot, I have been paying more attention to the plants in the back garden.
I must learn to identify them:-
2. Caladium Miss. Muffet
3. Zantedeschia (again)
4. Begonia
We went to hear Piet Oudolf talk at the very impressive Serge Hill Project for Gardening, Creativity and Health recently opened by Tom and Sue Stuart-Smith at Serge Hill, their house and garden in a strange and always unexpected piece of rural Hertfordshire.
The Apple House is designed by their son, Tom Stuart-Smith – beautifully and thoughtfully ecological:-
Oudolf’s talk was admirably un-self-important, covering the amazing range of his work across the globe – museum gardens, civic gardens, community garden, roof gardens. No mention of the Highline or Hauser and Wirth in Somerset, but a mass of other projects, all beautifully photographed year-round.
It’s very remarkable what they’re doing at Serge Hill:-
Having got interested in the issue as to how the government is going to fulfil its pledge to build 1.5 million new houses in the next five years, I went to visit one of the other housing developments in the London RIBA awards: a private development on a former industrial site in deepest Walthamstow.
At first I thought it was a wasted trip because being a private development it is not accessible:-
But then one of the owners kindly let me have a peak behind the gate:-
I thought it was impressive: all wood; reusing some of the onsite industrial materials; very heavily insulated; with a particularly charming communal area in the middle:-
It would not have made it on to the final shortlist because it is more eco than strictly architectural and has been done by a developer, not the public sector.
But if the government is going to lift planning controls, then it should surely find a way of encouraging inventive adaptations of brownfield urban sites in a way which is ecologically sustainable. This is a good model.
So, I salute the architects, Boehm Lynas, the developer GS8, and am very grateful to the residents who kindly allowed me to see it.
I am also relieved that my guesstimate of what the unit cost might be was not way out.
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