We went down to the beach to watch the sun go down:-

It’s a long time since we’ve been in Anglesey for the bluebells.  We went to see them in the woods on the Vaynol estate where one can walk through to Y Felinheli along a track which runs alongside the Menai Straits:-

There were lambs in the fields as well:-

I went to have another, proper look at the new project by Amin Taha on Greville Street just west of Farringdon Station.  It’s a fascinating development, re-using the existing concrete frame and then covering it with aluminium sheets which makes it a curious and unexpected re-invention of its previous history:-

And at the back:-

As I sat down in the pew for Norman Ackroyd’s memorial service, I was told by my neighbour that the photograph reproduced in the programme (by Paul Tozer) told one everything one needed to know about him:-

A big smoker, years of nicotine had dried out his skin.  When I arrived at the RA in 2007, meetings of Council would have a cigarette break.

The odd thing was that I had known him a bit in the 1970s as near neighbours in Southwark – he was already installed in Morocco Street.

What I hadn’t known was his rich frame of cultural reference, his deep knowledge of poetry, alongside his passion for the west coast of Ireland and his extraordinary and inspirational skill as a printmaker.  I only knew him later as the committed guardian of the RA Laws which he knew far better than I ever could or did.

https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/april-2025/a-cathedral-in-the-classical-tradition/

The last stop on my west London tour was Bedford Park.  I wasn’t expecting the grandiosity of the interior of St. Michael and all Angels, Norman Shaw’s 1880 parish church, which looks as if it might be the parish hall outside, but is surprisingly gothic – and beautifully preserved – inside:-

I have got interested in Edward Maufe, partly because I have fond memories of Guildford Cathedral.  So, I went to have a look at St. Thomas’, Hanwell whose foundation stone was laid in 1933, the year after Maufe had won the competition to design a new Cathedral at Guildford.  Nairn wrote that he was ‘a man with genuine spatial gifts but out of sympathy with the style of his time’.  But the truth is that this was very much the style of the time – an abstracted form of gothic with strong Scandinavian influences, bringing a stately form of Christianity to the outer suburbs:-

I am beginning to enjoy the fact that the nearest place for our car to be serviced is in Brentford because it gives me an opportunity to explore a part of London I know so little.  This morning I walked along a stretch of the Grand Junction Canal, within sight of the M4 but surreally unspoilt, with locks and an elegant ironwork passenger bridge dated 1820, a bit after the canal was opened:-