If like me you’re stuck for what to buy for Christmas, then Romilly and the seven jewellers she works with are holding a small exhibition in our house at 135, Mile End Road today and tomorrow from 11 to 6, and on Sunday from 11 to 4.

I had been tipped off that a very enjoyable conversation I had a couple of weeks ago with John Goodall, the architectural editor of Country Life would go live today on the podcast he does more normally with Clive Aslet. It is now online on https://www.ypompod.com/. John is wonderfully well informed about all aspects of country houses, including their medieval history, and I hope it makes for lively Christmas listening, covering all aspects of the origins of both Castle Howard and Blenheim, how they came about and the nature of the relationship between the circumstances of their commission and the character of their design. Also, quite a bit at the end about Vanbrugh’s influence on Bob Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

I have kindly been alerted to the fact that – very surprisingly – Tower Hamlets has decided to turn down planning permission for the redevelopment of the Genesis Cinema (see Comments).

Tyrone Walker-Hebborn who owns the cinema and runs it very successfully as a local independent cinema has claimed that, since COVID, audiences have meant that he has run it at a loss. The only alternative was to redevelop the site with a bigger building mostly devoted to student accommodation, with a new smaller cinema in the basement. The new building would have dwarfed its surroundings, particularly the charming Bellevue Place which lies immediately behind what used to be Wickhams Department Store and immediately adjacent to the proposed new tower block.

So, the question was: was Tyrone Walker-Hebborn a cineaste making efforts to protect a local amenity ? Or was he a property developer maximising the development potential of a building he owned to the detriment of the local neighbourhood ?

Surely the answer to this quandary should have been, might still be, to make more of an effort to consult the local community, to design it with more of the character of a civic amenity and less as a vast rabbit hutch of poky student rooms.