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.

It is a long time since I have posted anything about Liverpool Street Station, partly out of a sense of relief that Herzog and de Meuron had withdrawn what always looked like a terrible plan – to build a tower block on top of a listed Victorian hotel.

Now I am pleased to see that John McAslan who did the development of King’s Cross in a very successful way has come up with a plan which looks obvious: to concentrate the new development above the glass train sheds in such a way as to retain, indeed enhance, the full scale of the sheds to public view. I just hope that Network Rail will see the clarity and logic of this approach and adopt it so as to avoid the versions of a towering inferno which have been proposed:-

https://www.savebritainsheritage.org/news/a-new-vision-for-liverpool-street-station-unveiled-by-john-mcaslan-partners

I am posting information about the Vanbrugh Tour that Martin Randall has organised and I am leading in July in case there is someone, besides me, who would like to see all of Vanbrugh’s major houses in the space of a week.

I know it looks expensive, but then hotels are expensive.

I once went to Castle Howard, Seaton Delaval and Grimsthorpe over a long weekend. It was pretty memorable:-

https://www.martinrandall.com/tours/vanbrughs-greatest-houses

Thanks to the National Lottery Heritage Fund funding the celebrations of Vanbrugh’s tercentenary next year, the Georgian Group has just launched a website which will make it possible to find out what is planned, including events at each of his major houses. It blows up the Kneller Kit-Cat portrait as its frontispiece, with a backdrop of the frontispiece of the plays and the façade of Castle Howard from Vitruvius Britannicus.  There is already a lot planned for next year and more to come:-

https://www.vanbrugh300.co.uk/

This week sees the publication of The Modern British City 1945-2000, edited by Simon Gunn, Peter Mandler and Otto Saumarez Smith, also published, like John Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture, by Lund Humphries. It consists of nearly 500 pages of articles on all aspects of the post-war city from a social, political and planning perspective, hard to summarise, although Peter Mandler does a good job in doing so in his ‘Afterword: The Five Phases of the Modern British City’: less about the utopian grand plans for new cities and more about cities as they actually were; constrained by restrictions on new development during the 1950s; only really undergoing radical redevelopment in the 1960s; already subject to a new interest in conservation and heritage in the 1970s; developing post-2000 through the rise in the number of students who attended the new universities and then often stayed. There is a lot about the ambiguities of gentrification, particularly in the 1960s.

It’s a rich read:-

I have been asked if my event was livestreamed and the answer is yes.  Free, but a suggested donation.  Not sure what it will be like without the lovely audience.

John Gilhooly, the Director of the Wigmore Hall in London, very generously suggested that I could launch my book, John Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture there.  It was an amazing experience because the Wigmore Hall is such a beautiful space – so grand and yet still so unexpectedly intimate, a performance space with perfect acoustics, designed for the piano.  In the Green Room are photographs of all the greatest concert performers of the last fifty years.  I was both overwhelmed, but also found it unexpectedly enriching.

Thank you so many of you for coming:-

https://www.pashley.co.uk/blogs/pashley/pashley-x-considered-things?_kx=91rxTAkG8ktn4MziNJ3eW1DlEf6fO7dxT8g5UFS4ZdGR4bqdgWd67RNg5-COqw10.Ux7JNC