It being sunny and not too hot, I thought I would bicycle to see Peter Barber’s housing development in Enfield, not least because I have been meaning to explore the further reaches of the River Lea, where it turns more desolate, a landscape of open fields and pylons next to the reservoirs which presumably provide water to London.
The estate is in Barber’s standard idiom, more Berber than London vernacular, a terrace with idiosyncratic fenestration. It nearly killed me to get there:-
Since the National Gallery itself is unlikely to feel able to respond to the attached criticism of its current plans, it is perhaps worth making some comments in defence of them (of course, I am not impartial).
Hewitt is correct that the key is circulation. The system of circulation for most of the National Gallery’s history was a circuit from the original entrance, starting with Italian paintings to the west and ending with nineteenth-century French painting to the east. There was a clear logic relating to national schools, which was a nineteenth-century taxonomy. The clarity of this system of circulation was complicated by the addition of an asymmetric new wing at the back (look at the ground plan) by the Property Services Agency in the 1970s and then further complicated by the addition of the Sainsbury Wing in 1991 which sits slightly separately and at an angle to the original building, as Hewitt correctly points out.
It seems to me that there is a perfectly good architectural and art historical logic to treating the Sainsbury Wing entrance as the main entrance, even if it wasn’t designed to be. It is much larger and more spacious than the original Wilkins Building entrance and more disabled accessible. But to make it the main entrance requires some degree of adaptation of the Sainsbury Wing to accommodate the huge number of visitors. This is what Annabelle Selldorf has been hired to do through a process of international competition.
It creates a more linear route through the collection, starting with fourteenth-century Italy in the west and ending with nineteenth-century France (and coffee) in the east. The changes she has proposed involve some degree of change to the entrance vestibule, giving it more height, putting the cloakroom downstairs, and getting rid of the bookshop which made the Sainsbury Wing entrance a bit cramped.
But there is no change whatsoever to the main floor galleries which have been recently and beautifully restored. So, it looks to me to be pretty – and rightly – respectful of Venturi and Scott Brown’s original, although I know strict conservationists and possibly Denise Scott Brown herself may not agree.
https://www.archdaily.com/985449/in-london-a-venturi-scott-brown-masterpiece-is-threatened
Some time ago, I went on a small pilgrimage into Sussex to see Nithurst Farm, a project which caught my eye when it was shortlisted for the RIBA’s House of the Year in 2019. A project like this would be unlikely to win because it has obvious historical references in its design, but I think in an intelligent and interesting way, wearing its classicism lightly. I also revisited the Ditchling Craft Museum recently, a lovely small-scale, thoughtful project by Adam Richards, the architect of Nithurst Farm. I wrote about it for The Critic (see below):-
The Art Newspaper have just published the latest news about the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. For those, who do not have a subscription, the answer is NOTHING. After being sold in 2017 (I thought it was November 2016), and Historic England allowing, and even encouraging, it to be dismantled – one of the greatest sites of surviving craft industry in London – on the wholly spurious grounds that it would be a good example of their policy of ‘adaptive re-use’ and a long drawn-out planning enquiry, the Planning Inspector pooh-poohed the plans to keep it as a Foundry and approved those to butcher it into becoming a boutique hotel.
Since which we have had COVID, three new hotels have opened in the neighbourhood, and the developer, Bippy Segal, is rumoured to be concentrating on his New York investments.
Guess who it was who approved the scheme. None other than Christopher Pincher, then a junior minister, now the accidental author of the Prime Minister’s downfall.
Last stop on my architectural bicycle ride this morning was Orchard Park by Panter Hudspith, just south of the Elephant and Castle, one part of the redevelopment of the notorious, now demolished, Heygate Estate.
The honest truth is that most people would not register the elevations of this building on the Walworth Road since it can only really be seen and appreciated from the other side of the street.
In so far as I could judge, which was hard to do, it looked good of its type – and its type is important in terms of how the city is developed. But I have a suspicion that this may be as much a product of the masterplan (the masterplan was by Make) as of the big blocks of new development within it:-
Next stop was 100, Liverpool Street by Hopkins Architects, a smooth bit of re-engineering of an existing building – included presumably because retrofitting instead of demolition is such an important theme of our times (Marks and Spencer should be retrofitting their building in Oxford Street). I was even less welcome in a corporate HQ than in a primary school, so it was hard to judge exactly what had been done, except that it was high quality:-
After the announcement of the shortlist for the Stirling Prize at midnight last night, I thought I would go and visit the projects which are close-at-hand, including a combined Primary School and apartment block on the Kingsland Road by Henley Halebrown. Of course, it isn’t a great idea to turn up at a primary school on the last day of term and I probably looked a bit eccentric in bicycling shorts. So, I could only see the outside. The nomination describes it as pink which is odd because by far its most obvious feature is that it is powerfully and sculpturally brick red, including the concrete base which has been stained the same colour. It is included in Owen Hatherley’s recently published Modern Buildings in Britain dated 2019, so am not clear why it is included this year, but it’s an interesting combination of tower block cross-subsidising the adjacent school, commissioned by the Benyon Estate, who own De Beauvoir Square and big chunks of Birmingham:-
What is currently happening in Brick Lane is interesting. There is a battle going on between the existing local community, much of it Bangladeshi, and the forces of redevelopment, led by the Zeloofs, the family which bought the Truman, Hanbury and Buxton brewery site over twenty years ago.
One would have expected Tower Hamlets, a traditionally Labour council, to have sided with the local community. But it became over-enamoured of new development under its previous Mayor, John Biggs, as was evident in the debate over the Whitechapel Bell Foundry and decisions are frequently made by the planning committee, often with tiny majorities.
Hettie O’Brien wrote the best informed article on the Bell Foundry and has now written about Brick Lane, as below. I’m glad to see the Spitalfields Trust is involved:-
I tried to post John Wilson’s interview with Maggi Hambling yesterday, but have only just worked out how. I strongly recommend it because she is so dry, so mordant, says what she thinks in such a gruff way, it’s a pleasure to hear her:-
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00159tb?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile
We walked to the Mile End Hospital as it’s only a street away. The Alderney Street cemetery door was open, very unusually, as if making itself available for new takers. I don’t think I have ever experienced such burning heat, certainly in Britain, but even in Marrakesh and Florida, so we crept along the pavement as close to the wall as we could. I felt you could have fried an egg on my head.
Anyway, the nurses were charming and reassuring, administered some special elixir, so our anxieties, but not the COVID, are now over. Thank you all for your concern !
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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