I was extremely upset to read of the death of Chris Wilkinson yesterday – a very good architect and an exceptionally nice, decent and shrewd person who devoted a great deal of time and energy to the Royal Academy when I was there, including chairing the Client Committee which was responsible for the major building project in Burlington Gardens and being Treasurer, a very onerous role, during the last three years. He did quite a bit of work in East London, including the Stratford Market Depot for the Jubilee Line and the Arts Two Building for Queen Mary with a wall to the main road designed by Jacqui Poncelet (he was interested in collaboration with artists).

In 2015, he asked me to write the introduction to a book about his drawings and I reproduce part of it in his memory:-

Through knowing Chris at the RA, I became a great admirer of his work and of his practice.   Some of it I already knew before coming to the RA, like Magna in Rotherham, the highly inventive science centre in a disused industrial building, which won the Stirling Prize for architecture in 2001;  the Gateshead Millennium Bridge, which snakes across the River Tyne connecting Newcastle to its long-standing urban rival to the south and which won the Stirling Prize the following year;  and the elegant twisting bridge which connects the Royal Opera House to the Royal Ballet School across the street.   I even remember seeing the Stratford Market Depot, one of the early projects on the then new Jubilee line, when I was a judge on the Building of the Year Award some time in the mid-1990s.

More recently, I had the opportunity to be taken round the amazing Wilkinson and Eyre project in Singapore:  Gardens by the Bay, which consists of great bubble domes of exotic botanical specimens celebrating biodiversity in an equatorial city.   I am very familiar with Arts Two, the project he and his firm completed recently on the campus of Queen Mary, University of London, which is just up the road from where we live in east London and which includes a ceramic façade of books by Jacqueline Poncelet, indicating his willingness to work and collaborate with artists.   And, for the Summer Exhibition in 2012, Chris designed a very beautiful, extremely simple, geometric installation for the courtyard which consisted of a series of frames converting from Landscape to Portrait.

What I didn’t know — but it doesn’t at all surprise me — is the extent to which Chris thinks about the process of designing new buildings projects by way of drawing in a sketchbook which he carries with him.   I love the way he describes the process of drawing in the introduction to this book, as a system of facilitation for the process of thinking, working out his ideas on paper.   He does this not with any conscious aesthetic intent, but the results are frequently aesthetically pleasing precisely because they are pure expressions of design thinking.

What one sees in the book are the different ways in which he uses drawings:  the outline doodle;  the slightly more worked out sketch;  the ground plan showing the use of space;  the more finished watercolour;  the presentation drawing done to seduce a client;  the depiction of a particular detail which is worrying him;   the drawing which looks as if it has been done for pure pleasure.   They are infinitely various and demonstrate very clearly the ways in which he uses drawing as a visual language, now sadly rare.

So, the rural communities of North Shropshire stretching east-west from Oswestry to Whitchurch – farming country, pro-Brexit – have sent a very clear message to Westminster and the country as a whole: they do not like the Prime Minister, they do not trust him, they abhor his dishonesty and would like him to go. So what happens next ? The conservative vote is 31% down from 62% to 31% – a lamentable figure. The liberal vote is 37% up to 47% of the electorate. I just hope that this might bring the liberals and labour to the table to discuss the so-called Progressive Alliance. You only have to look at the statistics to see that a minority of the country supports this government and the majority needs to work together to boot them out.

I have just been filling out the Marketing Questionnaire for the book I wrote during the toughest part of lockdown on the work of John Wonnacott, an artist whose paintings I have always admired ever since the National Portrait Gallery commissioned him to paint John Major, while Major was still (but only just) in office as Prime Minister, looking a bit forlorn in one of the grander rooms in 10, Downing Street, with Norma sitting in the window seat behind him. Four years later, Wonnacott himself suggested that he might paint a portrait of the entire Royal Family to mark the millennium. I thought it was extremely unlikely that they would agree, but to my surprise they did and so he painted a great set-piece portrait of them all. At the time, he was represented by Agnew’s, one of the leading Old Master dealers who had very grand premises on Bond Street. They were able to negotiate the sale of his work to both the Tate and Metropolitan Museum.

The book will be published by Lund Humphries in September.

I was more impressed by Dezeen’s list of its top ten architecture projects of the last year than I was by this year’s Stirling shortlist. The Stirling list seemed to be dominated by big projects by well-known architects whereas the Dezeen list seems to have a wider range, less metropolitan, more inventive and paying attention to originality. I was particularly pleased to see Niall McLaughlin’s Auckland Tower listed. I also like the look of the two Devon projects, both of which are lowkey and ecological. These projects are much closer to the reality of everyday architecture and it would be good if the RIBA paid more attention to this, not to what looks good in photographs.

https://www.dezeen.com/2021/12/15/british-architecture-review-2021/?s=09

In case you’re stuck for what to buy for Christmas, can I make a gentle suggestion (I hope it opens correctly) ?

https://mailchi.mp/38afd7420ebb/last-posting-date-20th-december-2021?e=9dc0f9b85b

I wasn’t really planning to write anything more about the vexed question of the Downing Street Christmas Party – or parties, as it now appears, of which it is easy to lose count, not just the one on December 18th. pre-arranged, but an endless round of champagne and quizzes, with the cameras conveniently covered by dustbin bags in case they were being recorded: so they knew they were doing something wrong.

But now I read that a report will be produced by Simon Case ‘as soon as we reasonably can’. We, not he. I thought that the whole point was that the Cabinet Secretary had been asked to produce an independent report. But now it is apparently a co-production, written jointly by the Prime Minister. A whitewash in other words. Well, we guessed that, but he might have had the grace not to make it quite so obvious.

I have been trying to think what I would do if I were in the Cabinet Secretary’s position of having to exonerate the Prime Minister from the idea, now widely held, that he may possibly have lied about the various parties held in Downing Street last year.

The obvious thing would be to bring in someone properly independent, not the police because they say there is no available evidence. I suggest Jo Maugham of the Good Law Project (ie someone who is independent, a lawyer and committed to legality in government). Then, I suggest he is given access to all the Prime Minister’s WhatsApp and mobile phone texts and messages which should anyway be in the public domain from 1 November to Christmas Day last year.

If there is no reference to any parties, and if there is no other record of drink having been ordered at public expense and no other communication with Lord Brownlow than the request for further funding which he had apparently forgotten when briefing Lord Geidt, then he could be cleared which would be good for him and for the government.

Providing of course that his records have not already been deleted as they were when he was Mayor.

In the unlikely event that you might want to hear my article about Bishop Auckland read aloud, you can listen to it in the third part of the podcast below. It sounds as if it’s a fairy story, but it’s true.

https://thecritic.co.uk/london-gossip-dickensian-christmasses-and-experimental-castles/

Having posted one bit of family memorabilia today, I am posting a second – a picture of my father which I was recently sent. He was aged 8, just after the first world war, staying with his grandparents in Hertfordshire:-

It was my brother’s funeral yesterday in the peaceful setting of The Charterhouse where he spent the last couple of years. I got a slight frisson from the picture of him reading as a child, which he went on doing for the rest of his life. It was taken in Pembrokeshire in August 1953, where my parents went on holiday in a small cottage the year before I was born. John was ten. I post it in his memory: