Following the announcement of the shortlist for the Stirling Prize, I went to visit the new London College of Fashion, one of the group of buildings on the east side of the Olympic Park, part of what is known for obvious reasons as East Bank.

I haven’t regarded the new LCF as the most likable of the buildings of this group – O’Donnell & Tuomey’s Sadler’s Wells East is lower rise and has made more of an effort to conform to a post-industrial aesthetic. But I can see that the Stirling jury will have been looking for buildings with a sense of grand ambition, and the London College of Fashion certainly has that.

From outside, it’s a grid.  Only the ground floor and first floor are open to the public, so I wasn’t able to see the top part, nor the view which is no doubt spectacular:-

What is very impressive is the interior, a concrete Piranesi:-

Last night, I went to the launch of a book about London Clubs in the Subscription Room at Brooks’s.  Tonight, I have been reading it.

What comes across very vividly is how varied London clubs now are, not least in the admirable photographs taken by Laura Hodgson.  Of course, there are the traditional ones in Pall Mall, still opulently palatial.  Then, there are the ones established in the 1980s like 2, Brydges Place which did damage to my waistline in the 1990s, and the Groucho, now owned by Hauser and Wirth.  Jones treats them not really as clubs, but as examples of interior decoration, which he writes about interestingly and with an observant eye.

It’s a bit more expensive than I thought, but beautifully produced, an opportunity to visit all those clubs of which I am not a member.

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I missed the Architecture Foundation’s tour of 469, Bethnal Green Road, a project by Carmody Groarke who are interesting architects (long ago, before the Olympics, they designed a restaurant on the roof of Westfield Stratford City).  It would be easy not to spot the project altogether because it is an adaptation of an existing building – adding three storeys made of galvanised metal on top of an existing, previously nondescript 1970s workshop.  It’s interesting to see architects (and developers) embracing the challenge of refurbishment in place of demolition and the fact that it fits so well in its surroundings is to its credit:-

I have been sent a picture of our house as it was in 1997 when it was acquired by the Spitalfields Trust. It describes how the houses were acquired and the photograph shows the state they were in at the time, as well as the row of shops in front:-.

We walked through the rest of St. John’s, backwards, starting with New Court by Thomas Rickman:-

Good Gothic detailing, as one would expect from the scholarly Rickman:-

Across the Bridge of Sighs:-

Coffee in second court:-

Then out onto the backs:-

We were given a comprehensive and fascinating tour of the Cripps Building, which I realised was only completed in 1967, five years before I matriculated.  I don’t remember being very aware of it.  It anyway fits pretty discretely into its site in between Thomas Rickman’s New Court and Edwin Lutyens’s building for Magdalene College next door.

We arrived from the east, from the car park, not the sequence of medieval courts.  It has an attractive austerity, the staircases treated in a sculptural way:-

It is all very reticent and carefully considered:-

The college is in the process of relandscaping it, so it is not so easy to get a sense of its larger dimensions:-

Its architect, Philip Powell, was the nicest, most charming and modest of men and the architecture is viewed, rightly, as thoughtful, contextual.  It deserves a close look.

It’s Roy Strong’s 90th. birthday today. The Critic have kindly posted the article I have written for its August/September issue in his honour and to remind people of what we owe him.

Happy Birthday, Sir Roy !

https://thecritic.co.uk/sir-roy-strong/

I have just received an advance copy of David Cannadine’s festschrift – Institutions, Individuals and Modern British History, edited by Jonathan Parry and published by The Boydell Press.

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I have only had time so far to read Parry’s introductory account of Cannadine’s remarkable career. Parry implies that Cannadine modelled himself on the career of Jack Plumb, the worldly Master of Christ’s who must have helped to get him elected to a fellowship at Christ’s when he was appointed in 1977 to an Assistant Lectureship in British eighteenth-century history, an interesting appointment for someone whose PhD was on late nineteenth-century landownership. Possibly. But at that stage of Cannadine’s career, he seemed more influenced, as Parry also makes clear, by the work of Lawrence Stone at Princeton and H.J. Dyos at Leicester; and, as it happens, I think of Linda Colley, Cannadine’s wife, as more obviously a product of the Plumb school having done her PhD under him on the early eighteenth-century Tory party.

Anyway, the book is a rich feast for anyone who is interested, as I am, in the relationship between individuals and institutions and it includes essays on two other Cambridge historians – Noel Annan, author of a study of the intellectual aristocracy, and Owen Chadwick, who is always said to have turned down every bishopric offered him.

But, it’s not cheap.

I have just been on my bicycle to the offices of Lund Humphries to pick up one of the first copies of my book, John Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture, just arrived from the printers in Bosnia.

This is, as every author knows, an exciting moment.  Instead of staring at it on screen for the last four years, it is a reality.  And Lund Humphries have done a really wonderful job in terms of its production.  White paper.  Matt photographs.  I already knew that the designer, Mark Thomson, had done a brilliant job in terms of its layout, mixing colour and black-and white, double-page spreads, drawings and contemporary portraits, giving the reader a proper sense, I hope, of the gestation of the work and of Vanbrugh’s friends, allies and clients.  David Valinsky has taken excellent photographs of the three greatest surviving houses – Castle Howard, Blenheim and Grimsthorpe.

You are all invited to the launch at the Wigmore Hall on November 20th:-

https://www.wigmore-hall.org.uk/whats-on/202511201200

Please come.

Meanwhile, copies can be pre-ordered from Lund Humphries.

Or Amazon.