A little while ago, we went round the British Museum and were impressed by the work which had been done during the first lockdown to address the battleground of provenance, with new labelling and some new displays, including taking the bust of Hans Sloane off its pedestal and putting it in a prominent cabinet, surrounded by information about his tacit complicity in slavery. Far from being shocked by this, as some critics have been, I thought it was an entirely sensible, and probably long overdue, acknowledgment of the deep public interest in how, when and where historic artefacts and antiquities were acquired:-
As we approach a second lockdown, I realise that an increasing amount of our life and intellectual stimulus is migrating back online, not necessarily unpleasantly, because tonight we were able to watch Sue Stuart-Smith talking to Edmund de Waal about her book, The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature which is an appropriate topic for lockdown: the therapeutic characteristics of gardens, their sense of psychological enclosure, which she is able to convey very effectively as a highly empathetic psychiatrist and psychotherapist.
I keep remembering that, by chance, I was in the States four years ago on Election Day, having supper in a small Iranian restaurant on Beacon Hill. We pretty well knew what the result was going to be by the time we left the restaurant at 10.30 from intermittently watching the results come in state by state on a small television screen behind the bar; but not in any way how cataclysmic the result would be for America’s standing in the world. That weekend I drove through rural Pennsylvania from Cleveland to Falling Water and remember all the Trump signs by the road. I wonder what those rural communities will be voting today.
I was part of a discussion organised by TEFAF and Apollo about whether or not Old Master paintings look better in traditional settings, as, for example, in the Frick Collection, where they are surrounded by fabric, furniture and decorative arts, a setting of traditional haut luxe, or whether they look at least as good, and possibly even better, in a more neutral, museum environment, as is the orthodoxy in plenty of European museums, as, for example, in the Kunstmuseum in Basel, designed in the 1930s by Paul Bonatz and Rudolf Christ, and the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, where the displays were overseen by Franca Albini who had pioneered a more abstract, ahistorical style of display in the Palazzzo Bianco in Genoa. The discussion was prompted by the issue as to how the Frick’s very choice collection of Old Master paintings will look in Marcel Breuer’s old Whitney Building on Madison Avenue, which is not just ahistorical, but powerfully so, a tough, in some ways combative environment for paintings. We will see.
So sad to hear of the death of David Scrase, an admirable, knowledgeable and thoughtful Assistant Keeper of Prints and Drawings, then Keeper and later Assistant Director of the Fitzwilliam from 1976, the year I graduated, till 2013 when he retired. He was always so supportive in a quiet way. A passionate balletomane.
As we go into a second lockdown at 12.01 on Thursday morning, I have realised that my blog fodder will remain very thin, so am posting a picture of the medlar tree in our front garden in its full autumn glory in what remained of the sun on Saturday morning, before probably pretty much disappearing for another month, apart from the occasional shopping:-
The Financial Times have just put online Edmund de Waal’s poetic and deeply moving account of Romilly’s working practices and recent jewellery in advance of her exhibition at Make in Bruton, opening on November 20th.:-
Oddly, the above link opened for me early in the morning on condition that I divulged what I most miss during COVID (the answer was the freedom to travel freely, since I can’t pretend that I miss going to sports matches). So, I am now posting the article instead:-
Then we went down into the Engine House. I loved the sense of the simplicity of the equipment, all with a slightly Heath Robinson aspect, pumping the slip round the factory building twenty four hours a day:-
I ended up inside the surviving bottle kiln:-
The point does not need to be laboured: we have become unfamiliar with the traditions and environments of handwerk. We assume that the only worthwhile labour is on a computer screen. This is why it is worth trying to preserve the monuments and craft skills of traditional workshop production, as are so wonderfully evident at Middleport and could so easily be re-established in Whitechapel.
Throughout the public Inquiry about the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, there was much discussion about Middleport Pottery as a good model for how the Foundry could be kept in operation.
Middleport Pottery, which opened in 1888 for the manufacture of Burleigh ware, was at risk of going out of business ten years ago, the building was on English Heritage’s buildings at risk register, so the site as a whole was bought by the United Kingdom Historic Building Preservation Trust, a subsidiary of the Prince’s Regeneration Trust established in order to be able to attract public funding. It is now called Re-Form. It’s Re-Form which was encouraged to intervene in Whitechapel and they clearly have the skills and expertise to do so.
The factory is on a massive scale – a monument to late Victorian enterprise, designed by a local architect, Absalom Reade Wood, built alongside the Trent and Mersey canal, very carefully designed to be as efficient as possible, Fordist before Ford.
Unfortunately, it was drizzling as I walked from Longport Station along the canal:-
On the left is the only surviving bottle kiln of the original seven, the other six demolished after the Clean Air Act was passed in 1956:-
I started upstairs, above the engine house, in the Slip House, moving next door into the Mould Store:-
Immediately, you see and feel the difference between a sanitised and reconstructed modern environment à la Raycliff and one which has seen the wear and tear of everyday skilled work:-
This is the room where they do the jiggering and jollying in the Potter’s Shop:-
One of the things that I have been very struck by in all the discussions surrounding the potential saving of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry is how little currency industrial archaeology now seems to have in the politics of conservation. In the 1970s and 1980s, as Professor Toshio Kusamitsu made very clear in his submission to the Bell Foundry Inquiry, industrial archaeology was a very important movement, mirroring the collapse of industry and ensuring the survival of the major relics of industrial history, putting industrial history close to the centre of the way history was understood and interpreted, alongside the movement to write history from below, History Workshop, and new interpretations of the early stages of industrialisation; but I haven’t detected that anyone in Historic England is any longer much interested in this aspect of architectural heritage. At the Inquiry, I was struck by how totally uninterested Michael Dunn, the Principal Inspector of Historic Buildings, was in the bell foundry, giving a very deadpan rebuttal as to any reason why it might be remotely worth preserving. The London Advisory Committee should have intervened, but was encouraged not to. Is it because issues of gender and race have replaced an interest in work and labour ? Or is it because industrial history is treated as a northern concern, not relevant to London ?
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