It’s an extremely long time since I’ve been to Ardtornish where we used to come and stay every summer, driving up from Surrey, staying en route in Dumfriesshire and then sometimes with other cousins at Laudale on Loch Sunart.

I remember it as a touch dour.  In fact, what I remember best are the servants’ bells as one comes in from the back yard:-

This is the house seen from its garden:-

And, more conventionally, it’s south front:-

Pevsner aka John Giffard is not polite. ‘A suburban villa afflicted with elephantiasis’.  ‘A gigantic but indistinguished villa with fastidiously detailed and very cold-blooded rooms worthy of a grand hotel’.

Tomorrow, I will learn more.

A lovely audience for Vanbrugh in Simonsbath, high up in remotest Exmoor. I now wish I had stopped to take photographs of the countryside as I drove across the middle of Devon, so amazingly unspoilt, a combination of deep dells and distant views. Just a bit scary because so many of the lanes are single track. The land still looking as it was photographed by James Ravilious.

If you happen to be near Simonsbath tomorrow evening, you can come and hear me talk about Vanbrugh:

https://www.simonsbathfestival.org.uk/events/sir-charles-saumarez-smith

It was the greatest possible pleasure to be shown round Culham Court Chapel in South Oxfordshire by its architect, Craig Hamilton, today.  Such a thoughtful and beautifully detailed project, demonstrating the extraordinary craft skills which are still available – stonework, kneelers, vestments, everything drawn out and executed to the highest possible standard:-

We tried out the new farm café today.  It opened last week and was PACKED, hardly surprising at 1 o’clock on a lovely, sunny Saturday.  It was a long wait for a bacon sandwich, but delicious when it came.

https://stepneycityfarm.org/at-the-farm/farm-cafe/?doing_wp_cron=1746884439.3286490440368652343750

As the eagle-eyed may have spotted in my Comments section, I have kindly been forwarded the marketing information for the Blue Anchor Brewery site on the Mile End Road.

This is a remarkable proposal and I feel badly that I was entirely ignorant of it:-

John Charrington established the Blue Anchor Brewery in Stepney in 1757. His younger brother, Henry, lived in the house next door to us and presumably supervised the work on site. It was the second largest brewery in London, but closed down in 1975 after Charrington had merged with Bass to create a conglomerate. The brewery was then demolished and developed as an unlovely retail park, most of it devoted to a car park. It is a very big and important site and how it is developed will have important consequences for the area, particularly since it is nearly next door to the Genesis Cinema also being developed.

What is currently proposed by AHMM in the outline planning is very similar to the development next to the London Hospital: big buildings set back from the road alongside newly created courtyards.

The obvious question is whether or not Queen Mary University have considered it as a possible site for student housing and additional teaching facilities. It is not very far away and they are keen to connect to the neighbourhood. It might lead to a less generic design.

The biggest risk in the development of the Genesis Cinema is going to be to the character and sense of seclusion of Bellevue Place, which runs up to the side wall of the Cinema and is currently not overlooked.  This is one of the more charming and best preserved bits of Stepney, a group of early nineteenth-century workers’ cottages tucked behind what was Spiegelhalter’s department store:-

My thoughts on the choice of an architect for the British Museum:-

https://thecritic.co.uk/an-architect-for-the-british-museum/

For anyone interested in the work of Rachel Reckitt as a result of seeing War Paint, there is plenty of her work to see in churches in Somerset and Devon in the area where where she lived at Golonscott on the edge of Exmoor and there was a recent exhibition in the Museum of Somerset:-

A Tour of Rachel Reckitt’s Somerset Artworks – South West Heritage Trust

We went last night to see Margy Kinmonth’s latest film, War Paint: Women at War, a brilliant study of the role of women artists in depicting and recording the horrors of war. The earliest was Dame Laura Knight who painted Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-ring, a memorable image from the Second World War. I didn’t know about Rachel Reckitt, who was Penelope Lively’s aunt and did what looked like wonderful and little known constructivist wood engravings of Whitechapel during the blitz. There was also film footage of Linda Kitson doing drawings during the Falklands War and interviews with Maggi Hambling, Rachel Whiteread and a Ukrainian artist making bread out of stones. I don’t think it is on general release, but is being shown in lots of cinemas round the country (https://www.conic.film/films/warpaint#screenings).

This is Rachel Reckitt’s picture of A Sleeping Family in a London Underground Station:-