I have found it hard to photograph Romilly and Lucille’s exhibition because the sunlight is transient and the quality of the space hard to convey.

This is a way of saying, do come if you can.  It is on today from 12 to 5 at #7, 78, Chiltern Street:-

I have been alerted by my friend, Adam Bennett, to the death of Roger Cooper, with whom we stayed in Tehran in the summer of 1973. There are obituaries in the Times and Telegraph.

At the time, we understood him to be the BBC Correspondent in Teheran. Peter Avery, the Persian scholar at King’s, had told him and his younger American wife, Cherie, that four Cambridge undergraduates needed somewhere to stay. They fed us with mountains of the finest caviar from the Caspian Sea, made us feel enormously welcome, taught us a lot about the customs of Iran, and invited us to attend the Summer Festival in Shiraz which he was possibly covering for the BBC.  So, from Teheran, we travelled southwards by bus through Qom to Isfahan and on to Shiraz.  For some reason, Roger and Cherie were at least as interested in contemporary Polish culture as they were in Persian and they were friendly with visiting groups of Polish actors and musicians who were also invited to stay.  It was Roger and Cherie who suggested we should cross the border into Afghanistan, which they told us was by a long way classed as the poorest country in the world.  I’m glad we did because we saw Herat before it had been much touched by the modern world with tribesmen on horseback on the main street.

We lost touch with Roger after we left Iran.   After the fall of the Shah, Roger would have lost his job, came back to London, but went back to Iran ostensibly on business, where he was arrested as a spy and spent six years in an Iranian jail, playing chess with his jailor.   He wrote Death Plus Ten Years in which he described his remarkable sang froid, made possible by the experience of having been educated in a British boarding school.

He was released in 1991.  Adam Bennett’s father discovered that he was going to speak about his experience at Chatham House.  We went to hear him.  What I remember of what he said in conversation was how incredibly shocked he had been at arriving back in Britain by how much it had changed during the six years he had been in prison.  He left what he described as a post-war society in which much of the urban fabric was still war damaged, people lived in comparative poverty and drove bashed-up, second-hand cars.  But when he came back everyone was driving big, smart, new cars.  He didn’t like it and retired to Spain to run a holiday business.

I have been asked to add a PS to my post about Philip on the gestation of the remarkable piece of research about him.

During her college years in the 1970’s, Bethany Ewald was one of the tenants next door to Lucy Core, Philip’s mother’s New Orleans carriage house.  The two remained close friends, especially as Lucy encouraged Bethany to focus on becoming a writer. Many years later, on Lucy’s deathbed, she made Bethany promise to write about Philip.

Now, half a century later, thanks to French Quarter Journal.com, she has worked with a dedicated team who “conspired” with her to bring Philip Core’s legacy to light.

As readers of my blog may remember, I have been intermittently trying to reconstruct the career of the artist, Philip Core, who was a close friend of ours and died of Aids in Westminster Hospital on 12 November 1989. In the last year, I have known that Bethany Bultman has been writing about his life from the perspective of New Orleans where he spent his childhood before being sent away to boarding school at Middlesex and then to Harvard. She has now published an article in the French Quarter Journal which immensely enriches my knowledge of his life, not least because she has had access to photographs owned by his sister, Marguerite. She has kindly allowed me to republish the article on my blog:-

Philip M. Core: Torchbearer for Artistic Freedom

It turns out that there is an immense archive of his work held by the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles and we are hoping this this might form the basis for an exhibition of Philip’s work either in this country or, perhaps, also in Los Angeles and New Orleans.

Head Ornament (1924):-

Clutch bag (1927):-

Tiger clip brooch, commissioned by the Duchess of Windsor (1968):-

It’s set-up day for Romilly’s and Lucille Lewin’s exhibition, Invisible Landscapes, which opens at #7, 78, Chiltern Street on Wednesday.

Their work looks so beautiful in the space – beautiful, bright sunlit space which is half-domestic, half like a gallery, a courtyard off Chiltern Street full of greenery:-

By the way, if you are going to the Storehouse, we had a very delicious supper at a nearby Italian trattoria on the River Lea called Gotto.  I mention it because you’re not spoiled for choice, although they have shrewdly opened a branch of E5 Bakehouse on site.

Also, it took me only half an hour to get there from Green Park on the Mildmay line to Hackney Wick.  Easier than the walk across the park from Stratford.

Go if you can. 

Opens Saturday:-

It’s quite something:-

I have now done a bit more research about the planned redevelopment of the cinema.

It appears that there was a community consultation in October, but although we live only a few hundred yards away, we did not know about it. Those who attended say there were not many people there and the event felt stage managed. No doubt, it was.

There is helpful information online:-

https://www.genesisredevelopment.co.uk/

A new basement cinema is shown in the plans with a foyer on the ground floor. The street frontage makes efforts to conform to the previous frontage.

So, the big issue is the scale of the development and its effect on Bellevue Place. And how it relates to whatever happens on the Anchor Brewery site next door.