We spent the afternoon in the Banqueting House, Inigo Jones’s undemonstrative masterpiece in which he brought a version of a palazzo in Vicenza into the heart of Whitehall. Begun in 1619, it cost £15,618, replacing a previous banqueting pavilion. I hadn’t realised that in 1638, not long before the Civil War, Inigo Jones drew up grandiose plans for the reconstruction of Whitehall Palace as a whole, all in the style of the Banqueting House: the palace that Charles I dreamed of, but had his head cut off instead:-

There has been an unprecedented amount of traffic on my Twitter account this morning following the publication yesterday of a letter that Dan Cruickshank and I wrote to the Times about the failure of the heritage authorities to work effectively together to save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. As readers of this blog will know, Historic England have taken a narrowly legalistic view of its responsibilities and have actually supported the application to turn the Bell Foundry into a boutique hotel. But if they are not going to fight to preserve and protect such an obviously important historic monument – a monument to long-standing and remarkably well preserved historic craft practices – who will ? Will Tower Hamlets have the guts to turn the application down ? Here is the text of our letter:-

In reading about the life and career of Justin Blanco White last night, just posted on the DNB as one of a group of female architects, a pioneer member of the architectural profession who studied at the Architectural Association from 1929 to 1934, where, in her first year, she did a rendering of the classical orders and in her third year designed a sports hall, I was interested to discover that not just her mother, Amber Blanco White, but her grandmother, Magdalen Stuart Reeves, have entries in the DNB for their involvement in the suffrage movement and fight for women’s rights.

Magdalen Stuart Reeves had been brought up in Christchurch, New Zealand, where she was a pupil of Christchurch School for Girls and edited the Canterbury Times. When her husband was posted to London as agent-general, they became involved with the Fabians and she co-founded the Fabian Women’s Group. In the war, she was director of women’s services in the Ministry of Food.

Meanwhile, her daughter, Amber, also born in Christchurch, had discovered the work of Kant in a bookshop in the Charing Cross Road and got a double first in moral sciences at Newnham. Befriended by H.G. Wells, she had a child by him and two by her husband, Rivers Blanco White, including Justin, who was born in 1911 in their house in Downshire Hill. During Justin’s childhood, her mother worked as a civil servant at the Admiralty and then at the Ministry of Munitions, walking to Whitehall from Hampstead and breakfasting on the way with cabbies.

Quite a family.

I’ve always admired James Lloyd’s work as an artist – a thoughtful, serious, sensitive painter, who won the BP Portrait Award in 1997 with a portrait of his girlfriend, now wife, and was then commissioned to paint Paul Smith, one of the best and most thoughtful portraits in the National Portrait Gallery’s collection. This evening, he had a small exhibition of his recent paintings of artists’ models, each of which was painted in a day.

1. Vanessa:-

2. Sophie:-

3. Phil:-

He won the Discerning Eye Award in 2003 and ING, who sponsor the award, own his Self-portrait:-

What remains of the formal gardens of Cliveden, originally laid out by Lord Orkney in the 1720s as a ‘Quaker parterre’, looked good tonight, as did Barry’s south front:-

I went back to Cliveden to see and admire the exhibition of Anthony Caro’s exhibitions which have been installed down the Green Drive.

I saw them last in spring. Now, it’s high summer. I got interested in the quality of the surface texture of work, much of which was assembled out of existing found fragments from naval and industrial scrapyards, laid out on the floor.

Rip Chord (1970/1974):-

Curtain Road (1974):-

Cliff Song (1976):-

Emma This (1977):-

Belt (1985):-

Box Tent (1987/1989):-

Tympanum (1987/1990):-

Aurora (2000/2003):-

Up Zero (2008/9):-

We were tipped off that a concert was being held in the big industrial space added to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in the late 1970s after the then GLC historic buildings division had intervened to prevent development of the site on the grounds that it was such ‘a unique and important living industry where crafts essentially unchanged for 400 years are practised by local craftsmen’.

It makes a great and atmospheric space for a concert of avant garde music, but the audience was perhaps oblivious of the fact that the space we were sitting in is soon to be demolished to make way for the entrance foyer of a boutique hotel:-

I was standing by the till at The New Craftsman in North Row when I spotted two little display cases placed temptingly just by the cash machine. They are of work which looks as if it might have been found in the ocean deep:-

I was invited to see the work which has been done by Jestico and Whiles – the new-build café and the conversion of the old 1930s classical library into new exhibition space – and the restoration of the original Soane central block and George Dance wing by Julian Harrap at Pitzhanger Manor in Ealing.

I hadn’t previously understood that Soane demolished an existing country house to create his new house, which is surprisingly small in scale, but based on the Arch of Constantine, while retaining the brick wing which had been added in 1768 and on which Soane had himself worked as Dance’s apprentice.

This is evident in the watercolour sketch by C.J. Richardson commissioned by Soane long after he had sold the house:-

The main house itself was, and is, quite small, not much more than a set of entertaining rooms, but it was made to seem much larger by the addition of a kitchen block flanking the carriage drive and fake Roman ruins:-

The entrance façade is appropriately Roman:-

Good Coade stone caryatids and detailing:-

Inside, the paintwork of the Vestibule, originally done by Crace, has been beautifully restored by Hare and Humphreys:-

All the furniture and Soane’s collection are missing. But enough survives to give a sense of the grandiosity of Soane’s suburban retreat:-

I was a bit early for lunch, so called in on St. James-the-Less which I haven’t seen since 1972, during the period when it was still threatened with demolition. It’s remarkably impressive – an intact example of Street’s polychromatic brickwork, designed in 1858, not long after he had published The Brick and Marble Architecture of Northern Italy in 1855 and his first work in London, described by Nairn as ‘taut, curled in, fighting mad – a superb performance’:-