I had read on twitter that Ipswich Museum is one of the best preserved civic museums, still with one of the display cases which it brought from its original building which opened as a private natural history museum in 1846 in Museum Street to its new building by Horace Cheston which opened in 1881, with its fine terracotta façade and its Jungle Case with backdrop painted by E.R. Smyth, a local Ipswich artist:-

Inside is highly atmospheric, although potentially at risk from a forthcoming lottery development (I haven’t seen how the Pitt Rivers has maintained its original style of display). The displays were Darwinian, based on the ideas of the Rev. Professor J.S. Henslow, who was the Museum’s President and had been Darwin’s tutor at Christ’s:-

The Great Pied Hornbill:-

At the back are displays of human anatomy:-

Upstairs are the great ornithological collections of Fergus Ogilvie (1861-1918), a local landowner with an estate in Argyllshire and author of Field Observations on British Birds:-

A reconstruction of Bass Rock:-

A Dotterell:-

I have never seen anywhere so spectacularly redolent of the Victorian fascination, and sense of wonder, in all aspects of the natural world.

Upstairs is Ethnography.

The life of the trapper:-

The hood of a sealskin coat:-

Figures from African Masquerades:-

I’m sure the displays will be condemned as outdated, which they indubitably are, but they preserve a strong sense of respect for other cultures from the days when Edward Fitzgerald lived in Woodbridge and Edward Moor built a Hindu monument in his Ipswich garden.

We celebrated Midsummer Night’s Eve standing on the balcony of the Maltings, looking out over the marshes of the River Alde towards Iken church and listening to Alisa Wallerstein play Bach Cello Suites in the amazing open space of the concert hall, which I have always thought of as a work (a masterwork) by Philip Dowson, but I see is credited in Pevsner – surely wrongly – to Derek Sugden, the brilliant acoustic engineer, who was a partner of Dowson’s in Arup Associates and worked with him on the project, creating the acoustic by having a high ceiling and hard seats, which are worth it for the quality of the sound:-

I apologise to those of my readers who have been plagued by the fact that a talk I gave about my grandfather Hubert a month or so ago always appeared first, as if I hadn’t posted anything since. This was a glitch in the system, owing to the fact that I must have pressed a button marked sticky and its stickiness meant that it always appeared on top. But I have now managed to rectify it, thanks to admirably clear instructions on Google, in order the resume normal service.

The Soane Museum does not allow visitors to take photographs after 10 o’clock in the morning in order to encourage them to enjoy and appreciate the house without the annoyance or distraction of other people snapping or themselves failing to pay attention to the reality of the experience. So, the attached photograph is technically contraband because it was taken at 10.01 yesterday, inspired by the way Hélène Binet’s three commissioned photographs make one look at the character of Soane’s interiors with new eyes:-

The film about the Whitechapel Bell Foundry has now been made more widely available by The Gentle Author in a columnn in Spitalfields Life which includes information about the latest state of the plans drawn up by Bippy Segal for his boutique hotel – that it will have a rooftop swimming pool where night-time swimmers can cavort in immediate view of the adjacent mosque and that there will be a big bell on its roof, ringing in the change in Whitechapel from employment in real industry to the decadence of luxury tourism:-

http://spitalfieldslife.com/2019/06/20/a-film-about-the-whitechapel-bell-foundry/

I saw a tweet recently commenting on what an incredible mess Trafalgar Square has become. I thought of this comment this evening as I looked down from the steps of the National Gallery on what is nowadays being used far too often as privatised performance space, not as one of the great, democratic open squares of central London where, as Sean Scully reminded me shortly afterwards, he was able to come as a young Irish child living in Highbury to feed the pigeons and absorb the lessons of British history:-

I went to see the multi-screen homage to the multifarious creative life of Lina Bo Bardi, A Marvellous Entanglement by Isaac Julien at Victoria Miro. It was filmed mostly in various locations in Salvador – the Casa do Benin, which she designed jointly with the French photographer, Pierre Verger, the staircase at the Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM) Bahia, where he filmed a sequence of dance by a local choreographer, and Coaty, a social housing project, now ruined. The style is meditative and allusive. ‘We can leave the historic Bo Bardi to the historians. Of course there is a great documentary to be made about her, that’s just not what we’re doing. The thing we want to communicate is the architecture, the movement, the dynamism of it. And to use her ideas’.

I went to the Soane Museum’s small, but very choice exhibition on his use of light in his buildings and perhaps more how those who illustrated his buildings, particularly J.M. Gandy, used and responded to the fall of light.

Gandy did a view of the Library at Cricket Lodge, Somerset on 29 January 1803:-

His view of the Desenfans Mausoleum at 39 Charlotte Street in 1807:-

This is the amazing conservatory which Soane planned, but never built, at the back of Pitzhanger Manor:-

Henry Parke did a beautiful aerial view of Stonehenge in August or September 1817 for Soane’s lectures to students of the Royal Academy:-

The South-East Transfer Office at the Bank of England:-

Downstairs, the Museum has commissioned three beautiful modern photographs of Soane’s work, two at the Museum and one at Dulwich, by Hélène Binet, the Swiss architectural photographer.

We went to see this year’s Jerwood Makers Open at the Jerwood Space in Union Street, but in due course to travel to Sleaford, Manchester, Scunthorpe and Torquay, a good national run to show work which oddly and fascinatingly has nearly all been made in Walthamstow.

We were particularly interested to see the work of Lucie Gledhill who has worked for a long time with Romilly – indeed, was the person responsible for reintroducing her to the making of jewellery, working as what she calls her translator. But she has always worked independently as a maker, developing different types of chain, on this occasion exhibiting differently sized chain links made out of wood, iron and silver.

This is the biggest wood ring (the photographs don’t do the scale of the work justice):-

They then grow smaller:-

And smaller still:-

I also like and respect the work of Forest + Found, which we have previously seen at Make in Bruton:-

The campaign to save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry has gone quiet of late because it has been hard to maintain the momentum of the campaign through the longueurs of the planning process. But it is coming to a crunch as Tower Hamlets have to make a decision as to whether to allow a New York venture capitalist to convert a great and important historic site into a boutique hotel or whether, instead, the United Kingdom Building Preservation Trust should be allowed to take the property over and restore it to being, once again, a working foundry.

Do please watch the short film they have made which makes the case for its preservation very powerfully:-

http://www.savethewhitechapelbellfoundry.com/