Out of the blue, I got an email from the curator of Stonehurst, a historic property designed by H.H. Richardson in Waltham outside Boston. She was enquiring whether I had any family papers relating to my step-grandmother, Ethel Paine Moors, who was brought up in Stonehurst and died ten days after marrying my grandfather in the year that I was born (she was dead by the time my parents went to meet her off the boat from Southampton). I could supply no information, but have discovered in return that she was a fiery liberal who devoted her life to teaching in African American schools, including Penn School in St. Helena, South Carolina. It was her family trust, not Rockefeller or the Ford Foundation, which funded one of the early civil rights conferences in 1957 at which Martin Luther King gave an historic speech later published ‘At the Threshold of Integration’.

I walked from my new place of work in Hanover Square down to a meeting in the Strand, cutting through Soho and observing details in the architecture which I have not spotted before.

The eccentric capitals in one of the shop fronts on Regent Street:-

The lettering on the entrance to the old primary school in Ingestre Place:-

And the surviving old warehouses beyond:-

The clock on the Bar Italia:-

And the Scales of Justice on the old Bow Street police station:-

St. Mary-le-Strand:-

The brutalism of the façade of King’s:-

And the lettering on the old Strand underground station, later called Aldwych, a branch on the Piccadilly line:-

I sadly missed the memorial event at the British Library last week devoted to the life of Anne Olivier Bell, the last of the so-called Monuments Men, editor of Virginia Woolf’s diary, and co-founder of Charleston Farmhouse. I thought I knew her well, but learned a lot that I had not known by listening to the recording: about the trickiness of her childhood split between her mother in Dorset and her father, who was Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum; that she was a motorbike despatch rider in the war, before she worked for the Monuments Commission, which she always downplayed (this I knew) and only did for a year and a half; about her sitting at her desk at the Arts Council with her pencil poised to pounce on any error in the catalogues; about her dressmaking in the late 1960s at Cobbe Place; and how little she wrote herself and how much she hated public speaking. What comes across is how loved she was, and admired, by the people who were asked to speak about the different aspects of her life up until her death last year aged 102.

I always like the cold winter light and long shadows in the house:-

I had not seen Old Flo since she moved to Canary Wharf.

The signage might suggest that she isn’t necessarily that much appreciated:-

But, otherwise, she looks good in the winter sun:-

Very appropriately, she sits opposite a Lynn Chadwick on the other side of the waterworks:-

Just back from Manhattan, I am unavoidably struck by the Manhattanisation of London.

First, Canary Wharf as seen from the south end of Millwall Dock:-

Then, the new skyline of the City as seen from Dunbar Wharf:-

The last stop on our Wiltshire/Somerset art weekend was the New Art Centre which had openings of the work of John Hubbard and Charlotte Verity.

Charlotte’s was shown in a new space designed by Steve Marshall, with good natural daylight on her work, including Seed Time (2018):-

Young Leaves:-

One of the innovations in Bruton is a new craft gallery called Make, owned by Hauser & Worth and, I assume, part of the way in which they are supporting the local economy.

It is showing Song Coats by Cameron Short and Janet Tristram of Bonfield Block-Printers:-

Baskets by Annemarie O’ Sullivan:-

Spoons by Mark Reddy:-

And pots by Nicola Tassie:-

Just for the record, this is another Piet Oudolf garden, in its winter mode, all brown, with the pavilion by Smiljan Radic:-

We went to the opening of Catherine Goodman’s exhibition Eve at Hauser & Worth in Somerset last night. I took photographs rather randomly and now, the morning after, am unable to identify them, having failed to pick up a list of works and being somewhat distracted by the throng.

This is Eve:-

And this is Beekeeper, based on the wonderful film ‘The Spirit of the Beehive’:-

They are rich and exuberant painterly paintings.