In the interests of those people interested in the planned redevelopment of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, I am providing a link to the proposals, which were posted earlier in the week:-

http://thebellfoundry.co.uk/

It shows that the plans have been drawn up with care and with the help and advice of the Hughes, the previous owners.

But it also demonstrates that it is a purely commercial hotel development, based on the Hughes’s belief that it is no longer possible to operate a working foundry in Whitechapel and therefore asking for change of use.

Since there is now a well developed alternative proposal, this argument should be rejected.

After lunch at the Art Workers’ Guild, I headed off to Mayfair Art Weekend.   It gave me a chance to enjoy the many shop windows celebrating the Royal Academy’s 250th. anniversary, most especially that of Fenwick which includes illustrations by Pierre Le-Tan of the Michelangelo Tondo:-

Henry Moore, who never was an RA:-

David Hockney:-

And Gilbert and George:-

Alongside John Claridge’s book of photographs of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, I have also acquired a copy of his book of photographs of the East End, published in 2016 by Spitalfields Life. They are amazingly atmospheric. He was brought up in Plaistow and acquired his first camera, an Ilford Sportsman, as a child. He got a job aged fifteen working in the photographic department of McCann Erickson, an advertising agency, and, aged seventeen, he took his photographs to show Bill Brandt. All through the 1960s, he documented the old East End in grainy, moody photographs of an area which was still war ravaged, poor, and still with a strong sense of working class community, which he depicts with affection.

From Boughton, we went over the border to Leicestershire, where David Ross has constructed a spectacular, small opera house in the old seventeenth-century stables attached to a large, sprawling manor house, which was previously a naughty prep school:-

The opera house has been designed – beautifully – by Witherford Watson Mann, intimate and heavily wooded.   We saw Antony McDonald’s stylish production of Thomas Adès’s Powder My Face and had supper in the kitchen garden:-

We went on our annual expedition to Boughton, this time to an event about Memory and the importance of music to those suffering dementia, often the only thing that people can remember when everything else is forgotten, hard wired into the brain.

The house was as beautiful as ever, floating across the Northamptonshire fields, dreaming of northern France:-

We went round the back where one can see the remains of an older house, monastic, bought in 1528 by Sir Edward Montagu, a Henrician lawyer.   Pevsner says, rather harshly, that it ‘does not call for study’:-

Inside were some items from the collection, including a copy of Peter Prelleur’s A Modern Music Master (London, 1730):-

And Bonnie Prince Charlie’s camp kettle:-

Best of all was Mozart’s 40th. Symphony, performed by the Aurora Orchestra in the Great Hall from memory.   Not having scores gave it a different mood:  lighter, less rigid, more authentic, as if performed for the first time in 1788.

Someone on my twitter account very kindly pointed me in the direction of a small book produced by Cafe Royal Books of photographs taken – I assume – in the 1960s by John Claridge, a very good East End photographer, of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry as it used to be (only available by post from Cafe Royal books). It is a melancholy record of the operation of the foundry when it was working at full blast, turning out ornate and beautifully crafted bells for the world.

Several people have asked if anything can be done to prevent its conversion into an upmarket boutique hotel.

Two things seem at least possible:-

1. It turns out that much of the historic equipment was part of the listing, so that it may have been illegal for the interior to have been stripped out of its contents.

2. It is open to Tower Hamlets to turn down an application for change of use. This will require members of the planning committee to recognise that it is better to have a working foundry in Whitechapel than a post-industrial restaurant and bar.

If anyone knows the relevant local councillors and members of the planning committee, power lies in their hands.

I spent the day at the Chalke Valley History Festival, speaking in the afternoon about the early history of the Royal Academy, which I used to know more about, when I wrote The Company of Artists (I was informed on arrival that it is now out-of-print, although still prominently on sale in the Royal Academy bookshop).   The Festival was originally held in Ebbesbourne Wake, but for the last few years has been held in Broad Chalke – a massive encampment of tents devoted to history re-enactment from Stone Age flint knappers to people selling WWII medical uniform.   I walked up Church Bottom to remind myself of the glories of the Wiltshire Downs:-

And later explored the village:-

I had forgotten that Cecil Beaton lived in Broad Chalke in Reddish House, where I was kindly fed chocolate ice cream and allowed to photograph both house and garden.   The house is a perfectly formed Field & Bunney piece of early eighteenth-century domestic architecture, originally built in the 1660s, sold in 1696 to Jeremiah Cray, a local and obviously prosperous clothier, and leased in 1702 to John Coombes, a mercer, who added the pilasters and pediment:-

The garden behind is also very beautiful, in the lee of the downs:-

I was asked this morning, and have been before, how it is that the Royal Academy owns a great Michelangelo sculpture.

The answers lies with Sir George Beaumont, an old Etonian baronet, who learned to paint at school as a pupil of Alexander Cozens and spent six weeks in 1771, when he was eighteen, staying at the home of the Reverend Charles Davy at Henstead in Suffolk, painting and drawing the Suffolk countryside. He went on the Grand Tour in 1782, when he acquired Claude Lorrain’s Landscape with Hagar and the Angel, now in the National Gallery.

The story of how Beaumont acquired the Tondo is told by Alison Cole in her monograph on it. Beaumont went to Rome in 1821. He made friends with Canova, who presumably alerted him to the existence of the Tondo in the collection of Jean-Baptiste Wicar, who had been a member of Napoleon’s Commission des Sciences et des Arts, which had been in charge of appropriating works of art from Italy and the Netherlands to enrich the Louvre and other French museum collections.

On 19 May 1822, Beaumont was able to write to Sir Thomas Lawrence, the then President of the Royal Academy, how ‘I am going this morning…to see a fine collection of drawings in the possession of Mr Vicari [Wicar], who was in great power during the French Revolution & made ample use of it, I am told all the treasures of Italy were at one time at his command, & it is from him that I have procured M. Angelo…’

Not long after, he wrote to his friend William Wordsworth, ‘How I long to show it to you’. He bequeathed it to the Royal Academy, died in 1827, and it came to the Academy following his wife’s death in 1829.

I forgot to post the amazing view from the top floor of Millbank Tower, looking downriver, past the Palace of Westminster, or, as in my photograph, across the river and over the gardens of Lambeth Palace towards the new towerscape of the City:-