It’s always a treat to visit Llanfairfechan, Herbert North’s model village high above the sea half way between Bangor and Conway. He built Wern Isaf in 1900, having just got married and worked for Lutyens. He began to build houses on Park Road in 1899.

Bolnhurst was one of the first, slightly more mannered than his later style became:-

The later ones are a bit more angular, part- Voysey, but independent-minded and well preserved, a flexible language:-

Two lovely ones at the top of the hill:-

Readers of my blog will know that we’re very keen on St. Baglan’s, Llanfaglan, the church where Lord Snowdon is buried – even in spite of the fact that the gate is almost always locked except once when there was a funeral.

It is in the middle of a remote field on the coast beyond Caernarvon:-

The estuary beside it is exceptionally beautiful:-

We went down to Port Penrhyn yesterday, which contains good remnants of the late eighteenth-century harbour.  No fish.

Good wooden boats:-

Decorative boarding:-

And views towards Great Orme:-

I have been alerted to a recent article in the New York Times about the continuing demand for the best quality office space in the City, a piece of apparent boosterism at a time when most of the evidence seems to point in the other direction: a decline in demand, apparent vacancies, offices keen to shrink to save money when so many people are now working only a three-day week in the office post-COVID. But I suppose I hope that the City’s planning committee are right and that all the tower blocks they are allowing to be built will be let.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/13/business/central-london-office-space.html?mwgrp=a-dbar&unlocked_article_code=1.KU0.rqjD.syIjXDenO9u_&smid=em-share

I find it odd that my uncle John Raven who led a richly varied life as a classicist and Senior Tutor of King’s College, Cambridge is now chiefly remembered for a paper he wrote for Trinity College, Cambridge in 1948 demonstrating that plants which had been discovered on Rhum by John Heslop-Harrison, the Professor of Botany at Newcastle University, had been put there fraudulently.

The episode has already been the subject of a book, The Rum Affair, published in 1999, and was this morning the subject of a short programme (see below) on scientific hoaxes:-

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001ptb5?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

I hadn’t remembered that he published that they couldn’t be natives in Nature without mentioning how they had got there, although it seems that the people in the local big house had already guessed.