I am very sorry to hear of the death of John Goto, a remarkable photographer:

I first came across his photographs of Prague – I think at the ICA – and commissioned him to document the changes at the National Portrait Gallery in the 1990s. He did this with a Russian panoramic camera which introduced a great deal of distortion, but they were, as I had hoped, much more atmospheric than most documentary photographs. Then, in 2002, we walked in to Tate Britain and found a room full of his works from his series ‘Loss of Face’ which were devoted to digital images from rood screens damaged on the orders of the Cromwellian iconoclast, William Dowsing. We bought four of them and have lived with them ever since:-

We had a tour of rural Hampstead, the bits we didn’t know. Starting in Downshire Hill:-

Then, Gainsborough Gardens:-

I think this is a cottage on The Mount:-

The garden wall of Fenton House:-

And some cottages on Admiral’s Walk:-

We ended up walking back down the hill to the local parish church. Hard to believe it’s London:-

I had never seen Benson and Forsyth’s 1978 Branch Hill Estate on the west hillside of Hampstead: an extraordinarily well-preserved model of its time, a year before the Thatcher election. It’s based on an Italian hill-town:-

It’s been such dreary weather that I haven’t been taking any photographs, but today the sun shone:-

Nice volutes in Bedford Square:-

The arrival of the August/September issue of The Critic with my views, nearly all positive, of the new look NPG, led me to see if my article on The Modern House had appeared online. It has (see below). It was an attempt to describe the revolution in attitude brought about by the website, The Modern House, which has made 1950s and 1960s modernist housing so desirable through good descriptions and photography, quite different from the puritanical earnestness which traditionally surrounded social housing.

https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/july-2023/modern-houses-buyers-actually-want/

I was sent a copy of the biography of Sir John Elliott which has just appeared online (see below) because it begins with the picture of John I was involved in commissioning when I was at the National Portrait Gallery; but I read to the end because it provides a fascinating and very detailed account of a remarkable historian – so incredibly hard working, so wide ranging, both a parachutist and a truffle hunter, who managed to maintain his humanity to the end. It’s a long read, but worth it.

https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publishing/memoirs/21/elliott-john-1930-2022/