Much as I admired the Hastings House and feel that its owner should have won the Client of the Year Award, the Appleby Blue Almshouse is in every way deserving of this year’s Stirling Prize: thoughtful, well considered, bringing the highest quality of both design and construction to a not very easy part of Southwark. 

And they won the Client of the Year Award.  And the Neave Brown Award for Housing:-

Julian Bell has an exhibition for one week only in a gallery space in 15, Bateman Street in the heart of Soho.

I was particularly taken by two pictures.  One of Dover, apparently topographically exact, but at the same time subtly symbolic.  The three castles;-

The other was a picture of the never-ending queue of cars going into the Blackwall Tunnel.  Although I know this scene only too well, it took me a bit of time to figure it out – again, a subtle mixture of the real and the symbolic, like American painters of tge 1930s:-

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I was invited to an art/architectural installation in 14, Cavendish Square by OF A, a Reykjavik firm of architects.

The house itself is remarkable, one of two grand houses on the north side of Cavendish Square on a site previously owned by the Society of Dilettanti.  No.14 was apparently bought ten years ago, but, although restoration work began, it has been used as an event/party venue.

OF A have made only minimal interventions to make it into magical space:-

I went to see Sarah Myerscough’s beautiful and unexpected new gallery space in Balderton Street, right opposite the front door of Selfridge’s, but feeling as if it belongs somewhere else, far away.  Anyway, it is an extremely fine space for the display of objets d’art, the superior form of craft in which the gallery specialises.  Hard to locate, but very well worth it.

The entrance from the street:-

And the gallery space:-

I found the Cecil Beaton exhibition at the NPG unexpectedly wide-ranging.  Of course, I pretty well knew many of the images of the Bright Young Things of the 1920s, including the likes of Dadie Rylands; but I didn’t know that he lost his job at Vogue in 1938 after making an anti-semitic comment; nor the quality of his work in the Second World War.

There are lots of photographs of Beaton himself and an exceptionally beautiful pencil drawing of him by David Hockney at his most Ingres-like:-

So much greenery, so close to the Palace of Westminster:-

There is a new exhibition of the work of the South African artist-potter opening today at Isaac Benigson’s new gallery at 40, Great Russell Street, nearly opposite the British Museum.

It’s a good and varied selection.  A plate once owned by Min Hogg:-

More plates:-

And some small ceramic sculptures:-

We went to the beautiful exhibition at the Garden Museum of Rory McEwen’s botanical paintings, done on vellum from an early age – the first when he was eight:-

They are very beautiful, sometimes in an abstract way, which is presumably why his work was admired by Jim Dine and Ed Ruscha:-

I realised that we know his work from the book he did for Charlene Garry’s Basilisk Press:-

Here he is photographed by David Dimbleby:-

A late work:-

It was a beautiful autumn day for the funeral of Nick Grimshaw in St. Margaret’s, Burnham Norton, a remote Norfolk church in the middle of fields with a distant view of the sea.

What I particularly valued was hearing about what he was like to work for, so trusting and supportive of younger architects in his practice, allowing and encouraging them to flourish, including industrial designers which was a strand in the practice I did not know about. And he obviously treated his practice like an extended family. You don’t often hear what architects are like to work for. Nick was one of the best:-

There were other architectural pleasures in Hastings besides the Hastings House.

I have always liked Wellington Square which was built, as you might expect, after the Battle of Waterloo and stretches up from the seafront in a slightly disorderly way:-

Then there were good houses on West Hill:-

We had fish-and-chips overlooking the beach:-

On the way back to the station, we walked down George Street, past 10, Marine Parade, with mathematical tiles on the side and weather boarding on the front:-

Last, Pelham Crescent, but we were getting late for our train:-