We had been tipped off that it was possible to buy good seafood in the old port office at Port Penrhyn, the surviving and attractively ramshackle old port to the north of Penrhyn Castle, much of the port rebuilt in 1820 before the castle itself. You can indeed, but only from Friday to Sunday. It provides a pretty impressive array of fresh fish, as you can see from their blackboard:-
For those who might be interested, I appeared on Mariella Frostrup’s daily radio programme on Times radio at 1.45 today. You can listen again at 45 minutes from the beginning:-
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/radio/show/20211118-4754/2021-11-18
I am learning things I did not previously know about my older brother, John, from his obituaries which appear in today’s Times and Telegraph. In particular, I had never heard the description of him by the late Michael Russell: ‘“If some old bag he had never seen before asked, in Latin, for a rare gardening book, there are two certainties about John: first that it would take him about 40 seconds to identify the book correctly, and second, it would take him about two minutes to recognise the old bag as the Queen of Iceland.”
I am posting a very nice tribute to my older brother, John, who sadly died at midday yesterday in the Charterhouse. The tribute conveys so much of his character, particularly his devotion to Heywood Hill, where he worked for 43 years, not counting a period over Christmas 1963, which I didn’t know about. I started buying books from him not long afterwards and he taught me a lot about books, as well as about many other things – china tea and brass rubbing. He was a mentor as well as an older brother:-
It is our sad duty to report the death yesterday of John Saumarez Smith, aged 78, after a short illness. John was a legendary bookseller who joined Heywood Hill fresh from Cambridge in September 1965, managing our bookshop from 1974 until his retirement in May 2008. He took to bookselling, and to Heywood Hill, like ink to the page.
John joined the team here briefly as a Christmas temp in 1963, in the days when most customers had accounts and their own page in the shop’s hand-written ledgers. Old-fashioned bookselling, recommending worthwhile books in person to appreciative readers and collectors, had rewards as he put it both literary and social, ‘I find the equation between books and people perpetually fascinating’.
John had a first-class mind including a truly prodigious memory for both books and people. He came to personify Heywood Hill for his many admirers across the world. John’s scholarly air, mischievous grin and deep, broad book knowledge made Heywood Hill a magnet for the affluent well-read. His style was perfectly suited to the book-lined stage of this little shop. Annual trips to America added many transatlantic customers to our ledgers and John was warmly welcomed into bookish drawing-rooms, and indeed libraries, everywhere.
John had a huge acquaintance and many customers became friends. His great tip was to ask new customers to name six books that they genuinely enjoyed, rather than what they were told to enjoy. People trusted John’s judgement implicitly. They still do. Not a week goes by without someone referring to John’s taste or opinion.
Throughout his lifetime John devoted his considerable intellectual energies to sifting the literary wheat from the chaff, in search of the beautiful, the important or the plain enjoyable.
After he left Heywood Hill, John continued to deal in books from John Sandoe and Maggs Bros. He was a natural writer who reviewed books widely and provided always considered advice to librarians and their patrons. Many across the book world will mourn him today.
John was very happily married to Laura, his devoted wife. His talented sons, Joe, a businessman, and George, an architect (whose beautiful sketchbooks have been published recently) were the source of much pride. We send sincere condolences to them all.
At Heywood Hill we salute John in gratitude for his unstinting tenure at our helm, his devotion to the bookish cause, and the indelible mark he left on the place and all who knew him.
I’m so delighted that David Chipperfield has been made this year’s Apollo Personality of the Year at more or less the same time that he has also been awarded the CH: both so well deserved for his longevity, his perseverance, and the admirable quality of his architecture and its respect for both history, as at the Neues Museum in Berlin and at the Royal Academy, and for greatly enhancing the local cultural environment, as in Margate and Wakefield. Edwin Heathcote provides an admirably succinct encapsulation of his career (see below), including his recent restoration of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and his new building for the Kunsthaus in Zürich, but not his Inagawa Cemetery Chapel recently completed in Japan. His work is always elegant, always thoughtful, always restrained. I see the James Simon Galerie is also one of three finalists for the RIBA International Prize today. Bravo !
https://www.apollo-magazine.com/personality-of-the-year-winner-apollo-awards-2021/?s=09
I have been digesting the news that Michael Gove has turned down planning permission for the Tulip Tower, a proposed monstrous development right next door to the Gherkin which looked as if it had been designed in 1955 in the pages of Dan Dare.
The fact that planning permission has been turned down could mean a number of things, all good:-
1) that Michael Gove has a mind of his own and is not necessarily going to be flattened by the army of planners, developers and consultants who think that all development is good, willy nilly, regardless of its urban and environmental consequences.
2) that planners might now pay proper attention to the costs of demolition and its environmental consequences, long overdue.
3) that the public mood may be turning against the hideousness of the new City. I note for example that Edwin Heathcote described in the FT that he could not think of a single new office development which was better than what it replaces, a pretty appalling indictment of recent office design.
Let’s hope !
In case you think I have entirely given up on the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, I was pleased to discover a post about the sound recordings of bells cast by the Foundry held by the London Metropolitan Archive (Both Sides Now – The Curious Case Of The Whitechapel Bells – London’s Sound Heritage (wordpress.com)). Robert Jenrick may think that no-one now cares about the fact that he gave accidental permission to the redevelopment of the Bell Foundry as a hotel (two hotels have opened in the vicinity during the last year, one immediately opposite), but I hope that it will remain a blot on his escutcheon and forever associated with this government’s lack of care for the historic environment and general air of total incompetence.
While I am posting about obscure websites, I am pleased to see that one has just been launched to document the work of Gerard Hoffnung, whose work, I realise, was very much a feature of my childhood, along with Flanders and Swann:-
I’ve just been introduced to the London Sound Survey (https://www.soundsurvey.org.uk/index.php/survey/about), a website I feel I should have known about, but didn’t, with hundreds – probably thousands – of recordings of street life in London mapped according to their location. It turns out that it was a private initiative by Ian Rawes, who died recently aged only 56, so that there is a question mark round whether or not the website can be maintained (https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/london-sound-survey-ian-rawes-field-recording-b964561.html).
I would hate to think that I had just found out about an invaluable resource for understanding history just at the moment when it might cease to exist.
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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