I had a somewhat idiosyncratic lunch because I had wanted to see a recent work by the architect, Adam Richards, who has designed a cheese barge on Paddington Basin as a homage to the Electa bookshop – a book ship – in the Giardini in Venice designed by Michael Wilford and Jim Stirling in 1989. It works well as a barge:-

And then I had the pleasure of a plate of cheese:-

It’s National Apple Day. A delicious selection of apples at Leila’s:-

I have spent part of the day cogitating as to what would be the best possible use of the Custom House if the City is not going to allow it to be turned into a luxury hotel.

It happens to coincide with my visit yesterday to the new Oslo Public Library which was absolutely packed with people at 9 o’clock in the morning who were using the library not as somewhere to read books, but as somewhere to work in a good public environment, rather than closeted in a small claustrophobic environment at home.

This echoes what has happened at the British Library where the public spaces are packed with people using the desks and café, but not the actual library facilities.

So, my suggestion for the Custom House is that it should be used to support the new world of work which it happens is not dissimilar from the late seventeenth century coffee house: privatised and individualised, not dragooned by organisations; highly sociable; fuelled by coffee. It would mean that the public rooms would find a new use, but one appropriate to the City.

Rather fascinatingly, the Bermuda-based owners of the scheme to develop the historic Custom House as (another) luxury hotel have withdrawn their proposals before going to the City’s planning committee. This is presumably because they had been told that they would be turned down, so they are no doubt adapting the plans to make them more acceptable.

I hope this might indicate a change of heart on the part of the City post-COVID, acknowledging that a programme of aggressive new development may not, after all, be the best strategy to retain the City’s prestige as a great financial centre and it may, instead, require re-thinking in relation to changing patterns of work. My own view is that it would be worth them re-thinking the area round the Tower, including the Custom House; they should pay more attention to the surviving historic fabric; and they should think how to make the City a better environment to walk round, instead of trying to turn it into Hong Kong.

Remember the hedge fund managers long ago moved out. Many banks went to Canary Wharf. They can’t want the City to become an environment of empty tower blocks.

https://mailchi.mp/savebritainsheritage.org/campaignscurrent-1646657?s=09

It doesn’t always rain in Oslo:-

As well as spending a great deal of time enjoying and exploring the different floors of the new Munch Museum (you will have to await my full verdict for the December issue of the Burlington Magazine), I also explored more of the old town.

I walked past what I think is the Cental Post Office building in Tollbugata, but can’t find much about its history other than the fact that construction began in 1906, was completed in 1924 and it ceased to be a post office in 2004:-

The Magistrat Gaarden:-

What seem to be barracks:-

And out on the coast the Akershus Fortress, a medieval palace converted into a seventeenth-century palace:-

I thought I would begin by exploring the new parts of the City which are being constructed very elaborately after the closure of the working docks.

There is a huge and very elaborate new public library, the Deichman Library, opened in June 2020, not perhaps very prepossessing from outside, but spectacularly spacious inside, with escalators taking one upwards, more public working space than somewhere for books:-

Next, I walked up the roof of Snøhetta’s opera house, which seems to have been popular and successful, opened in 2008, a bit like a public ski slope:-

Then, the new Munch museum looms into view, bending its top, as if subservient to the Snøhetta building. I think I will reserve judgment on it until I have seen more of it. It’s had a pretty troubled history, the product of a competition in 2008, nearly axed in 2011, designed by Juan Herreros, a Spanish architect, in an appropriately industrial style, opening tomorrow:-

It gave me an irresistible urge to go and see the old Munch Museum, now closed, which opened in 1963 next door to the botanical gardens. I can’t say I mourn its closure. It doesn’t look to me to have had a great deal to recommend it – a low-rise, single story which opened in 1963. But at least I was able to explore the surrounding area of Tøyen and walk through the gardens:-

I can’t say that it’s the perfect introduction to Oslo because it’s cold and very damp with snow on the ground in the countryside. My first impressions ? Easy to walk, not much traffic, the late nineteenth-century heart of the city still reasonably intact, low-rise and green. I saw some of the grand new building on the docks, but am hoping for better weather tomorrow. Meanwhile, I was able to admire the cathedral, with its bronze doors of 1938:-

And its adjacent neo-Romanesque Basarhallen, designed by Christian Heinrich Grosch in the 1850s as butcher shops:-

Nice art nouveau detailing on the Norges Bank building just behind the Architecture Museum (completed 1906):-

I see that the Tulip Tower is being talked up in the hope that Michael Gove will overturn most of the advice that he has been given and grant permission for the construction of the Tulip Tower, which would become the tallest tower in the City, a grand symbol of its vanity and ostentation.

It seems an odd project because it’s essentially just a tower with restaurants and a viewing platform – in other words, a latter-day reincarnation of the Post Office Tower whose revolving restaurant has been closed for the last forty five years as a security risk.

Also, it looks much less like a tulip than a prominent piece of male anatomy, which is somehow appropriate as a monument to the current generation of City Fathers.

https://www.dezeen.com/2021/10/18/michael-gove-to-overturn-tulip-tower-rejection/

I got an email last week asking if I would like to go to Oslo to review the new Munch Museum. Of course ! What could he nicer ! Except that I have nearly forgotten what it’s like to travel in an aeroplane, having not been near one for nearly two years, so am horribly out of practice with the rituals of travel – getting up at dawn, the button going on my trousers just as I was saying goodbye, the long trip out by the District and Piccadilly lines (my ex-PA disapproved of the Heathrow Express), the fact that my braces always show up as a security risk, trying to buy handkerchiefs at Terminal 2. It’s quite like old times, apart from the rising COVID rates.