My last Welsh post (for the time being) shows two views of Moel Eilio on January 2, morning and evening:-

A beautiful January morning:-

There’s snow on the hills:-

We walked down to the river:-

There is quite a bit to look forward to in 2025:-

January 21

There is a second screening at the Barbican of Stardust, the film about Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

February

Jonathan Conlin’s new book about the National Gallery is due.

April

The new Frick opens with a new wing at the back and the whole reconfigured by Annabelle Selldorf.  It will be interesting to see how such a precious set of interiors has fared their renovation.  The public spaces can only be an improvement.

May 10

The Sainsbury Wing will re-open.

May 31

One half of V&A East – the Storehouse – will open. It should be a revelation of what the V&A holds in store, freely accessible.

October

Modern British Cities will be published by Lund Humphries, a big volume of essays edited by Simon Gunn, Peter Mandler and Otto Saumarez Smith.

October 28

Holly Smith’s first book, Up in the Air: A History of High Rise Britain will be published by Verso.

November

My book on Vanbrugh will appear:

I forgot to mention St. Nicholas, Ingrave, an unexpected stop on yesterday’s church crawl: a strange, rugged, pure brick church of 1734, a most unlikely date for its style – but an argument in favour of Giles Worsley’s view that the eighteenth century should be viewed not in terms of linear stylistic development, but a more diverse aesthetic pluralism.

The church is thought to have been designed by Robert Petre, the local landowner.  It’s possible.  He would have been only twenty one, but had already been on the grand tour, got married in St. Paul’s, and taken over the management of his family’s house, Thorndon Hall, which he was busy replanning.  His principal enthusiasm was for botany, growing rare species in the magnificent hothouses:-

We hoped to have lunch in the Labworth Café, the only building ever designed by Ove Arup on the seafront at Canvey Island.  No such luck.  Maybe one could have lunch there at the height of the season, but not on Boxing Day:-

St. Mary, Great Warley was, perhaps not surprisingly, shut so we could only see its exterior in the gloaming.  The church is by C. Harrison Townsend, architect of the Horniman Museum and Whitechapel Art Gallery.  It was designed in 1902, the year after the Whitechapel Art Gallery opened.  A beautiful approach through a lychgate with lettering by Eric Gill:-

It’s impressive:-

I have been meaning to go and see the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Brentwood, a work of 1970s neoclassicism by Quinlan Terry.   It is hard to judge in photographs but in situ is extremely effective, the exterior quietly and calmly monumental, its interior remarkably Albertian, with a centralised ground plan and Florentine arcading, added to a Victorian gothic church which survives as a side chapel:-

We had a slightly surreal Boxing Day outing to Bataville, the Czech model town established by Tomáš Baťa in a particularly bleak part of the Essex Marshes beyond Tilbury.  Baťa himself died in a plane crash shortly afterwards, but is commemorated by a fine statue by Joseph Hermon Cawthra, a now forgotten monumental sculptor trained at Leeds School of Art, the Royal College of Art and then the Royal Academy Schools:-

This is the factory:-

And some of the model housing:-