In the discussion after the Annual Architecture Lecture last week, Grafton Architects claimed not to have been motivated in their choice of international architects by any consistent notions of style.   But, as one walks down the great spaces of the Corderie, it seems obvious that they are interested in low volume, social projects, which make good use of natural materials and create unrhetorical public spaces.

Níall McLaughlin opens, an Irish architect with an interest in Yeats:-

Opposite is a school building near Pune by Case Design:-

Z33, a House for Contemporary Art, designed by Francesca Torza is purely in this spirit: low-key, extremely sensual, built out of handmade bricks, an aesthetic retreat:-

I admired the work of De Blacam and Meagher, more Irish architects, who have reconstructed the central space of their Cork Institute of Technology as if it was drawn by Bellini.

What comes across most of all is a sense of materiality – the enjoyment of brick and stone in built form:-

I was asked to speak last night at a party for the Westminster Property Forum. I found myself trying to explain the historical significance of the grid of streets immediately north of Burlington Gardens, all built on land acquired by the first Earl of Burlington between 1670 and 1683: Burlington Gardens, so called because it was the northern perimeter of the garden of Burlington House; Savile Row, which was laid out between 1731 and 1735 (the first two leases are dated March 1732) and named after Lady Dorothy Savile, the third Earl’s wife; Cork Street, so-called because the third Earl of Burlington was also the fourth Earl of Cork; and Clifford Street, named after the first Earl’s mother. In other words, they are an integrated piece of eighteenth-century town planning, designed after the third Earl had returned from his second Grand Tour, having seen admired the layout of the streets of Vicenza and planned in order to help pay off his debts.

While I’m about it, I also want to promote the Poster Bar on the ground floor of Burlington Gardens, which opens every morning at 8am. At the moment, I am the only person using it at that hour, drinking a lonely cappuccino.

It serves coffee:-

Cakes:-

And meringues:-

I am (unusually) doing a post purely in order to promote something at the Royal Academy, having had Sunday lunch in the new-ish Senate Room restaurant upstairs in Burlington Gardens where we were able to enjoy the attention to detail.

Pewter cutlery by Mepra:-

The ceiling painting, probably not original, but which has been retained:-

The view through to the Lloyd Dorfman Architecture Studio:-

And the mixed cured meat platter:-

I passed an intriguing piece of graffiti on the canal this morning:-

Until today, I knew nothing of Richard Woods, the landscape designer who designed the park at Wormsley in Buckinghamshire and a great number of other gardens, not just round London, including the grounds of Hartwell House, also in Buckinghamshire, where he designed ‘a new Garden Greenhouse and Pinery’, but also in Yorkshire, where he worked at Harewood, and in Wiltshire where he laid out the park round James Paine’s mansion at Wardour in a style that was admired by Capability Brown.   He was forgotten because his style, like Brown’s, was naturalistic, but much less well documented.

We had lunch in a remote valley of the Chilterns – strangely unspoilt given its proximity to London:-

The walled garden looked out over a ha-ha, the residue presumably of the garden laid out by Richard Woods in 1775:-

And had good wild planting:-

I had a meeting in Camberwell which meant that I took the Overground to Denmark Hill, a surprisingly grand Victorian station with passing wagon lits:-

I was able to walk through the leafy late Georgian streets of Camberwell Grove, begun in the 1770s and with a few eighteenth-century houses surviving, and the grand terrace at the north end of Grove Lane:-

I only made it to the afternoon session of the academic conference Frenemies: Friendship, Enmity and Rivalry in British Art 1769-2018 (odd that the start date chosen was 1769 and not 1768, as if the first RAs were all friends – definitely not the case – and that it was only in 1769 that differences of opinion and artistic rivalries first surfaced). It was organised by the Paul Mellon Centre alongside the exhibition The Great Spectacle. I heard three papers: Hannah Westley describing and exploring the implications of her interviews of Paul Huxley, John Hoyland and other artists who first came to prominence in the early 1960s; Hammad Nassar who gave a fascinating account of a gallery in Cumbria, which I knew nothing about, but whose proprietor, Li Yuan-chia, had an exhibition co-organised by Mark Jones at Modern Art Oxford in 1972, while Mark was still an undergraduate; and Amy Tobin who is researching and writing about women’s art in the 1970s and 1980s and how and where it was exhibited on both sides of the Atlantic. The purpose of the conference was to describe what were described as ‘affective relationships’. In the concluding session, an anxiety was expressed that this could end up just being a new form of antiquarianism, about people rather than art. I thought that social anthropology gave thick description and the analysis of social networks an intellectual currency long ago and that art history hardly needs to be embarrassed about borrowing its legitimacy as an academic pursuit.

St. Michael, Great Tew is a nearly perfect village church.   One enters opposite the late eighteenth-century vicarage by way of an early seventeenth-century stone gateway:-

Then, one sees it from the south-east walking through the churchyard:-

And from the south:-

Inside, there is a tomb of Mary Anne Boulton by Sir Francis Chantrey:-

And the graveyard is overgrown:-