I haven’t been to Great Tew since the late 1960s, when the estate was owned by Major Eustace Robb, who kept it in a state of picturesque decay.   A chunk of the estate has now been bought by Nick Jones and converted into an estate hotel, in which guests stay in rustic, sometimes corrugated iron, cabins.   I realise I am not supposed to say any of this because it is a social media free zone (although I couldn’t help but notice that everyone was taking photographs).   I took only a small number of photographs as a record of a rural idyll:-

This is my obituary of Olivier Bell, written some years ago, but regularly revised.   I hope it conveys the full magnificence of her life and character:-

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/jul/19/anne-olivier-bell-obituary?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_WordPress

I heard last night of the death yesterday of Olivier Bell, one of the more remarkable people that I have known: a survivor of Bloomsbury, her father was A.E. Popham, the Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, her mother Brynhild Olivier, a member of the Olivier family (Laurence Olivier was a cousin) and a Neo-Pagan, who went off with a younger man during the first world war, and had to be helped financially by H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. Olivier was one of the first students of the Courtauld Institute, a great admirer of Anthony Blunt, and was taught how to make a particularly delicious cocktail, made of gin, lime juice and ginger beer, by Guy Burgess. I knew her late in her life, presiding over the kitchen at Cobbe Place in Sussex, conveniently close to Charleston, later in Heighton Street, in a cottage overlooking the Firle Estate, and, most especially, as a very active Trustee of Charleston. She was a formidable guardian of the shrine of Bloomsbury and all it stood for.

I spent the early part of the morning being shown behind-the-scenes at the Royal Opera House, which I have never seen before, apart from Jeremy Isaacs’s office on the other side of Floral Street. Stanton Williams have been commissioned to ‘Open Up’ the opera house (shades of the Venice Biennale) by creating much more publicly usable, daytime space between the corner entrance to the Piazza and the street frontage to Bow Street. It looks very successful, creating an extra public space beneath the Floral Hall, opening up the balcony overlooking the Piazza to greater public use, and completely refitting the Linbury Theatre with dark American walnut.

I wasn’t allowed to take photographs, so am posting one of the Floral Hall and one of the view down to the Piazza:-

We had the Annual Architecture Lecture last night, given this year by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Grafton Architects who did one of the installations for Sensing Spaces and are curators of the current Architecture biennale in Venice.   They gave a tour d’horizon of their choice of work for the biennale – very global, very publicly oriented, based on the ideas of imagination and generosity – ‘generosity of spirit and a sense of humanity’ or Freespace as their overall theme is called.   Almost no architects from the United States, apart from Michael Maltzan’s Star Apartments in Los Angeles:  the drive is towards the creation of non-commercial public spaces, a mood which passes most of North America by.

Am I alone in being reminded constantly during this spell of long, unnaturally hot weather of Joseph Losey’s The Go Between, which, true to the book, but more obviously, describes the consequence of a young-ish boy going to stay with a school friend in a Norfolk country house where he is used by adults in ways that he only half understands ? I thought of it particularly today, picnicing in Norfolk parkland and remembering the heat in the film, the sense of menace, the way that the adult world was seen through the eye’s of an adolescent, the places of escape in a large estate, and how the adolescent revisits the episode in his memory at the end of his life. I remembered that the film had been made in a Norfolk country house, but couldn’t remember which one. It was Melton Constable, south-west of Holt. In the book, the house is called Brandham Hall.

En route to Norfolk for a picnic lunch, we stopped off at Kettle’s Yard to see Antony Gormley’s current exhibition Subject, which makes use of the light spaces of Jamie Fobert’s new exhibition galleries by joining them together at right angles with thin, taut and extremely tensile metal wire which makes one register the quality of the spaces, as if with lines drawn between them.

In Gallery 2, there is a projecting body in cast iron, his own:-

In Gallery 1, a standing figure, prehensile:-

Upstairs, unmentioned in the gallery guide, was a small case of drawings, which help describe the character and quality of the thought process behind the work:-

I have discovered that – perhaps not surprisingly – there is already a very well established mythology about the line to Ongar. When it opened in 1957, the trains were discovered to be much colder than the old steam trains, not helped by the fact that they kept the doors open while they were waiting at Ongar. There was also not a very good electricity supply, which meant that acceleration was slow and they could only run one train of four carriages at a time. As a result, people would drive to Epping and park there, which meant that the line was little used. But the rumour that John Betjeman wanted to retire to Blake Hall station was apparently an April Fool.

I thought I remembered that there was a branch line beyong Epping to Ongar.   There was.   It was operated by steam until 1957 when the line was electrified, but the trains were only four carriages long.   The loop at North Weald was closed in 1976.   Blake Hall was officially closed in 1981, although drivers were apparently willing to make unauthorised stops on request.   And the branch was finally closed in September 1994, so is no longer available to take the Cabinet to their nuclear bunker in Kelvedon.   I find it odd to think how much the tube map has been quietly doctored during my lifetime without anyone, except maybe railway fanatics, and perhaps the Cabinet, noticing.

In reading Will Ashon’s book Strange Labyrinth:  Outlaws, Poets, Mystics, Murderers and a Coward in London’s Great Forest, I realised how little I know Epping Forest in spite of living within easy reach of it for nearly forty years.   So, I took the Central Line to Epping, the end of the line, past Theydon Bois where the underground runs alongside fields, and found my way, not without difficulty (it’s a while since I’ve had to rely not on Google, but the Ordnance Survey) out into the long rides of the forest, mostly deserted, apart from over-equipped runners, across the occasional road, to Chingford in the distant south where I was able to get a cup of coffee next to Queen Elizabeth’s Hunting Retreat:-