On Friday, I was thinking that I ought to write something about Joseph Rykwert. I have discovered from a notice in La Repubblica that he actually died on Friday, although there is no further information, other than the fact that he was 98.

He only just made it to the UK, as his brilliant autobiography, Remembering Places, describes, escaping out of Poland by way of Stockholm and Amsterdam. He was a remarkable person, who I got to know when he was still, but only just, a Professor in the Department of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex. In fact, I remember that I had to provide evidence of his intellectual credentials when he was appointed to a lectureship at Cambridge not long afterwards because it had come to the authorities’ notice that he had apparently never completed his training at the Architectural Association. He then moved to the University of Pennsylvania, but must have spent most of every year in London where he kept his library.

He was an impressively wide-ranging intellectual, as interested and involved in the practice of architecture as he was in its history and theory. He was important not just for his own writings, including On Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History (1972) and The First Moderns: The Architects of the Eighteenth Century (1980), but for his influence on other writers and architects, including David Chipperfield and Daniel Libeskind. In 2014, he was awarded the Gold Medal by the RIBA.

I booked myself on to the Architecture Foundation’s tour of Norton Folgate in order to see what has been done in a site which has been one of the great battlegrounds of British conservation history.

To recap (a bit).  The site is on the northern edge of the City and was originally occupied by a monastery, the Priory and Hospital of St. Mary Spital.  It then became a Liberty until absorbed by the Metropolitan Borough of Stepney in 1900.  In the late nineteenth century, much of the site was occupied by Nicholls & Clarke, a builders’ merchants, which sold the land to the City who encouraged British Land to redevelop it in the 1970s.  This development was fiercely resisted by a group which became the Spitalfields Trust, including John Betjeman, Mark Girouard and Dan Cruickshank.

More recently, there was another battle when British Land (again) acquired the site and planned to turn it into offices.  It was given planning permission by Boris Johnson as one of his last acts as Mayor.

The truth is that the development has been done with considerable care and sensitivity.  The masterplan was done by AHMM, but individual parts of the project were subcontracted to other practices including Stanton Williams and Morris & Company.  The Arts and Crafts building on Folgate Street has been renovated.  Some of the warehouses on Blossom Street have been retained.

It is too early to tell what it will feel like once the offices, shops and restaurants have been let.  At the moment, particularly on a Saturday morning, it is a touch lifeless, a bit like Blank Street Coffee, trying hard to belong to the neighbourhood, but not yet succeeding. 

Time will tell.  It’s certainly been done in a more sensitive way than much of the City.

This is Elder Street:-

This is the view west across Norton Folgate:-

And north towards the Bishopsgate goods yard (another battleground):-

This is Blossom Street:-

Maybe the most successful bit of the project is Blossom Yard:-

I love the church at Cley: a monument to the prosperity of Norfolk in the thirteenth century when Cley was a port until the plague arrived in 1349 and the port silted up.  Like a mini-cathedral-by-the-sea:-

Knowing that Old Town Clothing is due to close by the end of the year, I have been planning a last trip – a pilgrimage – to Holt to pay my respects to Marie Willey and Will Brown who have supplied me with clothes for the last, roughly thirty years, ever since I came upon their first shop in Elm Hill in Norwich. 

I went today.

They have had enough.  Hardly surprising.  They’ve been doing it a long time and it’s hard work running a small business, taking orders, getting things made, not using a factory, but local machinists.  It’s become harder to find people with the necessary skills.  They have insisted on everything being done to the highest standards.  That’s the whole point.

I have been disappointed how little interest there has been in maintaining these craft skills, encouraging the training of the next generation, the idea of rural industry.  In Japan, they would be living national treasures.  But here I’m not sure we recognise, let alone esteem, the intersection between craft and small-scale industrial production:-

By chance, I am travelling across London on the Elizabeth Line shortly after it has – deservedly – won the 2024 Stirling Prize.  Hundreds of people transported smoothly on long distances, opening up parts of London, including Woolwich and Abbey Wood, which were previously unreachable: on a scale and with a level of civic and national ambition which presumably knocked out the competition.

https://www.dezeen.com/2024/10/16/stirling-prize-winner-2024-london-elizabeth-line/

A repousséd silver hand reliquary, c.1300:-

A Visigothic belt buckle:-

Georges Vantongerloo 1948:-

Magritte 1928:-

Galileo Chini, Self-Portrait, 1933:-

Alighiero Boetti:-

Doris Salcedo, Untitled, 2023:-

Magnolia shaped teapot, c.1735:-

Iizuka Rōkansai:-

Egyptian alabasters:-

Egyptian wood arm, c.2000BC:-

Park Seo-Bo, Scripture No. 911104:-

Beatrice Caracciolo:-

We were close to East Hatley today, so called in on its church, hard to find, up a footpath off the only street, looked after by Friends of Friendless Churches and restored in 1874 by William Butterfield, when he was already well known, had been offered and turned down the RIBA Gold Medal.

It was completely neglected in 2002:-

It has now been put back into reasonable order by the Friends of Friendless Churches, helped by a grant from the Culture Recovery Fund:-

Inside one sees survivals of Butterfield’s decoration:-

As I say in the accompanying article, I was prompted to write about Canary Wharf by bicycling through it last summer and finding it vastly much busier and alive than the City – the river banks and wharf-side bars all packed.

I read endlessly that Canary Wharf is suffering whereas the City is thriving.  I wondered if perhaps the truth is the other way round.

https://thecritic.co.uk/the-us-city-on-the-banks-of-the-thames/

Reading Nicholas Olsberg’s excellent new book on William Butterfield (I am reviewing it for The Critic) prompted me to visit: a noble, if austere, mission church in the back streets of what must have been a suburb, built at the behest of Robert Brett, a local doctor, who was a close friend of Butterfield and had already got him the commission for St. Augustine’s College, Canterbury:-