One of the more bizarre features of the peninsula leading out to Harwich is the House for Essex, Grayson Perry’s highly bizarre, but unexpectedly convincing weekend folly, which rises out from the ploughed fields:-

It is supposed to evoke a wayside chapel, but is more in the style of a gingerbread playhouse:-

I liked it:  a fantasy, but done with total conviction:-

Harwich is not the most obvious place for a day trip:  the last stop on the branch line from Manningtree, past Wrabness and the International Port.   Outside the railway station is the High Lighthouse, built by D.A. Alexander under the supervision of John Rennie Senior in 1818:-

Past the Electric Palace, the oldest purpose-built cinema in the country (opened November 1911):-

Much of the centre of the town was demolished in the 1960s, but there are traces of its previous gentility:-

And there are places where the original streetscape survives:-

West Street has St. Nicholas, designed by a local Dedham architect in Commissioners’ Gothic:-

So, back to the sea front by way of some well-preserved, barge-boarded houses:-

I have been reading Claire Tomalin’s A Life of My Own:  not just because of its brief account of her time as a Trustee at the National Portrait Gallery and her role in my appointment as Director, but because I have long admired her independence of mind which comes across magnificently from the writing of her autobiography – the lives of her incompatible parents, her time at Dartington Hall and at Newnham College, Cambridge, her relationship with her first husband Nicholas Tomalin, which is described unsparingly, her turn to writing biography, the birth of a disabled son, Tom, the suicide of her daughter, Susanna;  it is all described unpityingly and austerely:  not an easy life, but mostly an admirable one.

In trying to understand how Hawksmoor used architectural forms in the west front of Christ Church, Spitalfields, with its very grand, projecting portico and dark shadows, and then the way that the tower is constructed in layers, ending in a tapered, slightly Egyptian spire at the top (Hawksmoor would have been very aware of John Greaves, Pyramidographia: or a description of the pyramids in Aegypt, London, 1646), I thought I would look up how it was described in eighteenth-century guidebooks (I used conscientiously to transcribe them in order to try to understand the way buildings were viewed and interpreted in the eighteenth century).

The answer is as follows:-

In 1755, it was described as follows in London in Miniature: Being a Concise and Comprehensive Description of the Cities of London and Westminster , London: C. Corbett, 1755, p.227: ‘In Spittle-fields there is a fine large substantial Church, entirely built of Free-stone’.

Six years later, there was a more detailed description in London and its Environs Described, London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1761, vol. 2, pp.125-126: ‘The foundation was laid in 1723, and it was finished in four years. The body of the church is solid and well-proportioned; it is ornamented with a Doric portico, to which there is a handsome ascent by a flight of steps; and upon these the Doric order arises supported on pedestals. The tower over these rises with arched windows and niches, and on its diminishing for the steeple, is supported by the heads of the under corner, which form a kind of buttresse: from this part rises the base of the spire, with an arcade; its corners are in the same manner supported with a kind of pyramidal buttresse ending in a point, and the spire is terminated by a point and fane. This is the character of this edifice given in the English Architect: who asserts that solidity without weight is its character, and that though this structure is not without faults, it is worthy of great praise’ (I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the transcription because my handwriting wasn’t very legible even forty years ago).

What the latter description shows is that contemporaries (or near contemporaries) perfectly appreciated the games that Hawksmoor was able to play with the language of architecture and took pleasure in describing the way in which the eye moves up the different layers of the west front up towards the spire (I assume that the reference to The English Architect is to the publication of ENGLISH ARCHITECTURE: Or, The Publick Buildings Of London and Westminster which had appeared in 1758).

Please excuse the pedantry !

Christ Church, Spitalfields has featured often in my blog before, but never, I think, in black-and-white, which shows off its full Roman monumentality. What is impressive is Hawksmoor’s extraordinarily free use of architectural form, the piling up of different architectural vocabularies, made possible by his deep knowledge of antique precedent, not from travel (so far as is known he had never crossed the Channel), but from the books in his architectural library. His architectural philosophy self-confessedly involved ‘Strong Reason and Good Fancy, joyn’d with Experience and Tryalls’:-

Every time I go round Burlington Gardens at the moment (sometimes twice a day), I see something different.   Today, it was the detail on the façade, which has all been cleaned.   I was reminded that I had been worried that it might look too new, but this has not happened, not least because of the softness of the stone.   It was on the Buildings at Risk Register in 2001:-

We had a small staff ceremony this morning to celebrate the opening of the new loos in time for the public opening of Jasper Johns.

Many people think I am ridiculous to be so obsessed by the new loos, but I regard them as:-

a) a milestone in the road towards the completion of the project

b) a symbol of the fact that we have long needed and required better and more spacious public facilities

c) I like and admire the way that David Chipperfield has treated the space as if it has been discovered in the basement of a Roman aqueduct with brick vaulted ceilings

Next stop the undercroft:-

Since I have been round Burlington Gardens not once, but twice today, and since I definitely can’t show photographs of Jasper Johns, I am posting some views of the newly unveiled statues on the façade (not with the Leica):-

I clearly owe Henry Aldrich an apology for having got his Christian name wrong in a post yesterday (since corrected). I mentioned his name in the post on Edward Harley only because I have always had the impression that he had quite an influence on undergraduates, particularly aristocratic ones, at Christ Church during his time as Dean, with his pipe smoking, deep interest in architecture, weekly musical gatherings, and high toryism. But I realise that Aldrich died in 1710 and Harley only matriculated in 1707, so they would not have overlapped for long.

I have been trying to find out a bit more about Edward Harley, about whom I wrote the entry in the Macmillan Dictionary of Art (the big Dick), but so long ago that I have forgotten most of it. He was born in 1689 and educated at Westminster and Christ Church, when Henry Aldrich was Dean. After graduating, he became a Tory MP for Radnor, but was never remotely as interested in politics as his prominent, highly political father. Instead, he devoted himself to bibliophily and antiquarianism, massively extending his father’s already extensive collection of books and manuscripts. According to A.S. Turberville, who wrote a history of Welbeck in the 1930s, ‘He loved the society of men of letters and of learning; he dabbled in archaeology; he patronised the arts; he made the collecting of manuscripts, of books, and of coins, medals and miniatures the consuming passion of his life’. Every summer he went on tours round England, ostensibly to visit his wife’s estates, but in reality to look at archaeological remains, writing sardonic comments on any examples of new building he encountered, particularly if they were designed by Colen Campbell, who he called ‘that ignorant rascal’ or had work by William Kent, which he described as full of ‘very clumsy over-charged chimney pieces to the great waste of fine marble’. Meanwhile, he bought manuscripts ‘with incessant assiduity and at an immense expense’. He started out with about 3,000 printed books and manuscripts and ended up with over 7,000 manuscripts – Greek, Hebrew and Oriental – and a library of about 50,000 books by the time of his death from drink in June 1741. He employed Gibbs to design extensions to Wimpole and bought pictures by Carracci and Claude Lorraine. Horace Walpole was contemptuous of that part of his collection which was sold by auction after his death, describing it as ‘much rubbish’, including such items as ‘Feather bonnets presented by the Americans to Queen Elizabeth’, apart from ‘a few fine bronzes, and a very fine collection of English coins’. But there are quite a few things he owned still at Welbeck, not just miniatures by Christian Zincke and Bernard Lens, but also a painted cabinet which had been owned by the Earl of Arundel and a dagger said to have belonged to Henry VIII.