I’m sure that Fournier Street has featured plenty of times in my blog before.   It certainly appears in the book.   But I normally see it on winter mornings when the sun falls on the houses on the north side.   Tonight, I saw houses on the south side lit up by the evening sun, including Hawksmoor’s Rectory, commissioned as a minister’s house in July 1725.   It was originally expected to cost £800, was £1,000 a year later, and ended up costing £1,456 8s. 10d. by the time it had been completed in 1729.   Next door was Marmaduke Smith’s house, the largest in the street, lived in when I first knew it by Michael Gillingham.   The fine door case is from No. 14, known as Howard House and built for William Taylor, a ‘carpenter and gentleman’, then leased by weavers, Signeratt and Bourdillon-

I have spent a disproportionate amount of time this week meeting people for early moding breakfasts at The Ned, Nick Jones’s staggeringly opulent conversion of the old headquarters of the Midland Bank, bang in the heart of the City and within walking distance of our offices in Blackfriars.   It was apparently designed in 1924 and only opened in 1939, the last blast of the old Empire, the banking hall dominated by a forest of grand green African marble columns.   It’s also a monument to the pre-war Royal Academy, designed by Edwin Lutyens, who was President from 1938 to 1944, having been elected in 1913, and sculpture by Sir William Reid Dick, who was elected an ARA in 1921 and only died in 1961:-

I did a talk last night upstairs at John Sandoe’s bookshop off the King’s Road in Chelsea.   It was the most select and recherché audience, consisting mainly of blog followers (thank you for coming).   I realise in talking about how the blog began in a wholly accidental and unpremeditated way that it meets a psychological need as a wholly self-imposed mental discipline, a form of mental gymnastics, compelling myself to describe things at speed.   The weakness is that my photographs so seldom show people, as if East London is post-holocaust, vacuum-pumped.   Anyway, the point of the talk was to encourage people to buy the special edition, of which John Sandoe is the sole stockist, special because the quality of paper is subtly different, the binding allows the book to fall open more conveniently, the corners are satisfyingly rounded (http://www.johnsandoe.com/product/east-london-special-edition/).   Some people did buy the Special and I am especially grateful to them.

I finally made it to Thaddeus Ropac’s new gallery in Ely House in Dover Street, once the home of the Bishops of Ely, designed by Robert Taylor in the early 1770s, occupied in the early part of the twentieth century by the Albemarle Club and in the post-war period by Oxford University Press.   It has been beautifully and immaculately restored by Annabelle Selldorf, keeping all the original fireplaces, but with new flooring throughout.   I luckily arrived just as a performance by Oliver Beer was ending in which maybe six singers explore the acoustics of the building through the performance of the Diabolus in Musica:

We had a discussion this evening at the RA about East London:  not the East London which I know and have written about west of the River Lea;  but the large tracts of local authority housing and industrial wasteland which lies beyond in Stratford, Maryland, Romford, Barking, Dagenham and beyond.   The discussion was focussed on three grand projets:  Here East, the Olympic Media Centre which is being converted into tech units by Hawkins\Brown;  the development of Albert Docks by Terry Farrell;  and the creation of a new town on derelict land in Barking Riverside.   The mood was in some ways optimistic:  except that nobody had a solution as to how to provide effective quality and diversity in housing projects;  and how to ensure that affordable housing is affordable.   This is managed in the Netherlands, Berlin and Scandinavia.   Surely there are ways of ensuring that – as we were told – 50% of new housing is not in the hands of six private developers.

In all the years that we have lived in East London, I have – shamefully – never been to the Ragged School Museum which is normally open only two days a week, apart from the first Sunday of the month.   Today is the first Sunday of the month.

The warehouse was apparently built in 1872 for a lime juice merchant, but was taken over in 1876 by Dr. Barnardo as one of his ragged day schools, which offered church services, Bible and sewing classes to the local poor.   His Sunday School was said to be attended by 1500 children, with the added incentive of ‘lentil or pea souo and bread varied occasionally by rice and prunes or haricot beans’.   Not long afterwards he bought the local pub and turned it into a Coffee Palace.

It was packed:-

One of the pleasures of walking round the neighbourhood with people who are unfamiliar with it is that it has made me notice new things.

The detail of a shop front on the Mile End Road:-

The carved lunettes by the entrance doorway to St. Dunstan’s:-

And the old shop front on Durham Row:-

We ended the patrons’ tour of Stepney by looking at a map which was made in 1703 by Joel Gascoyne of ‘The Parish of St Dunstan Stepney alias Stebunheath Being one of the Ten Parishes in the County of Middlesex adjacent to the City of London’.   What I found more fascinating than the depiction of Stepney Green (then called Mile End Green) as it was in 1703:-

And the houses set back from the Mile End Road (Mile End old Towne)-

Was the inscription which had been added which implied that Stepney Green was a place of ill repute:-

Following Dick Humphrey’s comment on my blog last night, I have been trying to find out a bit about Philip Mairet, Ethel’s second husband, who had worked for C.R. Ashbee in the days of the Guild of Handicraft in Chipping Campden, acted as Secretary to Coomaraswamy in 1910 and martied his wife.   He avoided conscription by moving to Ditchling, but was arrested, enrolled in the Royal Sussex Regiment and imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs.   After his release, he became an actor at the Old Vic, helped pioneer ideas of European integration as a member of the New Europe Group, and had an affair with  Gwendoline Norsworthy, who had helped Ethel Mairet establish the New Handworker’s Gallery in Percy Square.   He worked as Orage’s assistant on the New English Weekly, succeeded as editor in 1934, published the work of T.S.Eliot and supported organic farming.   Indeed, an interesting person.

I’m sure I should have known that Ethel Mairet also lived at Ditchling, attracted by the presence of Gill, in a house called Gospels in Beacon Road, where she trained apprentices and student teachers in the mechanics of weaving.   Nor did I know that, before marrying Philip Mairet, she was married to Ananda Coomaraswamy, the Anglo-Ceylonese geologist turned art historian, and that together they lived in Chipping Campden in the circle of Ashbee, before Coomaraswamy suggested that he became a bigamist.   Anyway, I much admired the examples of Mairet’s work on display:-