The streets of Stepney were looking ghostly in the pale winter light as I walked from the drycleaner to the farm.

The new London Hospital looks a bit sinister, sheathed in aluminium:-

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I was asked to see the exhibition of work by Harry Pearce at Foyle’s Gallery on the fifth floor of their handsome new shop (designed by Lifschutz Davidson) on the Charing Cross Road.   Harry as a partner of Pentagram has been responsible (brilliantly) for the corporate identity of the Royal Academy for the last five years – always clear, unobtrusive and attentive to the qualities and characteristics of type forms – and last year published a book of his photographs under the title, Eating with the Eyes (the title is a Japanese proverb), which have now been made very effectively into large-scale photographic prints, some by an artisan Neapolitan printer, showing details of street scenes and the materiality of surfaces and things from around the world.   The display cases are by Daniel Weil.

After doing the book, he offered to design the book of my blog and has done so – I think – wonderfully, capturing the movement of the eye across the page and the sense of visual exploration, as well as an intelligent relationship of image to text.

The silence of the blog is not owing to an attack of the widespread influenza, just an overload of Christmas events which leaves little space for anything other than mince pies:  the Royal Academy’s Annual Carol Service which I always enjoy and instils a very briefly holy mood;  our annual party held jointly with the Evening Standard, for which see tonight’s Londoner’s Diary;  and tonight, our annual staff party for which I always feel woefully underdressed, not having spent the last few days devising some fantastical costume, demonstrating the extreme artistic ingenuity and creativity of the RA’s staff.   So, the only photographs I have to post are of the mist across St. James’s Park:-

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We had an event tonight to commemorate Zaha Hadid;  or, as it turned out, to commemorate her as a person, as an architect, and her legacy.   A bit of the discussion revolved round whether or not, as she herself felt, she was a victim of misogyny:  whether or not she would have been more successful if she had been a man.   The only problem with this line of argument is that she was gigantically successful:  much fêted and commissioned around the world, highly regarded from the time that she was a student at the AA, given international teaching appointments in the 1980s, the subject of discussion in the exhibition on Deconstructivism at MOMA in 1988, and awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2004.   I remember her lecturing at a conference in Columbia University on a stage with Daniel Liebeskind in, maybe, 2003.   She was no shrinking violet.

We went off to Rugby in search of the spirit of Thomas Arnold.   Unfortunately, we should have checked to discover that the school term ended yesterday, so everything was very shut up, with no tours available.   However, we were able to see Butterfield’s New Schools with his characteristic muscular polychromy (Butterfield was originally hired by the head boy in 1859 to design the raquets courts):-

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I had a quick look at the church, which one sees prominently through the window of the castle, a fourteenth-century collegiate church, dissolved in 1545, and reconstructed on 1607 in pure gothic style, the nave constructed out of the original chancel, and a new chancel added:-

It’s got wall paintings on the stalls:-

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The castle looked better in the Sunday morning light, showing off the full extent of the ruin, owing to a fire in 1978 when it was a hotel:-

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We went on a pilgrimage to Walsall Art Gallery in order to see it again in advance of its possible shutdown, remembering the hopes which accompanied its opening and the quality of its building by Caruso St. John, full of surprises and unexpected vistas, with leather handrails to the staircase and an exhibition by Eva Rothschild, but surrounded by a sea of car parks and strip malls (‘no cruising in the Black Country’ it announces as one enters the town):-

A Polynesian shell ornament:-

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Saturday morning at the Barber Institute.   Nobody is here in the beautifully organised and immaculately silent galleries, opened in 1939, with a collection of the highest quality.

Simone Martini, dated 1320 on the frame:-

Botticelli:-

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We booked to stay at Astley Castle a couple of years ago.    One has to hover near a computer when booking opens and I forgot, so the only time available was a December weekend, when everything is water logged.   It’s an amazingly sensitive intervention by Witherford, Watson Mann into the fabric of the small medieval castle, not pretending in any way to be historic, but using robust materials, brick and wood, and adapting the building and the bedrooms to the available spaces:-