It’s not often that I go to Primrose Hill with its exaggeratedly wide, leafy streets, called after Arthur Primrose, 5th. Earl of Rosebery, a brilliant orator, marksman and connoisseur who was briefly Prime Minister from March 1894 to June 1895 before the fall of the Liberal government. I might have been able to do some folk dancing in Cecil Sharp House, but instead walked up Gloucester Avenue:-
As a postscript to my various posts about Regent’s Park, I went to have a look at the portrait bust of him staring slightly mournfully down the great stretch of Regent Street from under the circular portico of All Souls, Langham Place, one of two churches designed by him following the passing of the 1818 Church Building Commission. It is a version of a bust done by William Behne in 1831, the year after the death of George IV and when Nash was mired in controversy over the gigantic cost of Buckingham Palace:-
After hearing Todd Longstaffe-Gowan talk about the landscaping of Regent’s Park, I have realised how much of the design of St. James’s Park is owing to John Nash, in his role as Surveyor General of Woods, Forests, Parks and Chases, a role he held from 1806. It was he who, in early 1827, on the orders of George IV and following a report which suggested the creation of a pleasure garden, was responsible for converting the canal which had been created in Charles II’s time into a lake and laying out the paths. The superintendent of the Royal Gardens at Kew, William Aiton, is thought to have been responsible for the planting. But, it is Nash who we have largely to thank for its picturesque character:-
I went to the announcement of this year’s Museum of the Year Award. Beforehand, the betting had been on the Bethlem Museum of the Mind and the York Art Gallery as very obviously community-oriented, new building projects. The one place I didn’t expect to win was the V&A, not because it doesn’t deserve it, but because I thought it was too large and too obviously privileged. I was wrong. It won for its wonderful Alexander McQueen exhibition, its new Europe 1600-1815 galleries and its pledge to re-open its Circulation Department which existed from its beginning to tour its collection round the country in innovative, small-scale displays which went to art schools and public libraries and was closed down as a result of funding cuts by the Labour Government in 1977.
We had an official tour of our building project in Burlington Gardens in advance of our monthly project board meeting. For the first time, there are the beginnings of new construction alongside the extensive demolition.
The lecture theatre space is open for a full three floors:-
We went to what turned out to be the first performance (actually, a play-through) of a new piece by Jonathan Dove called Catching Fire, due to be played for the first time at the Cheltenham Festival this Saturday. But before playing it, Melvyn Tan said rather casually that he would do ‘109’ Beethoven’s 109th. piano sonata, performed fortissimo in the small space of his studio. Jonathan introduced his piece as a work-out for Melvyn. It was indeed – a piece of nearly impossible brilliance and virtuosity as well as complex musicality which involved, so far as I could tell, at least three fingers on a single key: what someone in the audience described graphically, if inelegantly, as a mind fuck. Afterwards, the composer commented in detail on precise aspects of the performance, praising Melvyn for developing his own interpretation and saying, rather astonishingly, that part could have been played more flashily. Then, there was much discussion of the use or otherwise of the middle pedal:-
In walking down Salmon Lane this morning, I was reminded of the Chinese restaurant Good Friends which was a great attraction of the street and brought people out from the west end, including, I’ve discovered, Fay Maschler’s parents in the 1960s (although it only opened in 1967). Even better, from our perspective, as well as cheaper, was a restaurant called The Peking, which disappeared once West India Dock Road was widened, had a large fish tank from which one could select one’s dinner, and was presided over by a magnificent woman who was half-Chinese, a representative of the local Chinese community which was still in evidence in the early 1980s, but now may have gone.
Since it was such a spectacularly beautiful morning, I decided to potter round some of my old haunts in Limehouse where we used to live. I got a good view of 5, Newell Street which was, and remains, a monument to early post-modernism, designed by Tom Brent in 1977 when he bought the whole of Nelson’s Wharf as an experiment in semi-communal living:-
I walked down the Regent’s Canal and was struck by how hugely beneficial it is that, whether because of poverty or ecology, Tower Hamlets has allowed the verges of Mile End Park to run wild, so that Canary Wharf pops up out of an overgrown meadow:-
We went back to the new Tate Modern to get a better sense of it without the opening crowds. It felt better being able to navigate it on one’s own. We liked the view from outside the new south entrance:-
Kader Attia’s table reconstructing the ancient city of Ghardaïa out of couscous:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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