Today is the day of the official launch of Yinka Shonibare’s amazing and wonderful so-called Wrap which covers the huge scaffolding over 6, Burlington Garden and reveals something of what has, does and will happen inside.

This is the work in the process of being installed:-

This is the finished work:-

We went on a pilgrimage yesterday to see the wooden obelisk which was nearly Peter Smithson’s last work, designed for a vista in Hadspen and recently re-erected in a field nearby.   We had been there to celebrate its original installation, but missed the recent party to mark its move.   It’s smaller than I had remembered, less monumental, a pure wooden structure of ingenious geometry, with its wooden model nearby:-

Although I had been to Wells before, I had never seen the Vicar’s Close, the extraordinarily well preserved, still medieval group of small houses established in 1348 for the Vicars Choral, with front gardens added fifty years later by Bishop Bubwith and tall chimney stacks another fifty years after that:-

Our first view of Wells Cathedral was from the east, much larger than expected, like a monastic church in France:-

We had a guided tour of the west front, originally grandly polychromatic and constructed between 1215 and 1248 under the supervision of Adam Lock and Thomas Norreys:-

Inside is fine, squatter than many:-

There is good carving:-

We liked the amazing scissor beam arches designed in the mid-fourteenth century to support the tower:-

We enjoyed the transi tomb of Thomas Bekynton, the Bishop of Bath and Wells in the mid- fifteenth century with his skeleton below and Chantry Chapel above and metal railings to keep the public out:-

Graffiti on the tomb of Ralph of Shrewsbury:-

The door through to the Choir:-

The door into the Undercroft:-

We ended by trying to recreate – without success – the famous Frederick Evans photograph of the Chapter House steps:-

I have seldom enjoyed such delicious meat as is served by the Roth Bar and Grill.   It can be seen before it is eaten in the Salt Room which looks like an art installation and is lined with hand-cut Himalayan salt bricks.   Good for the steak:-

We went over the hill by Alfred’s Tower to see the gardens at Stourhead, but at noon there were so many people that we retreated and returned in the early evening when the crowds had gone to enjoy the Virgilian walk round the lake.   The first view across the lake was picture perfect:-

The Temple of Flora, first to be completed:-

The sleeping Ariadne in the grotto with a quotation from Pope:-

The cottage orné:-

The Pantheon prominently at the end of the lake:-

The temple of Apollo inspired by Baalbec:-

If one averts one’s eyes from the virulent rhododendra and tries to forget the monkey puzzles and later pines, then it is almost possible to reconstruct the mood of meditative neoclassical reflection which inspired Henry Hoare II (‘Henry the Magnificent’) to commission Henry Flitcroft to build these temples in his garden.

We have been spending the weekend at Durslade Farmhouse which is attached to, and run by, Hauser and Wirth in Somerset.  It’s an old and previously rundown farmhouse which has been restored under the supervision of Luis Laplace, an Argentinian architect, trained in Buenos Aires, who is now based in Paris and is adept at combining the rusticity of a Somerset farmhouse with an atmosphere of art luxe:-

I was pleased to have Edward Chaney’s scholarly comments on my blog about York House.   I knew about Balthazar Gerbier’s possible involvement in its design as he described the impatience of the Duke of Buckingham to get going on the renovation of York House in his Discourse concerning the…Principles of Magnificent Building and may well have been an eminence grise in its design, as Summerson long ago suggested.   But I didn’t know that the attribution of the Watergate to Stone was made not by his son Nicholas, another sculptor, but by his nephew Charles Stoakes (or, according to George Vertue, his grand nephew), a jobbing builder who inherited his uncle’s business books and listed ‘Some of the most Eminentt Workes that my Uncle Mr Nikcolas Stone did in England in Holland in Scotland’ which included the attribution of the Watergate.   Since the list was made long after Stone’s death, I can see that inaccuracies may have crept in.

I was a bit early for drinks in Cadogan Square so found a park bench to sit on in the middle of Lennox Gardens as someone had accidentally left the gate open.   It’s not my normal patch – I’ve barely been to Cadogan Square since the death of Denis Mahon – but I could not help but be impressed by the calm and the greenness of a square laid out between 1882 and 1886 on a site previously occupied by a cricket ground and before that Cattleugh’s nursery, which specialised in the sale of pines:-