I have been following the City’s plans to demolish the old Museum of London building with increasing concern.  When it was first proposed, there was a logic to it.  It was being sacrificed to build a new concert hall.  But when the concert hall collapsed, the City replaced it with plans for two massive, out-of-scale office blocks totally out of sympathy with the immediately adjacent Barbican, not to mention St. Paul’s.  Diller Scofidio + Renfro are in many ways interesting and creative architects.  They were partially responsible for the Highline.   But they have been made to flip their scheme into something entirely different which has zero legitimacy and is totally hostile to its location.

If Chris Hayward as chairman of the City’s Policy Committee is sensible, he will ask them to re-invent the project in such a way as to preserve the existing Powell & Moya buildings.  Times have changed since 2013 when the project was first proposed.

One way forward would be to create an Architecture Museum.

https://thecritic.co.uk/a-wilting-wallflower/

I have never previously been to Stroud in Gloucestershire and was taken on a tour of its back streets and markets.  It quickly became clear that I should have been there for the Saturday market, but I still enjoyed a town with two bookshops, so many independent shops, good historic architecture and not too much intrusive new building:-

I stopped off on my way through Hyde Park to check out Vanbrugh on the Albert Memorial.  He’s on the north side, so in shadow, sandwiched between William Chambers and Christopher Wren.  He didn’t make it on to the façade of either the Royal Academy, when Sidney Smirke added the top storey or of the V&A, so I am interested as to who chose the architects for the Albert Memorial.  Presumably, Scott himself had a say because he included himself alone among living sitters.  Only one woman and she was Egyptian.

I always like visiting St. James-the-Less in Pimlico, such a great Victorian church, not least for its surrounding Darbourne and Darke estate which enhances the sense of surprise at its polychromatic brick exterior:-

Inside, beautiful, rich detailing, but it was already getting dark:-

At the weekend, we were shown and greatly admired a small printed volume which combines a lecture Fiona MacCarthy gave to the Biographer’s Club with a short memoir by Richard Calvorcoressi, her literary executor and adviser on her last book on Walter Gropius.  I was just about to find out if it was possible to acquire one when I discovered a copy in our letter box, so have been able to enjoy her curious mixture of the ingenue, half a pose, with the highly sophisticated and endlessly curious biographer who treats her discovery that Eric Gill was incestuous with magnificent half casualness.  She died just before Covid, so it has been hard to mourn her properly, but I see that her ODNB entry has just appeared along with other deaths of 2020.

As you know, I don’t like the architecture of the new City – too over-scaled, incoherent, fine from a distance, not good at street level where the blocks are over-bearing.  But it doesn’t look bad in the evening sun:-

It was such a strange, stormy day, one minute hail, then fierce light, that I thought I would bicycle down to see Greenwich Hospital from across the river, one of the great views in London:-

I realised that the composition of the blocks by the river, including the King Charles block by John Webb, is odd because the façade facing the river is so much more elaborate – if you like, more baroque – than the two long and more Palladian façades facing one another across the great courtyard.

This is the river façade – two temple fronts joined together, itself an unusual composition:-

Then the adjacent façade is compositionally quite different (I show the replica façade on the Queen Anne block):-

Here they are together, seen from the east.  Maybe this is a view not many people see and Webb didn’t expect one to see:-

Yesterday we went to check out the bluebells in the Novo Cemetery in Queen Mary:-

And today I stopped off to check them out in Tower Hamlets Cemetery:-

I have just been pointed in the direction of Bill Sherman’s own longer and much more scholarly article on Senate House which fills in many of the cracks in mine:

https://drawingmatter.org/masterplanning-the-university-of-london/

I was inspired to write about London University’s Senate House by a talk given by Bill Sherman, the Director of the Warburg Institute.  It’s a huge building, but in an odd way invisible and I realised that I had never given it much thought, did not know its history and, not least, that its tower is occupied not by bureaucrats, but by books:-

https://thecritic.co.uk/the-building-that-inspired-orwell/