In honour of London Craft Week, we went to an exhibition-cum-event held at The Sea The Sea, a small fish restaurant in an alleyway behind Sloane Square. Emma had created a very beautiful series of objects – objets d’art – opulent, ornate and neo-Victorian in feel, celebrating life below the sea:-
Rowan Moore does everything he can in the accompanying article to acknowledge the rationale and potential benefits of Herzog and de Meuron’s planned redevelopment of Liverpool Street Station, but in the end comes to the conclusion that too much of it is misconceived. Why, not least, have Network Rail allowed the station to fall into a state of neglect ? Why have they not already installed better lifts ? Why do they have to build two vast office blocks over the station just to perform what should be their normal statutory duties ?
Maybe they will revise it, but it’s hard to see how.
The new owners of 195, Mare Street, a big late seventeenth-century house (1697 for Abraham Dollins) set back from the street just short of Hackney Town Hall, generously allowed locals to see it before they start work on its restoration. It’s a big project:-
Indoors, it is surprisingly well preserved in spite of – actually maybe because of – being a Working Man’s Club (The New Lansdowne Club) from 1913-2004, when it was sold to a succession of developers who constructed flats in the garden at the back.
This is the entrance hall:-
Many of the rooms show fragmentary evidence of the original decoration:-
The basement is going to be turned into an arts centre.
A brilliant piece of sustained invective by Griff Rhys Jones, the chairman the Victorian Society, particularly excoriating about the lamentable so-called public consultation in which it was nearly impossible to see the principal proposal of the scheme which is to put an office block right smack on top of the adjacent Victorian Great Eastern Hotel. Instead, they show a completely ludicrous image of a fancy swimming pool as if the roof of their office block can be transformed into a perpetually sunny public Lido. There were no proper images of the nature of the proposed junction between the office block and the hotel.
No wonder, because it will look horrible – a horizontal office block plonked on top of a Grade 2* listed, gothic Victorian hotel.
https://spitalfieldslife.com/2023/05/12/griff-rhys-jones-on-liverpool-st-station/
An admirable review of the new biography of Jim Ede by Honor Clerk, formerly of the NPG.
I know I went to Kettle’s Yard my first week at Cambridge in late September 1972 and I have a distant, but it could be a false, memory of meeting its owner, who left for Edinburgh about that time. So, am looking forward very much to reading the book.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/jim-ede-and-the-glories-of-kettles-yard/
Readers of my blog will be familiar with what is proposed at Liverpool Street Station. After my post yesterday, I was kindly asked to write an Opinion piece for Building Design which has just been published (but I fear may be behind a paywall).
Some people take the view that the station is already pretty down-at-heel, so refurbishment is necessary. Refurbishment no doubt is, but it should not be done by plonking a mammoth office block on top of it.
For some reason, I was able to access the article below about the letter in today’s Times to which I was a signatory about the hideous proposal to put a brand new 18-storey tower block bang on top of the Victorian Great Eastern Hotel, as if this is somehow going to save it, instead of looking both monstrous and ludicrous.
I was only sorry that the signatories did not include the designer, Adam Nathaniel Furman, who asked the sensible question on twitter two days ago as to why on earth Herzog and de Meuron have agreed to do it, when as Furman rightly says, they ‘are usually such good architects’. ‘Don’t ruin one of our best railways stations, while simultaneously ruining your reputation’.
Good to see that he’s got 20,000 followers.
A few more thoughts in retrospect, while it is still reasonably fresh in my mind. The politicians were all in the transepts so were effectively invisible to the bulk of the congregation. The nave was filled not with the political establishment, but by-and-large, representatives of national and community groups, including those, like the Prince’s Trust, which operate under the crown: so, deliberately apolitical. I thought this was interesting: the idea of the crown binding the nation together through public service and community action, outside the remit of national and local government. Not sure where this leads us, except perhaps to demonstrate how divisive recent politics has been, as demonstrated by the procession of former prime ministers exiting the Abbey right at the end.
My impressions being there are probably no different from those who saw it on television: particularly the full glory of the English musical tradition, beginning with John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Monteverdi Choir, and including a great number of pieces composed for the occasion. Purcell, of course, and Handel; Vaughan Williams; ending, slightly oddly, with a fanfare by Richard Strauss. I thought Rishi Sunak read particularly well. It was a mixture of ecumenism and the Anglican post-Reformation tradition at full throttle. A pretty impressive piece of organisation by, I presume, a mixture of the Lord Chamberlain and DCMS. Faultless, apart from the cold.
The Order of Service is a very beautiful piece of classic English typography, but no designer is given. I’m told that it is just the standard form used by the Abbey’s printer, Barnard & Westwood. They deserve a medal.
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