Although I read Patrick Wright’s The Village That Died for England when it first came out in 1995, I have never been to Tyneham, nor the valley in which it sits. 

I was not prepared for the beauty of the view from the top of the hill overlooking Tyneham – a scene of field and woodland out towards the coast which is strangely, but not surprisingly, unspoilt: no housing, the property of the MOD, just a shooting range ever since the village was taken over as part of the war effort in 1943. 

Photographs do not adequately convey the view:-

In the village, there is an abandoned telephone kiosk:-

And the church which is the only part of the village to have been preserved:-

We went to the Isle of Portland yesterday, source of Portland stone, including the church of St. George’s, built on an ambitious scale in the late 1750s, consecrated in 1764, an unusual moment for church building, designed and constructed by Thomas Gilbert, whose grandfather supplied much of the stone for St. Paul’s Cathedral.  The tower is to come extent modelled on the west tower of St. Paul’s:-

Inside:-

The font was carved by Thomas’s brother, William:-

Beautiful carving on the tombstones in the churchyard, demonstrating the skills of the local masons:-

Dunshay Manor gets a somewhat laconic entry in Pevsner under Worth Matravers, doesn’t appear in the index and there is no mention of the striking and unusual gate posts.  A very uncharacteristic lapse. 

The house repays close study, not just for it fifteenth-century origins, but for the quality of its renovation in 1906 by Philip Sturdy, a local arts-and-crafts architect; and, not least, the history of the house under its former owners, George Spencer Watson RA, and his Australian wife who underwent psychoanalysis in Switzerland with Jung and performed Bakstian dramas in a makeshift theatre in the former dairy; and then their daughter, Mary Spencer Watson, who was trained in the Royal Academy Schools, studied in Paris, made figurative sculpture, fell in love with the wife of her tenants, and bequeathed Dunshay to the Landmark Trust. 

It’s a beautiful house:-

And then there are those gateposts:-

Last of the Isle of Purbeck churches we went to yesterday was St. James, Kingston, a fine, beautifully considered church by G.E. Street, late in his career and paid for by the Earl of Eldon, the local landowner.  A fine ironwork screen but by then I had run out of battery:-

Worth Matravers, to the south of the Isle of Purbeck, surrounded by quarries, has not one, but two churches.

St. Nicholas in the heart of the village is a relatively conventional, but sturdy Norman church, square tower, with good zigzag carving round the chancel arch:-

Then, impossibly remote, along a long dusty track across open fields to the edge of the sea, a remote chapel, St. Aldhelm’s, a boxy structure, serving no-one except the coastguard cottages:-

You can see Corfe Castle in the distance from Dunshay Manor where we are staying – a remarkable and slightly surreal sight in the distance – its tall towers dismantled in the Civil War and then looted for building stone:-

Up close it’s oddly less impressive, but still on a massive scale:-

On the way down to Dorset, we stopped off at St. Cross, the wonderful, stately, beautifully preserved, pure Norman church just outside Winchester. 

Founded by Henry of Blois in 1136, and part of the Hospital of St. Cross, a set of medieval almshouses, it has been preserved in a way which is unusual in England – so little change, a holy place:-

The transepts:-

The columns of the nave:-

The carving in the chancel:-

Details of the carving in the lady chapel:-

The view down the south aisle:-

The wood carving in the chancel:-

And back outside:-

I love the podcast as attached in which Matthew Lloyd Roberts talks to Piers Gough about the character of Vanbrugh’s architecture, beginning with Vanbrugh Castle, talking in Woolwich which I did not include in my book and describing very eloquently so many aspects of Vanbrugh’s work: the way the ground plan at Castle Hiward is extended; the chauvinism of Blenheim; the tameness of Kimbolton; the relationship of Vanbrugh to history; and Vanbrugh’s influence on post-modernism, including Gough’s own work. 

Gough knows so much about Vanbrugh from looking and experiencing the buildings as an architect, not a historian.

I really recommend it.

The Aalto Siilo and a Provenance Projected seminar was the reason for coming to Oulu.

The Siilo is smaller than expected, although not without monumentality.  Still in its raw postindustrial state.  It was completed in 1931, so is a very early work by Alvar Aalto, but hard to square with the other works at this stage of his career – the Viipuri Library in Viborg (1927-1935) and the Paimio Sanatorium (1929-1933).  It is already an exciting space inside, with grand plans for the future:-

I made it to Oulu – not completely straightforwardly.

This morning, we had a tour of the city, starting in the centre with the City Theatre, the result of an architectural competition in 1962:-

The Central Library, which opened ten years later than the theatre, in 1982:-

The cathedral is at the heart of the city was burnt down in 1777 and reconstructed in 1832:-

Ending at the new Tiima Museum, sadly not yet open, with an extension matching the adjacent science museum with its grand water tower:-