If you have a chance to see the film Fatherland by Pawel Pawlikowski, then I strongly recommend it.  It’s an amazingly realistic and carefully crafted reconstruction of the visit of Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika to Frankfurt and then Weimar in 1949 to receive Goethe prizes.  I don’t know how far it is fiction or non-fiction.  It feels appallingly real in a very understated way with admirable performances by Sandra Hüller and Hans Zischler, also both understated, but profound.  It’s on at the Genesis Cinema.

A very brilliant exhibitiin at Gagosian – This is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte.  In spite of the disclaimer in the title, Gagosian have managed to borrow a remarkable number of Magrittes, presumably from the Fondation Magritte, which makes it almost a Magritte show with the benefit of additional more recent works, some commissiined in the Magritte tradition.  Here is Le Voyageur (1937):-

Romilly asked me to photograph Isabelle Albuquerqe’s Summertime Sadness (2025). 

And we both liked the work by Soshiro Matsubara, a Japanese artist based in Vienna:-

I went last night to the opening of a small, but very interesting exhibition in the Senate House Library on the fourth floor of Senate House. As its full title ‘A Place to Call Home: Poverty and Housing in London’ recognises, it is about the history of social housing in London, beginning with the amazing maps prepared by Charles Booth, charting the patterns of wealth and poverty in London street-by-street (https://www.london.ac.uk/about/services/senate-house-library/exhibitions/place-call-home-poverty-housing-london).

The maps are available online and so are the accompanying notebooks in which the police walked round the areas recorded on Booth’s map in 1897 and 1898. One of the accompanying notebooks records a walk round Stepney on 30 December 1897. XX Place, now commemorated only by the name of our local doctor’s surgery had ’10 two storied cottages, rather rough’, while Stayner’s Road was ‘very rough, “a bad quarter, card sharpers, thieves, a few prostitutes here” (https://booth.lse.ac.uk/notebooks/police-notebooks).

The other thing I didn’t know about and obviously should have done is the website, Layers of London, in which, again, you can explore your local neighbourhood for historical information (https://www.layersoflondon.org/). This shows a photograph of Withy House, the new social housing constructed in Stayner’s Road in 1962, described by Pevsner as a “forceful grid of balconies”:

There was an article about the exhibition in yesterday’s Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/oct/19/a-place-to-call-home-senate-house-london-charles-booth-maps-london-housing).

I went off to sunny Coulsdon to see the new housing development on Lion Green Road which won this year’s Stirling Prize as the best piece of new architecture in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, although this year, as in other years, no project was shortlisted north of Cambridge.

I will be writing about it for the December issue of The Critic. 

Meanwhile, here are my photographs:-

You can get pretty good carrots in London too.  From Leila:-

The cover of my new book, Architecture, Criticism and History, has now been approved.

I like and admire it. It’s got a playful and experimental feel, which I hope is reflected in the essays. The typeface is called Grandmaster and was devised in 2018 by a French typographic designer, Lucas Descroix, based on a mixture of nineteenth-century fonts and a 1960s aesthetic.

The book is being published on Monday 26 April 2027, so please put the date in your diaries for its launch.

We went tonight to the launch of the beautiful book of portraits taken by Lucinda Douglas-Menzies whose work I know mainly for the care and precision she devotes to photographing work by Romilly. 

But I knew that she has another life as a portrait photographer because many of her works have found their way into the NPG, which started acquiring them after her exhibition ‘Portraits of Luminaries’ in 1989. 

Since she worked for several years in the Chinese department at Sotheby’s, it is not surprising that some of the pictures are of luminaries of the art world: Sir Trenchard Cox, who I discover only died in 1995, long after he had retired from the V&A; Stephen Calloway in 1989; and the painter, Derek Hill in 1988.  Then, not surprisingly, there is also a strong representation of figures from Spitalfields, including Raphael Samuel, The Gentle Author and Marianna Kennedy.

Each portrait is differently composed, unpredictable, formally impressive and full of character.  I was nearing the end when there was a portrait of Romilly which I had not seen and is characteristically brilliant, the best that I have seen of her and demonstrating all of Lucinda’s skills, including empathy and speed of execution.

There’s an exhibition at the House of Anetta in Princelet Street for only a week.  And there are only 150 copies of her book so it’s already rara avis.

A beautiful day for a last visit to Castle Howard for its Vanbrugh exhibition which finishes at the end of October.

We walked out to the Temple of the Four Winds:-

Past the bulls guarding Daniel Garrett’s bridge:-

To the mausoleum:-

Much discussion about the extent to which the steps added by Daniel Garrett marr the clarity of Hawksmoor’s idea of a free-standing temple:-

Then across the bridge to the Pyramid:-

Inside the pyramid is an outsize bust of Lord William Howard, the founder of the dynasty:-

Then along the line of Vanbrugh’s fortifications guarding the entry to the estate:-

To the pyramid gate:-

The point of the visit was to enjoy Vanbrugh’s idea of the wider landscape.  We did.