If you go to Bruton, I recommend eating at The Old Pharmacy. It’s not cheap. £50 a head for a tasting menu (with wine); but stupendously delicious in a totally unpretentious, but brilliant way. I’ve now read about it. I didn’t feel it to be quite as local as it claims to be, but people in Bruton certainly take their meat seriously, starting out with fresh bread cut thin with slices of saucisson and a main course of pork with roast potatoes and turnip, with burrata and broad beans in between. As much Spanish, I thought, as local, but maybe that was the focus on flavour. Coffee ice cream to finish on a bed of mascarpone, crumble and salted caramel. It’s like a lot of Bruton: a form of heightened reality, like the Hudson Valley.

We travelled down to Bruton to see the exhibition, Five Seasons, at Make Hauser and Wirth Gallery in the High Street with Romilly’s work prominently and beautifully on display in a mixed show of work loosely inspired by the gardening philosophy of Piet Oudolf. It’s hard to photograph – much better on their website. I liked the trio of objects – not a set – not in a glass case but just set out on a metal plinth:-

I have just been listening to the latest episode of the Londown (https://open-city.org.uk/the-londown), an excellent weekly programme about what is happening in architecture. This week is concerned with Michael Gove’s decision to call in the plans to demolish Marks and Spencer’s building in Oxford Street. It does feel as if there could be a mood swing in attitudes towards new building: this decision to protect a perfectly good if not especially distinguished 1920s commercial building instead of replacing it with a deeply undistinguished new building; the decision to appoint the most conservation-minded of the entries to the competition to re-do the Barbican; the apparent success of a scheme to convert Hammonds of Hull, a department store, into a food market; these suggest efforts to look for imaginative new uses for existing buildings instead of just demolishing them. Now, it just needs Gove to call in the planned monstrous development by Make next door to the National Theatre to demonstrate his support for this new policy direction. It would be condemned for its conservatism; but it is about the future as much as the past. The ITV scheme by Make is a 1950s dream of the future by a 70-year old architect. Younger architects have a much more imaginative attitude towards re-use, refurbishment and protection of the planet, as well as of old buildings. It feels as if Gove sees this and supports it.

I have been pretty sceptical about the City Corporation allocating £150 million to the idea of a radical transformation of the Barbican just at the moment when it is being properly appreciated as an architectural monument, but the team selected look well qualified to renew it and regenerate without changing its character overmuch: not least Asif Khan who is also working on the Museum of London, so there could be a chance to look at the culture of this part of the City as a whole, once the new Farringdon Station opens later this year; it needs a project of cultural regeneration instead of commercial over development. Plus Alan Baxter, who are based in Cowcross Street so use the neighbourhood every day. And Isaac Julien. Good choices.

https://www.barbican.org.uk/our-story/press-room/winning-design-team-to-lead-barbican-centre-renewal-revealed

I should have said that the exhibition about Maurice Dorfman is in Clapham Public Library, conveniently close to Clapham High Street station which is on the Orange Line (I travelled straight back to Whitechapel) and Clapham North which is on the Northern Line (but remember that the Moorgate branch is partly closed), and part of the pleasure of the exhibition is the way it is laid out through the library, which, whatever its defects as a library, works well as a space for exploration. Also, the exhibition was originally going to close at the end of this week, but has now been extended to May 28th. If it wasn’t already obvious, I strongly recommend it and attach a) a piece in the Guardian about it:-

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/apr/14/behind-the-shop-facade-the-life-and-times-of-maurice-dorfman

And, b) the website address of the exhibition which tells you how to buy the book:-

www.behindtheshopfacade.com

A friend, Jim Grover, who is a photographer, spent a lot of lockdown documenting the life and shop of a haberdasher called Maurice Dorfman, who had a shop on Clapham High Street called Jeannette, next door to the Railway Tavern (it’s still there). I never visited the shop and don’t remember it – not really my part of town. But the story and the pictures are fascinating, a microcosm of the life of a small trader – Jewish, single – starting out in his parents workshop, De Harmo, and then after his parents died and his brother emigrated, running the shop on his own until his death in 2020.

This was Maurice:-

This was a workshop in East London of the type Dorfman’s grandfather would have worked in (I thought it was Ukraine where the family came from):-

His clothes:-

It’s a wonderful piece of visual and sociological documentation, showing the amazing richness – sailing, dancing, Harley Davidsons – of an everyday life.

If any of you are near Bruton over the next month or so – it’s a good place to stop if you are driving to Devon – there is a treat in store.

https://mailchi.mp/69d0aec5e586/goldsmiths-fair-online-13832308?e=9dc0f9b85b