The only thing about being away for Easter is that we may have missed the best of the tulips:-

There is a very good and level-headed analysis by Rowan Moore in this morning’s Observer (in the main paper, not the The New Review) of Make’s plans to create a huge new office development right next to the National Theatre. The question is whether or not it is right to have a new office development on this scale on such a highly sensitive sight right opposite William Chamber’s Somerset House, particularly since, because of the curve of the river, it will dominate views east from Westminster Bridge and Waterloo Bridge. Moore suggests that Michael Gove calls the scheme in. I sincerely hope he will.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/24/londons-south-bank-deserves-better-than-brute-of-a-building

We went to see a preview of the new film about the Queen which is due to be released on May 24th. just in time for the Platinum Jubilee.

We had seen a preliminary version some time ago, which was a touch more personal, with more private film footage of family life in the 1950s. Now, it is more about the Queen as icon in the late twentieth century – by turns, funny, charming, revealing, affectionate, getting close to being sentimental, but staying on the right side of the line, a very tricky tightrope to have to walk, possibly too glorifying for a younger generation and not quite reverent enough for Palace officials, but for anyone born in the 1950s, as the late Roger Michell was who directed it, inescapably nostalgic, including news reel footage of the Coronation, the Queen as a child, her passion for horse racing, the requirement to go on endless factory visits, never putting a foot wrong, with very occasional glimpses of humour behind the never-ending imperturbability, ending with HM and David Attenborough looking at the labels on the trees in the garden at Buckingham Palace or maybe it was Windsor. Terribly and touchingly moving. At least that was my view seeing it again on the big screen.

We happened to listen to the PM Programme yesterday just after the Prime Minister had been referred to the Committee of Privileges for lying nem. con. At long last, it felt as if the whole structure of the recent extremist tory party erected by Boris Johnson is falling down. No Nadine Dorries or Jacob Rees-Mogg coming out to defend him, saying that decency, honesty and integrity in politics are just a piece of fluff which can happily be ignored by shysters and millionaires in top hats. Instead, at long last, the mainstream of the party grappling with their consciences as to whether or not it is really in their interests to have a pathological and serial liar at their helm who had mistaken Carrie and champagne in the Cabinet Room as a work meeting and, it seems, has almost certainly been photographed dancing to Abba in his flat on the night Cummings left Downing Street. I liked the analogy of the boy who is contrite only for as long as he is in the headmaster’s study and then jokes and beams and shows no trace of contrition in a room full of his co-conspirators, which is presumably exactly what happened and seems to have revolted even them.

Hard to beat Clough Williams-Ellis’s Morannedd Café at the end of the seafront at Criccieth for lunch: now run by Dylans, a small, but excellent chain; a piece of post-war modernism, when modernism was a style, like the baroque, and no longer daring, although it may have been in Criccieth:-

We have been to Lloyd George’s grave before – a shrine high above the Afon Dwyfor in amongst the woods, designed by Clough Williams-Ellis who lived nearby in a restrained classical style, lowkey, unlike the man himself:-

The museum nearby is also a shrine, full of portraits and relics, with an excellent introductory film and a spooky hologram:-

We went to see St. Cynhaearn, another church preserved by the Friends of Friendless Churches, close to Criccieth, but in the middle of fields with views across to Snowdonia, reached by a single track road which runs, if you follow Google, through a semi-derelict farmyard: as remote as can be and as beautiful:-

We look out towards the distant hills and observe the changing conditions of the light, day after day, always the same, but always different:-

An Easter pleasure is having received a copy of Owen Hatherley’s magnificent gazetteer, Modern Buildings in Britain, long awaited and recently published – a monumental description of all the most important modern (or modernist) buildings in the country, both scholarly and opinionated. Being in North Wales is an opportunity to test its coverage. He includes a long description of the theatre and halls of residence at Harlech, but not Clough Williams Ellis’s Morannedd Café on the seafront at Criccieth: he perhaps disapproves of Williams Ellis’s urbane form of superficial modernism and the fact that it was owned by Billy Butlin. He is a bit more generous than I would be to the recent alterations to Oriel Mostyn in Llandudno, which I remember as having somewhat compromised the integrity of the original Edwardian galleries at the back. He doesn’t include the Gwynedd County Hall in Caernarvon which I always think is one of the more interesting and unexpected pieces of 1980s design, inserted into the town in a way which is historically interesting without being too pastiche. On the other hand, he is impressively up-to-date in including the new Grimshaw building for the University of Bangor and Ty Bawb in Wrexham, only completed in 2019. From what I’ve read so far, it looks as if it will stimulate a great deal of visiting of out-of-the-way modern buildings, more like Nairn than Pevsner. So, many treats in store.