I have just discovered a relation who till this morning I didn’t know existed, my great aunt, Helen, who is commemorated in a fine piece of stained glass in Steyning Church, north of Worthing. I had assumed that all my great aunts had lived in Australia, where they migrated in 1890 when Helen was twelve, but she must have returned to England and lived in Sussex unmarried. I don’t ever remember her being mentioned, so would be interested to know more about her life, if anyone knows.

I have been asked a few questions by Inigo, the posh estate agency which was born out of The Modern House and is based on the same principle of being selective in what they take on, providing good quality photography and accurate architectural information. It makes me sound a bit of an old soak, but maybe that’s just a consequence of being closeted during lockdown with no consolation apart from wine:-

https://inigo.com/almanac/home-comforts-charles-saumarez-smith

In case any of you are in the vicinity of Petworth on June 17th., I am doing a talk in the Newlands Gallery on ‘The Rise of the Private Gallery’, followed by lunch for those who want it nearby. I didn’t want to just repeat talks I have given on my book over the last year, so I have chosen a topic which I half covered, but only half.

The Rise of the Private Gallery with Charles Saumarez-Smith (mailchi.mp

It’s only just over a year since my book on art museums was published. It seems longer ago, partly because the text was delivered on 31st. March 2020, a week after lockdown and so inevitably reflects a more confident and optimistic era. I added a final conclusion to reflect the changes which I could see were coming. It is possibly too apocalyptic. But I hope the book still stands as a historic record of museums as they developed in the post-war era, becoming ever bigger, more architectural, more civic in their view of their responsibilities.

https://thamesandhudson.com/news/podcast-what-should-an-art-museum-be/?s=09

It’s five years since the Garden Museum, so Dow Jones, its architects, gave a talk about the nature of their practice in the nave surrounded by their earlier interventions: thoughtful, lowkey, interweaving sometimes lightweight architecture with the natural world. Their extension to the Garden Museum has worn well, inserted to the north of the church, with the effect of a cloister surrounding Dan Pearson’s small garden at its heart and retaining the adjacent medieval wall of Lambeth Palace. Their other projects obviously have many of the same qualities, particularly their Maggie’s Centre in Cardiff, although on a difficult site, which also has a garden at its centre; and I’m pleased to see that they’re working on the Bevis Marks Synagogue.

I very much enjoyed Peter Guillery’s online description of the origins of the Survey of London in C.R. Ashbee’s decision to document the history of the Trinity Hospital on the Mile End Road as a way of recording local history and establishing the importance of memory and local community against the trend of massive new construction; and its relationship to their decision to go back to Whitechapel for their forthcoming two volumes which will document, not least, the history of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry for which they did important documentary research. Its record of the area round Aldgate will be invaluable because so much is unrecognisable from what it was like even five years ago: even the streets have changed, vast tower blocks have gone up, so that it is hard to remember what it was like before.

In amongst so much bad and depressing news, it’s a pleasure to read a good story about an imaginative developer and architect making imaginative conversions of disused buildings for local community use, financed not by local authorities, but investors:-

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/may/12/car-park-to-cafe-bar-how-the-really-local-group-is-renewing-the-uks-derelict-spaces?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

I have been sent a copy of a book to be published by Artifice Press on a strange and unexpected house built in the veldt north-east of Pretoria by Sydney and Victoria Press. Sydney Press owned Edgar’s, a big chain of stores. His wife, Victoria, was a designer from New York. They commissioned an Italian modernist architect, Marco Zanuso, who had edited Domus, on the basis of a picture of a Sardinian house he had designed which they had seen in a magazine, invited him out to South Africa and he proceeded to design an astonishing, enormous and bold house on an immense scale, which the book documents:-

https://www.artificeonline.com/product/creating-coromandel-marco-zanuso-in-south-africa/