It seems to me that the revelation of the latest party in Downing Street on 20 May 2020 puts the government in a nearly impossible situation. However much we may respect Sue Gray as a very senior and experienced civil servant, she has been given a pretty well impossible task of investigating more and more parties, with more and more evidence of malpractice appearing every day, and a requirement that she hands over her report to Simon Case who is her employer and the Prime Minister who is his. So, it will be impossible for her to be impartial.

The obvious thing at this juncture should be to hand it over to the police who must have access to all the evidence. But the police themselves have thus far refused to get involved and are themselves contaminated by not having forbidden or investigated the parties going on in the first place in spite of being in charge of security at 10, Downing Street.

So, what is to be done ? It’s hard to see.

I have been following the competition to renovate/reinvent the Barbican with the utmost interest. £150 million which is the quoted cost of the project is far higher than would be required if it was simply a question of preserving and protecting the character of a major monument of the 1960s. So, the plan must be to do something dramatic and ambitious: not necessarily a bad thing, but tricky if you are dealing with the integrity of such a historically important set of buildings.

It coincides with the potential demolition of the old Museum of London, a possible move of the market traders out of Smithfield, and the opening of a new Museum of London: in other words, the total redevelopment of the heart of the City round Smithfield, Charterhouse Square and the Barbican.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro are already working on a new project for the Museum of London site. BIG are hardly known for their sensitivity to the historic environment. Allies and Morrison are good urban planners, and are working with Asif Khan, a strong combination.

It looks as though the Barbican as we know it is effectively doomed.

https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/five-mega-teams-shortlisted-for-barbican-centre-renewal-contest

Deeper and deeper it goes. It is perhaps not the fact of the occasional booze-up in the Downing Street garden, but the never-ending deception, as it is increasingly clear that throughout last year the government was making rules and pronouncements as to how any form of social interaction was strictly forbidden, even at weddings and funerals, enforced by a draconian police force, whilst they were instantly disappearing into the garden for a piss-up by invitation, contravening all their own rules and which the police refuse to investigate because it happened in the past. Heads should surely roll, and it shouldn’t be that of the Prime Minister’s Private Secretary alone, but that of his boss who must, if only tacitly, have authorised it and approved it by showing up with wine and a giant smirk.

https://www.itv.com/news/2022-01-10/email-proves-downing-street-staff-held-drinks-party-at-height-of-lockdown

I thought I should maybe repost some pictures I took on my last visit to the Gladstone Pottery Museum (https://charlessaumarezsmith.com/2017/05/14/gladstone-pottery-museum/) in the light of the likely decision by the conservative-run council to close it for most of the winter, at the same time as losing the majority of the curators in the wonderful Stoke Museum, one of the greatest places to see a comprehensive collection of English pottery.

A government should be judged by its actions. In spite of so much protest about the loss of history and the need to protect and preserve a true version of the past, as well as an election platform in favour of levelling up, its record so far in protecting history is not impressive: it has allowed the destruction of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry; its economic policy will now require Stoke-on-Trent to lose the expertise which enables a creative and scholarly interpretation of its past.

I have been very mildly castigated for suggesting in my recent post about Simon Lewty that he may have somewhat dropped out of public view after a period in the mid-1980s when he had exhibitions more or less simultaneously at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham and then at the Serpentine and was taken on by Anne Berthoud who showed his work in her gallery in Clifford Street. I exaggerated this sense of him dropping out of public view. The truth is that his work went on being seen and shown in exhibitions – for example, there was an exhibition at the Mead Art Gallery and Nottingham in 1992 – and he continued to be represented by Art First who showed his work over a period of thirty years in their gallery upstairs on Cork Street and later in Eastcastle Street.

My point was more that he was not the type to promote himself; that his work has not been shown, as it deserves to be, by Tate. I hope his recent death will lead to a reappraisal, as people now look back on artists who were prominent in the 1970s and 1980s. He was in so many ways a great original.

The attached very sensitive obituary of Simon Lewty has just been posted online. It is by the art historian, Paul Hills, who knew Lewty when teaching at Warwick in the mid-1970s.

Lewty was a remarkable artist, living almost entirely in the realm of his imagination, combining graphics, calligraphy and arcane, sometimes primitive imagery in a distinctive and highly original way, informed by a deeply stocked knowledge of the history of art – medieval, mystical and contemporary. He was an artist who was highly regarded in the mid-1980s when, as Hills says, he had exhibitions at the Serpentine and Ikon Gallery, but then disappeared from public view, too shy for his own good, too concerned with the realm of the imagination, only visiting Swanage after finding the experience of Chartres Cathedral too overwhelming.

I’m pleased to learn that he has been recorded by the National Sound Archive, which will reveal the ideas and beliefs which informed his art.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/jan/06/simon-lewty-obituary?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

I spotted the attached discussion about the life and work of Mark Girouard to celebrate the publication of his Biographical Dictionary of English Architecture 1540-1640 and his ninetieth birthday.

He talks incredibly impressively, demonstrating his extraordinary range of publications, not just work on the country house for which he is now best remembered – the Victorian Country House (1971) and Life in the English Country House (1978), but also a reminder that one of his early books was on Victorian pubs, that he spent five years at the Bartlett training to be an architect, and wrote a very good and lively biography of Jim Stirling, as well as being a great admirer, which I did not know, of the work of Denys Lasdun. The only thing I felt was missing was recognition of his role in protecting Spitalfields. Now, he’s apparently written a novel.

I’ve not always been that keen on Conway in summer – we’ve never found anywhere to eat – but liked it out of season, seeing the Castle from the quay:-

And we liked the Palace Cinema, by the same architects as Harlech Theatre, but pre-war and pseudo-medieval:-

The Civic Hall, now sold for redevelopment, has an odd 1960s extension, totally out of sympathy with its surroundings:-

There are good medieval houses:-

The smallest house in Britain:-

And fish-and-chips in the Castle Hotel.

St. Mary, Tal-y-Llyn is the sole survivor of a village which was swept away by the Black Death: strange to think of it without a congregation for more than six hundred years, isolated and surrounded by farmland:-

The second of the two great Anglesey Bridges is the Britannia Bridge, designed by Robert Stephenson to take the railway to Holyhead and accidentally burnt down in 1970, leaving only the great stone piers intact:-