My morning in the garden with a copy of the Weekend FT has been immensely cheered up by discovering that Jackie Wullschläger has nominated my museums book as her choice for summer holiday reading. Thank you, Jackie ! You have made my day.

https://on.ft.com/3h6fakP via @FT

Today is the last day in which it might have been possible to launch a judicial review into what went wrong in terms of the decision-making over the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. But the money is not available to do this and no-one has the appetite to prolong the agony. Hope that it could be saved is ebbing away as officials wash their hands of it, suggesting that it is now too late, although the fabric of the building remains 100% intact and it would not be difficult to put the historic parts of the building back into operation again, rather than just turning it, as now looks inevitable, into the posh adjunct of a private members’ club or luxury hotel.

I can’t help but notice that Robert Jenrick, who promised to launch an Inquiry to establish how it was that the Whitechapel Bell Foundry was given planning permission by his own Department and, indeed, in his own name, has not yet done so or, if he has, it has not been reported.

Let me remind him of a couple of the issues he might look into.

1. It would be useful for him to find out which of his officials ‘expedited’ the permission through the system and the motivation for this. Was it someone in his private office or perhaps one of his Special Advisors ? Is he confident that all aspects of the decision making have been squeaky clean and not susceptible of undue influence ? Why was he himself circumvented from involvement in the final decision when it was known that he was sympathetic to the historic importance of the Bell Foundry and the symbolic significance of not just Big Ben, but the Liberty Bell as well ?
2. Local Councils are expected to test the market before allowing change-of-use. But Tower Hamlets never did this, nor did the Planning Inspector raise it as an issue. Yet, it should have been obvious that this is a basic first step and common practice. Why was it circumvented ?
3. Historic England now have a policy of favouring what they describe as ‘constructive conservation’. This involves getting into bed with developers, not quite literally, but at least working alongside and with them and putting them on their Boards, including attendance at the London Advisory Committee. Is this really a sensible policy ? Or does it give developers undue influence on decision making, not allowing Historic England to perform its statutory duties ?
4. The approval of planning permission was by the casting vote of the chairman of the Tower Hamlets planning committee after a split vote. So, a single casting vote decided the fate of a building which has been in existence since the 1740s. It is now known that the Mayor of Tower Hamlets influenced the decision, encouraging the committee members to vote in favour of the proposals. What, one wonders, influenced him in this way ? Was it a purely disinterested desire to further the interests of the borough ?

Although I now realise the the Bell Foundry itself is probably doomed, I still think it is worth trying to learn the lessons of what went wrong and who and what caused the mistakes.

It starts with a Limoges enamel casket with Becket being decapitated:-

His parents, Gilbert and Matilda, were merchants in Cheapside.   According to John of Salisbury, Becket ‘was tall in stature, handsome in appearance, acute in intellect…’  

His consecration as archbishop:-

A remnant of the Romanesque cathedral:-

Becket shows his feelings towards the King and Louis VII:-

There’s a font from a church in rural Sweden showing the rapid spread of his cult following his murder:-

The cult spreads to a reliquary in Norway:-

In alabaster:-

A wonderful, intellectually coherent, narrative exhibition, so rich in objects and a sense of Becket’s tragedy.

Deborah Swallow talked last night to the Royal Drawing School about her plans for the Courtauld: so incredibly complex because of the multitude of different levels making disabled access so incredibly complicated, what looks like a piece of ingenious adaptation, and clarification of the layout and gallery spaces by Witherford Watson Mann who have good experience of working with historic buildings at Astley Castle. It’s due to re-open in November with the galleries re-floored in oak and newly designed concealed lighting: a treat in store.

My belief that the odds in terms of development in London are totally stacked in favour of developers, who have deep pockets to pay the best QCs, the best PR firms, and now appear to have the support of Historic England, has taken a minor knock having just heard that the monster development of 8, Albert Embankment by U+I (the Deputy Chief Executive of U+I just happens to be a Commissioner of Historic England) which would have taken much of the available daylight away from local communities, parks and the Garden Museum has not been given planning permission by Robert Jenrick, following a Planning Inquiry and on the basis of the advice of his Planning Inspector. A great victory on the part of those who campaigned so brilliantly against the plans !

Perhaps it will stem the advance of the approaching triffids:-

In the great tide of London’s redevelopment which seems to have been let rip during COVID, such that central London is now populated only by construction workers (have you tried travelling on the Central line at 6.15 ?), we seem to have given up on any idea of systematic conservation in favour of turning London into Hong Kong. Luckily, I like Hong Kong, but I also liked the low-rise, historically complex, Victorian city that London used to be, now disappearing under huge anonymous blocks of high-rise, with ungovernable planning consents.

The death of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry is only emblematic of the death of the old city, thanks to the new policy of Historic England to encourage and work with developers and accept payment from them for their advice, which used to be called a conflict of interest, but is now just the way to get things done:-

A day trip to Ledbury: such a surprisingly well-preserved market town with new building kept out of the main street, all independent shops apart from a rustic Tesco and an amazing cobbled alleyway leading up to the church:-

Good monuments in the church.

Edward and Elizabeth Skynner who made a fortune in the cloth trade and had 11 children, one killed as a baby by a wolf:-

And the memorial to Robert Middleton Biddulph, who made a fortune in Bengal, by Sir Richard Westmacott, a fine piece of early nineteenth-century sentiment:-

The only photograph I was able to take on a lightning visit to Cambridge today was a distant view of the new Magdalene College Library, which looks like a very sympathetic and ingenious addition to the architecture of the college by Niall McLaughlin. People often feel that any form of historical treatment should be taboo in a modern building, but this doesn’t look nostalgically revivalist, just intelligently cognisant of its surroundings, fitting in harmoniously, which is quite a great achievement:-

I see that Janet Malcolm has died, the great mistress of long-form, analytical writing for the New Yorker. Her obituaries so far focus on the controversies surrounding her books, In the Freud Archives and The Journalist and the Murderer, both of which provoked immense, long-lasting critique, and neglect the fact that her first book, published in 1980, was a brilliant book of her essays about the history of photography, Diana & Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography, writing about photography as an art form when this was still unfashionable, studying the subject through studies of the work of individual photographers, who she subjected to subtle semi-psychological probing (it is not surprising to discover that her father was a Czech psychiatrist and her second book on Psychoanalysis). She also had an interest in Bloomsbury, writing a long article about Charleston in 1995 under the title ‘A House of One’s Own’ (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/06/05/a-house-of-ones-own), which, like all her writing, was incredibly deeply informed, subtly investigative, beautifully well written and full of her own, well-considered critical judgments of people as well as their writing. I never met her, and now can’t, but I admired her greatly for her writings.

It’s funny now how reviews do not necessarily appear in the places one wants or expects, but instead they appear mysteriously, including, today, an excellent one – at least, not surprisingly, I thought it was excellent – on the Blue Guides website, which both summarises and engages with my findings in a way which I found helpful. It is about the issue of how far museums should be didactic; how far didacticism is off-putting to the public or a necessary part of deepening public understanding. The author makes the analogy with basic grammar. Teaching grammar has become unfashionable for the same reason as didacticism. A schoolroom or a playground ? A set-menu restaurant or a smorgasbord ? Exactly.

https://travel.blueguides.com/book-review-the-art-museum-in-modern-times/