I have done a post about Hooton’s Homegrown Farm Shop only once before in spite of the fact that it has been a staple of our life in Anglesey ever since it opened in 1998 – it seems longer.

We managed to stock up there just before lockdown and today I arrived just in time to buy the most spectacular carrots, pulled from the ground today:-

A footnote to the many obituaries of Jeffrey Archer.

He used to come to events at the National Portrait Gallery a lot while I was there and, indeed, bought a work from the artist Stuart Pearson Wright when it was exhibited as part of the BP Portrait Award in 1999 (I see from his obituaries that, for a time, he was an art dealer in the 1970s).

Looking back at the work, it’s not one I would have thought he would have wanted to have too prominently on display:-

Rob Perkins came into my life by way of Daphne Astor, who he had known somehow in Boston; but then Daphne knew everyone. It turned out later that he had overstayed his welcome in Cambridgeshire, so Daphne had recommended he come and visit us.

I think his father had been a banker in Boston, he had gone to private school, then Harvard, but had some kind of breakdown and turned into a filmmaker and adventurer. He lived partly in Zion National Park and partly in Lamu on the coast of West Africa. He followed my blog and I would occasionally get messages about posts. Then, I just heard that he had died quite a while ago and, of course, I didn’t know. You don’t get an email from someone who is dead.

I went for a morning walk along the quays at Newcastle.

The old part of the town, south of the railway station, feels unexpectedly well preserved, with steep steps and alleyways down to the quays and the great bridges of the Tyne overhead:-

Before going to Seaton Delaval, we went to Cherryburn, the house where Thomas Bewick was born, grew up, explored the local fields, and returned to every weekend from Newcastle when he was an apprentice, walking twenty miles up the Tyne valley to visit his parents. 

It’s pretty well preserved, including the cottage where he was born:-

And the larger stone farmhouse constructed by his youngest brother, William Bewick, who was a farmer and managed a local mine:-

It was established by the Thomas Bewick Birthplace Trust in 1987, involving Frank Atkinson, the founder of Beamish, and handed over to the National Trust in 1990:-

Bewick died in November 1828, so his bicentenary is coming up.

I have never before seen Seaton Delaval in an evening light, with a small amount of sun on its amazing north façade:-

No photograph ever does justice to the adventurousness of its composition, the contrast between its two side wings and the compression of the main block, as if all the elements of its composition are fighting against one another:-

I went back to Ghent to see the new Design Museum which opens at the weekend.

I assume photos are still embargoed, but here is how it sits within the historic city:-

And views of the roofscape from the top floor:-

You may not have recognised the Samuel Worrall House in my post about Spitalfields yesterday because it is behind-the-scenes in an internal courtyard between Fournier Street and Princelet Street.

Worrall was a carpenter-cum-timber merchant who was responsible for the construction of several of the houses in the surrounding streets, as well as working on Christ Church, Spitalfields from November 1723 and becoming one of its church wardens.

The house is apparently only one room deep:-

One of the pleasures of going to see the Anderson House was that it is in a part of Fitzrovia I did not know – an unexpected residential area west of Charlotte Street with good late nineteenth-century housing blocks:-