I was very delighted to hear on the Today programme that the Heritage Lottery Fund has given a big grant to save Taylor’s, the other historically very important Bell foundry besides Whitechapel based in Loughborough.
I have known for a long time that the HLF had chosen to concentrate its funding and resources on Loughborough rather than Whitechapel.
I just hope that it helps raise the importance of Bell foundries, their cultural significance, and will enhance determination to save Whitechapel rather than undermine it at this critical juncture in the campaign.
We have just been listening to a concert by Melvyn Tan from Charleston: such a treat. It seems like a hundred years ago since the early days of lockdown when we listened to him playing on Friday evenings for a small group of friends. Now, it is a fully professional, staged performance, interspersed with readings from Proust and Virginia Woolf by Jack Farthing. He played Fauré, Ravel, Debussy and finally a Chopin Ballade.
Lockdown has been horrible in so many ways, but it has at least made one, or maybe it is only me, more attentive to the deep pleasures of listening to music, even if it is only secondhand.
The concert is available for a week only and you have to pay, but it is in the best possible cause:-
We came back from Somerset with some Westcombe Cheddar Cheese, four large chunks of it. We ate some in the evening and it was more unspeakably delicious than you can imagine, so full of the flavour of the fields, as if it had only just been made, which it maybe had. Since I know that independent cheese makers have had a hard time during COVID, I am posting information about it, not least because I have discovered that you can get it by mail order:-
We also stopped off at Roche Court en route to Bruton to see Edmund de Waal’s very beautiful, select, choice groupings of objects of alabaster, porcelain and gold leaf, arranged with such visual attention and precision in groups behind glass in the gallery designed by Stephen Marshall of Munkenbeck and Marshall so that they can be seen and appreciated COVID-free from the garden:-
I was going to wait till next week to post my Christmas card, but I have noticed that I pay much more attention to cards which come early – or maybe it just the effect of COVID that one particularly appreciates those cards from people one has not seen for a year at least; or what I try not to call retirement. Anyway this is my way of reciprocating and thanking people for their cards and their loyalty to the Blog when news has been thin, particularly as I have been discouraged from commenting on politics, which has occupied so much of everyone’s time and thoughts during the last year.
So Happy Christmas to all my friends and perhaps, most especially, those friends who contributed to the fight to save the Bell Foundry !
We had arranged to see Romilly’s exhibition at Make Hauser and Wirth Somerset in Bruton, a great treat as well as definitely work for her, before we are once more immured as a result of Tier 3.
I should know the difference between seeing work on the dining room table and seeing it in a proper gallery setting, beautifully displayed, with quotations from Edmund de Waal and Marina Warner, which I meant to photograph, but didn’t.
I have been waiting for the article I wrote about Middleport Pottery to be posted online. It has now been. It was the result of one of my few excursions outside London in the last nine months as I wanted to see what Re-Form had done to preserve Middleport Pottery, as it has been viewed as a potential model for what they might be able to do at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. Credit where credit is due. The scheme at Middleport was led by English Heritage, which makes it the more baffling that Historic England has supported the crass commercial redevelopment of the Bell Foundry as a hotel and not Re-Form’s much better and more intelligent proposals.
The Inspector visited the day after I did and I hope drew the same conclusions.
I have been reading Claire Wilcox’s Patch Work which has been written about as if it is only about her work as a curator at the V&A, handling old clothes in museum stores, but it is about far more and is only incidentally informed by her feel for fabric – at least as much by a very strong visual memory and a sense of the poetry of insignificance, each recollection written as a short and very intense linguistic meditation. She anonymises her memory of ‘The Keeper’ who was presumably the late Santina Levy, brisk and efficient like a house mistress jangling the keys to the stores and instructing lost visitors where to go. There’s a particularly good chapter on moths. But it’s all good.
Over the last few months, one of the oddest consequences of COVID is that the City of London, which you might have thought might be taking a long hard look at what its future is going to be after nine months in which it has been nearly totally deserted, is instead taking the opportunity to rush through approval for a large number of monster new developments on its fringes, including a big office block in Aldgate, which seems to me to sum up much of the total misguidedness of what is happening:-
There may be people who think this is attractive, but I am not one of them: it seems to me obvious that it is absolutely hideous and totally out-of-scale, robbing what is left of Aldgate of its character.
Now, interestingly, Chris Ferrary, a former city planner, has described how members of the City Corporation did not want to allow the building of a Marks and Spencer’s in the 1980s because they preferred to retain the surviving pubs and barbers shops. I see the point: that anyone like me who objects to new development cannot see or imagine the glories of the future when all the pubs and barbers shops have gone and we have nothing but gleaming empty office blocks and branches of Marks and Spencer’s.
Having worked for a period on the fringes of the the City myself, I’m afraid I think he is quite wrong and that the City will itself live to regret the annihilation of so much of its historic character as people may have discovered the attractions of staying at home rather than working in soulless and anonymous office blocks. But maybe he and his ilk will prove me wrong.
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