It’s a busy morning for the Bell Foundry. I have just been rung up by someone who wants to attend the hearing and has been informed that it is now full up. This is very strange since it is not a live hearing where there would of course be limitations of space. It is being done online. So, why can’t the hearings be streamed live ? It sounds a bit like the track and trace system, where you can get a test only providing you drive to Inverness. I hope the Planning Inspectorate will make the necessary change and live stream the hearings as soon as possible, because there will be many people who want to watch how Tower Hamlets defends itself from allowing an American venture capitalist to asset strip one of its most important sites of historic preservation next door to a mosque.

I’m now posting the online version of the Observer article as it’s much easier to read in this form.

I also want to comment on a twitter post by Stephen Clarke who, as a trustee of Re-Form, has been briefing our lawyer, Rupert Warren QC. He points out that the importance of the Bell Foundry lies in what he describes as its ‘intangible heritage value’. This reminds me that Historic England has consistently argued that it has no interest whatsoever in intangible heritage value, only in the built fabric. The claim is that they have no legal obligation to pay attention to how a building is used, only to how it was built. This has always struck me as a very weak and indefensible argument for a preservation agency and I hope that a) our lawyer might be able to pick it to pieces and b) the Commissioners of Historic England (who have been unwilling to get involved throughout this whole affair) or the Department for Culture might investigate whether it was right for them to take this position, if necessary through judicial review.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/oct/04/will-the-bells-ring-out-again-at-londons-big-ben-foundry?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Today’s coverage of next week’s Inquiry, as attached:-

My next bit of the way that the Bell Foundry has entered mainstream popular culture is a clip of Grayson Perry RA talking about how he has always wanted to make a bell. I hope it works. Technology is not my forte:-

https://wetransfer.com/downloads/1abcdf1592df1f9f7a975a9f19e856d220201003084551/b7c7990b3ed3f3d143e973a9945ba26920201003084551/cebfc4

Today’s post about the Bell Foundry is one of the more unusual, but demonstrates the cultural reach and resonance of what is happening. It’s an episode of a programme called Celine’s Salon on Soho Radio in which Celine Hispiche, the host of the programme, sings a song of lament about the possibility that the Foundry might be destroyed. I found it unexpectedly moving that the ideas and issues which we have been struggling to get over should now have gone so mainstream in popular culture and she speaks very well about the issues as well as singing her lament.

It is the second item on her programme from three days ago, so you have to scroll through the first nineteen minutes. I recommend it:-

You read it here first. I’m so pleased to see that the Daily Mail is such an eager reader of my blog.

We’re moving in to the final stages of our fight to save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry after nearly four years of discussion and debate. Historic England have decided not to appear at the Inquiry. This is intriguing. They have led the support for what the developers are planning to do, they refused to upgrade the listing to Grade 1, they paid no attention to the fact that John Summerson recognised the historic importance of the Foundry in the first edition of Georgian London, published in 1945. Maybe they have realised that they have backed the wrong horse and do not want to be fighting any longer on the wrong side. Maybe it has dawned on them that treating the building only in terms of its building fabric and not in terms of what happened inside was the wrong approach. Whatever the views at Historic England’s headquarters, the public body which has supported the destruction of the bell foundry has withdrawn, leaving Tower Hamlets vulnerable to the view that they, too, have failed to recognise one the greatest heritage assets in the borough, complacently allowing commercial interests to win over local and community value. I hope you will all be watching and praying when the Public Inquiry opens on Tuesday that the Inspector will see that the wrong decision was made by Tower Hamlets Planning Committee and that it is right that that decision should be overturned.

As yesterday at the Horniman Museum, I attach a totally arbitrary selection of things seen at the BM.

Nibunesut:-

King Nectanebo I:-

Egyptian Standing Male Figure:-

And a painted heron on an alabastron:-

We went to the British Museum today – partly out of a straightforward desire to see it and partly to catch up on its new display strategies. To judge from some of the newspapers, it has had an attack of the utmost wokeness, but we went through the Egyptian and Greek galleries and were disappointed to discover that the labelling was exactly as it was before: indeed, perhaps unchanged since the early 1980s, with no additional information that we could find about the circumstances of the objects’ acquisition, whether through plunder, purchase or archaeological digs, all of which would add to their interest. We missed the African galleries to have lunch, so the only change we detected was a display case of the utmost tastefulness in the Enlightenment gallery which acknowledges the extent to which Hans Sloane, the founder of the British Museum, was a beneficiary of slavery during the time that he was physician to the Governor of Jamaica, invested in the Africa Company, and married Elizabeth Langley Rose, a plantation owner. It felt like a wholly legitimate adjustment of the historical narrative, not exactly dethroning him from his centrality in any account of the British Museum, but acknowledging that, like so many of his generation, he was complicit, both actively through his investments, and passively through his time spent in Jamaica, with the slave trade. I suspect that many of those who have expressed outrage have not seen how it has been done:-

This is much the clearest account I’ve read of the current risks in the spread of Covid-19. The thing I find particularly odd having recently endured Self-isolation myself is that you can only be tested if you have the symptoms already, whereas it seems obvious that the only way to identify the spread of contagion and prevent it is to test those who think they might have it and have had contact with someone who has, get the test and results really fast, without having to drive to John O’Groats, and then get those people to self-isolate, not have to wait until one already knows, and shows the symptoms, that one has it:-

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/27/britain-failure-covid-surge-disaster-test-trace-virus?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other