I can see that Roger Scruton is going to cause almost as much controversy in his death as he did in his lifetime: the question being whether or not it is possible to lament the death of someone independently of his (or her) views. But it’s surely legitimate, indeed desirable, to respect someone of such wide-ranging, if wilfully adversarial views: a philosopher, who trained as a barrister and was turned down as a Tory candidate for being too intellectual; a writer on aesthetics, a sufficiently rare phenomenon; a musician and a novelist. I didn’t know him, but I can still admire the work he did in Czechoslovakia and believe that independent thinking is desirable on the right as on the left.

I have been reading the minutes of the London Advisory Committee, the sub-committee of Historic England which has dealt with the decision to revise its listing and support the Raycliff scheme for the redevelopment of the Foundry as a hotel. They have been provided to me through what was construed as a freedom-of-information request. They make revealing, but – to me, at least – somewhat mournful reading as at no point did the Committee stop to think whether or not it might be better for the building qua building if the Foundry was retained as a foundry (not necessarily as just a bell foundry), instead of being converted into a restaurant as was originally proposed according to the papers provided on the first occasion at which the plans were discussed on 2 February 2017. The idea was suggested then of ‘scheduling the Old Foundry and its equipment’, but much of the equipment was modern, so was either sold or removed to new premises in Bromley. No visit was organised so that members of the committee could see the building in action, which was essential to a proper understanding of its industrial and historical significance as a survival of an eighteenth-century working foundry, still in use, not just a group of interesting buildings. The only expression of sorrow at what was about to happen was in the minutes of the meeting when it was recorded that ‘The LAC recognised that loss of bell production on this site represented the end of a tradition of London’s ‘back garden’ industries’.

There was then a long gap in which it was scarcely discussed until 28 September 2017, when it was reported that ‘a representative from the UK Historic Building Preservation Trust’ had expressed an interest in the acquisition of the site. It’s odd that it took so long for this to be considered because, as I understand it, the UKHBPT had taken an interest from very early on, and certainly before the internal fittings were sold. But, let that pass. It may be that representations were made to the Chief Executive, not to the relevant planning officers.

There was no further discussion until 21 February 2019 when the Raycliff scheme to turn the site into a hotel was discussed. There was reference in the Principals’ Report to the fact that ‘there is a high profile campaign against the proposals’, but, in the minutes, this is downgraded to ‘a local campaign against the proposal was continuing’. Then, on 21 November 2019, it was reported that the Raycliff scheme had been granted consent in red letters, as if it was a matter for congratulation. Again, the minutes report that a hotel development ‘was contentious locally’.

Having read the minutes carefully, I can only regret that it appears that none of the officers, nor members of the committee felt very strongly about the destruction of such an important site of industrial archaeology. They were encouraged to think that the sale of the contents and the change-of-use was a foregone conclusion and that turning the ground floor into a restaurant was perfectly acceptable.

The only point I would make in reading the minutes is that opposition to the scheme is always described as a local issue, as if it were of concern only to local residents like myself, whereas, from the beginning, it has been an issue of much more than local concern. Tristram Hunt, the Director of the V&A, expressed concern early on; so did Antony Gormley; Factum Foundation, which has put forward such imaginative alternative proposals, is based in Madrid; United Kingdom Historic Building Preservation Trust was established under HRH the Prince of Wales and is based in Stoke-on-Trent. Dismay has been expressed not just in E1, but from all corners of the globe, and in articles in the Financial Times and Daily Mail.

It is for this reason, above all, that the scheme should be called in. It is not just about merchant bankers swimming on the top-floor swimming pool next door to the local mosque. It is about wanton damage to a site of exceptional national and international significance, as the London Advisory Committee should have recognised back in February 2017.

My copy of the second volume of the publication on the work of Jeremy Dixon and Edward Jones has just been delivered (I have already written about seeing an advance copy in October). It is the greatest pleasure to see it at long last in print, including the introduction to it that I wrote so long ago that I had nearly forgotten what I had written.

What I am struck in re-reading it again is how quickly the present becomes the past and that what was new is rapidly absorbed into the texture of the city and nearly as rapidly forgotten, if not properly documented. There was a moment in the late 1990s when the work of Dixon Jones was ubiquitous in reconstructing the heartland of the centre of London: their great project at the Royal Opera House; the opening up of Somerset House and its courtyard; the Ondaatje Wing at the National Portrait Gallery; a proposal for steps out into Trafalgar Square from the National Gallery; not to mention the pedestrianisation of Exhibition Road in west London. I’m really glad that the book documents and describes all this work because part of its quality was precisely its relative invisibility, much of the work inside, not drawing attention to itself, about city planning, not single monuments.

Now Stanton Williams have already reworked bits of the Royal Opera House and Jamie Fobert is reworking the NPG, as the city evolves like a grand palimpsest.

I walked back from the Charterhouse this morning by way of Bunhill Fields, that melancholy burial ground which was outside the City’s walls and the care of the church of England – in the eighteenth century, it was known as Tindal’s burial ground after Mr. Tindal who held the lease – and so was the site of burial of many prominent nonconformists, including John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe and William Blake. It was municipalised in the 1960s by Peter Shepheard of Shepheard Epstein after bombing in the war and some of the gravestones have been wrapped in blankets to protect them from the frost:-

I’ve been closeted in the British Library, enjoying long days reading which I haven’t done for years, and freedom from the telephone and interruptions, the benefit of collective single-minded concentration on what is essentially a wholly solitary and impersonal task, with the strange experience that some of the people I knew as readers thirty years ago are still there thirty years later, unchanged:-

I have, not surprisingly, been preoccupied by memories of visiting Iran in the summer of 1973 and of those monuments which Trump has so casually and brutally threatened to bomb out of existence, now only half retracting because it is so obviously contrary to international law, not because he accepts that it is an appalling proposal. Most especially, I got out of the library a copy of Robert Byron’s Road to Oxiana, which is what inspired the trip, together with the contacts of Peter Avery, the great Persianist. I was trying to remember where it was that we stopped en route between Tabriz and Tehran and realise that it must have been at Soltaniyeh, with its great fourteenth-century mosque or mausoleum, which Byron shows as a ruin, but has been at least half reconstructed. Only one of so many great and memorable and culturally important monuments. I wish I had been taking photographs then or, if I did, had kept them.

I’m so pleased that the V&A is taking such a vocal and principled stand against Trump’s insane threat to attack Iran’s cultural monuments, the clearest evidence, if evidence were needed, of his invariable tendency to shoot from the hip, irrespective of the consequences.

I’m also glad that they are going ahead with their Iran exhibition in the autumn which will be such a great opportunity to be reminded of the wealth and depth of Iran’s culture. I still regret that we pulled the RA’s Syrian exhibition. It seemed essential at the time, but not in retrospect.

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I have been thinking about McKendrick’s biography of Jack Plumb. It describes, but doesn’t sufficiently explain Jack’s remarkable transmogrification from an unconfident, unsuccessful and, by his own admission, not very brilliant, solitary PhD. student of G.M. Trevelyan in 1930s Cambridge, who went back to Leicester, his home town, for friendships, affairs and weekend drinking and going for long, gloomy walks with Trevelyan in Northumberland, into, already by the late 1940s, the super-confident author of England in the Eighteenth Century. What exactly happened to him, either as the lodger of Anthony de Rothschild at Tring or as a worker at Bletchley Park on de-coding or as the Ehrman Research Fellow at King’s to give him his carapace of sometimes excessive social confidence, his autocratic demands as a teacher and mentor, and the zest and brilliance of his prose style ? He thought of these as wasted years, but they don’t seem wasted if they were an opportunity for his own re-invention.

I have spent the day reading the bizarre, fascinating and ultimately macabre, warts-and-all biography of Jack Plumb, which has been written by Neil McKendrick, an early pupil, life-time protégé and long-term friend, ally and supporter, even when towards the end of Plumb’s life it became nearly impossible. I was just about aware of the extent to which he lost all sense of restraint in the last years of his life as I witnessed his voluble and intolerable abuse of his successor-but-one as Master, whose election I’m pleased to discover he had supported. It’s a sad tale because it obviously clouded his many and remarkable achievements as a writer, teacher and historian.

There is a chapter which defends his record as Master of Christ’s. I certainly owe Jack an immense debt of gratitude for establishing the Christie’s Research Fellowship in the Decorative Arts to which I was appointed not long after he became Master and for being a deeply supportive and life-enhancing friend and ally for the time that I was a fellow there and thereafter.

I have only just found out that my old headmaster, John Dancy, died last week aged 99. For some reason, he was rather prejudiced against me, even in spite of the fact that I sat at his feet to study Religious Knowledge A level, where he taught us about the Book of Daniel. In retrospect, he was a remarkable and admirable person, a scholarly and very donnish headmaster, who had indeed been a fellow of Wadham before becoming a schoolmaster at Winchester, headmaster of Lancing aged 33 and of Marlborough from 1961 to 1972. And he was a liberal and reforming headmaster, responsible for the introduction of co-education while I was at school. My last contact with him was quite recent when he wrote me a letter expressing astonishment that I had appeared in a television programme and even more astonishment that my views were apparently treated with respect, something he couldn’t disguise that after 50 years he thought very odd.

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