For those of you who, like me, have lost track of the ins and outs of the planning process for the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, I have provided a brief digest of the last three years since news of its impending sale was first announced on 2 December 2017.

What I think the narrative demonstrates is how long it has taken the heritage community to mount an effective opposition to its sale and dismemberment and how odd it was that Historic England, the government agency which has responsibility for the built heritage, did not intervene at once in late 2017 when it had an opportunity to broker its salvation and, instead, have chosen to endorse the vandals.

Thank goodness Robert Jenrick looks likely to call it in and see if there can be a negotiated solution:-

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/comment/the-whitechapel-bell-foundry

I was asked last night for the current situation on the Bell Foundry.

Robert Jenrick, the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, has told Tower Hamlets that planning permission to turn it into a hotel is temporarily suspended whilst he and his officials consider whether or not to call it in. He is now back in office today, so is likely to make this decision sooner rather than later, based on the submissions which have so far been made to the Planning Casework Unit in Birmingham (pcu@communities.gov.uk).

If you have not already written, please do. The decision will be based, as I understand it, on whether or not Tower Hamlets have followed correct procedures in granting permission (they have not tested whether or not the Foundry can be kept as a Foundry), whether or not this can be judged an issue of national and international interest, and the politics of either allowing or refusing permission.

My general view is that in writing you should stress that this is an issue of not merely local, but national and international concern; that there is a perfectly viable and financially sustainable plan for keeping the Foundry as a Foundry, drawn up by the United Kingdom Historic Building Preservation Trust; and that the Foundry is uniquely important in a way that a boutique hotel is not.

Then, light a candle, ring a bell, and pray !

I was pleased to read this account of the origins of The Friends of Friendless Churches, which I did not know and am not surprised that it was founded by a Welsh MP because its work is particularly valuable in North Wales, including many of the churches I most admire:- St. Mary, Tal-y-Llyn, remote along a deserted road east of Aberffraw; St. Baglan, Llanfaglan, again exceptionally remote, on the coast west of Caernarvon; and the astonishing St. Mark’s, Brithdir, which I finally managed to locate last summer, on a hillside surrounded by rhodendendra near Dolgellau. Friends of Friendless Churches keeps them open as places to admire without song and dance – the best sort of charity.

https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2019/dec/15/rescuing-run-down-churches-friends-of-friendless-churches-england-wales-photo-essay?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_WordPress

We went last night to hear Jakub Józef Orliński sing at the Wigmore Hall, which he did divinely, singing arias from forgotten Italian operas of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries by Cavalli, who studied under Monteverdi and became organist of St. Mark’s, Boretti, Bononcini, born in Modena, studied in Bologna, moved to Rome, moved to Vienna, Berlin and London, where, in the 1730s, he was a rival of Handel, Predieri, who likewise moved from Bologna to Vienna to be Kapellmeister, Hasse, who was born in Hamburg, but worked in Naples, Venice and Dresden, and Francesco Conti. Music of the courts, as Evelyn described it ‘the most magnificent & expensfull diversion’.

I hadn’t previously spotted the eighteenth-century street sign attached to the wall of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, which reads ‘This is Baynes Street 1746‘, erected presumably just after the completion of the bell foundry, which took over the so-called Artichoke Inn in 1743, when the Daily Advertiser announced the availability of the lease of The Old Artichoke Alehouse. It’s not even the oldest street sign in Whitechapel:-

I went on a small pilgrimage this morning to see the Whitechapel Bell Foundry with an ardent visiting campanologist. I had learned something of the interest and enthusiasm of campanologists for the fons et origo of bells all over the world, but I hadn’t known that there are 80,000 bell ringers in Britain alone, that they have their own magazine Ringing World, and that they are all as upset as I am at the sale of the Bell Foundry and the loss of its deep rooted skills and historic traditions.

They all hope, as I do, that Robert Jenrick, if he is reappointed Secretary of State as he well may be, will intervene to find a creative solution to its future:-

By a strange coincidence (or maybe it wasn’t), there was a long programme on Gombrich’s life last night on Radio 3 in which his grand-daughter talks about the archive: his time in impoverished Vienna in the 1920s where his father, Karl Gombrich, was a lawyer (‘interfering in other people’s affairs’); his upbringing as a Protestant; the growth of anti-semitism; his long and intellectually formative friendship with Karl Popper; his passionate interest in music, in some ways more than art, which he looked at intellectually; arriving in London as a research assistant at the Warburg Institute; monitoring enemy broadcasts in Evesham and developing an interest in the gestalt; turning down a job at the Albertina: dictating The Story of Art; his view of himself as a central European intellectual, his interest in the question of explanation and his belief in the inadequacy of explanations. Above all, it was good to hear his voice, cautious, burred, heavily accented, but with great intellectual authority.

Last night I went to a seminar/discussion on the life and work of Ernst Gombrich, the Director of the Warburg Institute from 1959 to 1976, by his two grandchildren, Leonie, who looks after his literary estate, and Carl, who is himself an interdisciplinary historian crossing the boundaries of the arts and sciences.

Two things stick in my mind. The first was Gombrich’s determination not to be described as an art historian, but as a historian tout court. This was a Warburg tradition, the belief that art was only one part of a broader cultural tradition; and he was certainly not, in any way, a connoisseur, the dominant characteristic of art history in the 1950s.

The second was his determination not to be regarded as a refugee, having arrived in London in 1936 of his own volition before the anschluss to join the staff of the Warburg Institute as a research assistant, working on Warburg’s papers, which led ultimately to the publication of Gombrich’s intellectual biography of Warburg, written in spite of Gombrich’s own dislike of biography as a genre.

So, we wake up to a different country: blue across great swathes of the north of England; the Conservatives the new party of the working classes and Labour apparently now only representing cities, universities, the young; Anglesey is now conservative; Emma Dent Coad has lost: so has Jo Swinson; running through the results, Conservative gains in all sorts of unlikely places, including Sedgefield. The world has been turned upside down.

I have been castigated for describing Jeremy Corbyn as ‘without obvious political passion’. It is true that I have watched him in full political flow speaking against the Iraq War, but on television during the election campaign, I found him oddly dry and unwilling to attack Johnson effectively as he so easily could, and should have: most especially in describing his own position on Brexit which seems to be a natural sympathy for opponents of Brexit and a visceral, traditional Bennite hostility to the neoliberalism of the EU, whilst at the same time wanting to defend the EU’s stance on wages and its internationalism. If this is indeed his position, why couldn’t he bring himself to say so, particularly when attacked by Johnson ? I didn’t mean to suggest that he doesn’t have deep-rooted political beliefs, because he obviously does, just not as effective as he needed to be in expressing them.