So what I thought was a hoopoe turns out to be a lapwing.

Shows I am an ignoramus when it comes to birds:-

Rather late in the Christmas season, I have caught up with Tim Abraham’s very nice and generous recommendation of my Vanbrugh book in a pre-Christmas post on Engelsberg Ideas (I also enjoyed Dirty Old River).

I am a third of the way through Robin Holloway’s unbelievably magisterial Music’s Odyssey: An Invitation to Western Classical Music, if you want some New Year’s reading:-

Books of the Year 2025 – Engelsberg ideas https://share.google/bG4gBHH2UsMsd2XsL

Another church recently taken on by the Friends of Friendless Churches is St. Twrog is open farmland atmospherically placed on a knoll surrounded by sheep.  We were told it would open at 2.30, but didn’t.

But beautiful nonetheless:-

I hadn’t registered that the Friends of Friendless Churches have recently taken custody of another redundant church in a remote northerly part of Anglesey.

We couldn’t get in, but admired it from outside, surrounded by trees and next door to what used to be the village school:-

The Architecture Foundation has kindly chosen John Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture as one of six books for its Book Week, showing short – well, in my case, not so short – films about what it describes as ‘the best architecture books of the year’.

I hope this will bring the book to the attention to architects as much as architectural historians – and, also, to listeners in the States where it is being published in March, more or less at the same time as the opening of the exhibition at Sir John Soane’s Museum.

Happy Christmas !

Very sad news that Colin Ford, the former Keeper of Film and Photography at the NPG, has died.

He was an incredibly important pioneer of the study of photography, appointed by Roy Strong who, like Colin, recognised that the NPG should study and collect photography. He was at the NPG from 1972 to 1981 when he left to establish the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television at Bradford.

Oddly, he came from nearly exactly the same part of north London as Roy, was at school at Enfield Grammar School, and lived there in Gentleman’s Row.

I am posting an unexpected picture of him as a young man in his memory:-

It’s such a beautiful day today (if only it had been yesterday) that I decided to take my still new bicycle out on a spin to Hackney Wick.  I had been tipped off (see Comments) that Simon Goode who runs the London Centre for Book Arts had produced a pamphlet on the industrial history of Hackney Wick or, as he calls it more properly, Old Ford. 

He kindly supplied me with one of the last remaining copies, located in a cupboard.

I half knew, but only half, that Old Ford conceals a rich industrial history, including, from the south, John Kidd and Co., who manufactured printing ink on a site previously occupied by a seventeenth-century dye-works (‘Bow dye’); H.W. Caslon & Co. which inherited the business first established by William Caslon, the great eighteenth-century typographer:-

and the Britannia Folding Box Company, which made cardboard boxes until it went out of business in 1973.  The building then housed Percy Dalton’s Famous Peanut Company until the London Centre for Book Arts took it on in October 2012:-

Back in October, I went on a very enjoyable and interesting trip to Hastings to see the house extension designed by Hugh Strange which had been short-listed for the Stirling Prize. It did not win (nor did it win the RIBA House of the Year), but I still thought it was impressively thoughtful, representing some of the current tendencies in architecture involving small-scale interventions as much as grand statements.

I wrote about it for the December/January issue of The Critic and the piece has just been posted online:-

https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/december-january-2026/recognition-that-small-is-beautiful/