Having upset people with my rude comment about the King’s Road, I am making reparation by adding some extra good things in Chelsea on my walk from the V&A to Petyt Hall.

The houses in Beaufort Street, looking south towards St. Luke’s:-

St. Luke itself, designed by James Savage in 1820 in pre-ecclesiological Gothic:-

And Argyle House, actually on the King’s Road, by Giacomo Leoni, grandly reticent, with its nicely wonky urns on the façade:-

I’ve never really seen the point of Chelsea – too posh for my taste and the King’s Road long ago turned boring, apart from the Chelsea Arts Club and Green & Stone.   But as I turned off the King’s Road and walked down Glebe Place, I realised that there is still the residue of the old, late nineteenth-century artists’ community with houses by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Philip Webb, a very odd house (no.50) designed by John Lowe in the 1880s, a completely bogus and mis-spelt plaque recording where Alfred Munnings lived, and eighteenth-century houses in Cheyne Row, vestiges of what was once a village:-

On Chelsea Embankment, a lampstand by the Coalbrookdale Iron Foundry (with glimpses of Norman Foster through the trees beyond):-

I went back to see the new Entrance Courtyard at the V&A, having missed its opening.   It’s pretty impressive:  grandly complex geometries inserted elegantly into the old Boilerhouse courtyard of which scarcely a trace remains;  a luxurious black lacquered staircase turning down into the deeply dug exhibition space which currently looks like an empty football stadium before the installation of the autumn Opera exhibition;  and then back by another black lacquered staircase which snakes up to the shop, producing an Escher-like effect, with an interesting light brought down into the basement.   Only one small lift.   What will happen when the lift breaks down ?   Otherwise, it’s all very spacious and impressive, creating good open public, as well as exhibition, space (the café is open till 9), and making it possible to appreciate the quality of Aston Webb’s detailing, newly scrubbed up.  

The hole in the courtyard:-

The view down the entrance staircase:-

Back up:-

The entrance to the Blavatnik Hall:-

Beautiful detailing on the steps:-

And Aston Webb newly revealed:-

I had a slight frisson last night as I was walking across Leicester Square and spotted the top of the Trafalgar Hotel across a huge and vacant building site.   Described by Pevsner as ‘a period piece’, it was designed by Charles Pike & Partners in 1967.   Looks like a survival from Comintern:-

I was able to bide my time before an evening event at the National Gallery not by watching Formula One racing on a big screen, but by admiring the stonework on the façade of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, a church which in theory I know very well having worked in its shadow for thirteen years, but which suffers from over-familiarity, from not being robustly baroque or purely Palladian, and from multiple reproduction in our former colonies.   The church was designed by Iacobi Gibbs ArchiTectus, cost £33,661 16s 7d. and was completed in December 1724, although the inscription carved on the tympanum gives the date as MDCCXXVI:-

I have been waiting for a moment when the sun shines on the north façade of James Pennethorne’s building in Burlington Gardens to celebrate the fact that the scaffolding is at long last coming down, revealing the freshly cleaned and differently coloured stonework as well as the statuary in its newly restored glory.   At which point, it is maybe worth saying that if any of my readers wants to buy association with one of the statues, there are several, including Archimedes, Plato and Goethe, still available:-

I have been fascinated by the comments about Harold Falkner about whom I knew nothing at all, but clearly should have done because he was so important to the preservation of Farnham, Surrey.   He was a child of the town, educated at its grammar school, studied at its School of Art before completing his articles under Reginald Blomfield and lived his whole life there, running his architectural practice from his house in West Street and designing its public swimming baths aged twenty one.   Much of his best work was at Dippenhall on the north west of the town, where he and his brother owned property and where he built a series of idiosyncratic, neo-medieval houses, based on free sketches, using architectural salvage, and free from any interference of bureaucratic controls.

Following the correspondence a week or so ago about the virtues or otherwise of Basil Spence’s Ministry of Justice building, I passed it in the evening light and stopped, if not to admire it, at least to examine its incredible hulk.   It was built not for the Home Office as I’d thought, but as a speculative development to replace an old mansion block.   It was completed in 1976 by which time I thought brutalism had fallen from favour, but remains as a grand monument to its genre with a curious belt like a railway track running round its roofline (they were apparently modelled on medieval Italian fortresses):-

I have been looking at my images of canals which I took this morning – some very standard, one more esoteric.

This is the lower reach of the Limehouse Cut, which was approved by Act of Parliament in 1767 and opened in 1777:-

Then, the first lock on the Regent’s Canal:-

And, finally, the River Lea as it passes the London Stadium:-

I hadn’t come across the firm of Niven and Wigglesworth until I saw their inscription on the Passmore Edwards Sailors Palace at the top end of the West India Dock Road (they also worked on a baroque palace for the Scandinavian Sailors Temperance Home).   I now realise, as Martin Hopkinson has suggested, that they are extremely interesting arts-and-crafts architects.   Like so many of their generation, they were Scots, coming south to find work.   David Niven came from Dundee, was trained at the Royal Academy Schools and worked in the office of Aston Webb.   Herbert Hardy Wigglesworth was born in Belfast before moving to Dundee and, like Niven, was trained in the Royal Academy Schools, while working in the office of Ermest George and Harold Peto.   They presumably joined forces at the RA and became brothers-in-law when Niven married Wigglesworth’s sister, Sarah.   Niven lived in Farnham, Surrey and together they designed a number of timber framed, tudorbethan houses in places like Walton-on-Thames and Byfleet.   After the war, they designed the Hyde Estate in Enfield as Homes for Heroes.   An interesting pair:-