I missed the opening week – actually, I’ve never been – and have instead come with the RA Patrons.

What follows are random observations.

The first pavilion which really caught my attention in the Arsenale was the Italian one, consisting of three artists – Giorgio Andreotta Càlo, Roberto Cuoghi and Adelita Husni- Bey exploring the world of Ernestode Martino’s Il mondo magico, partly because there’s a sense of history, as well as installation:-

I liked the Welsh pavilion by James Richards, partly because it is separate from everything else and I found it by accident exploring the back streets of Castello:-

I expected to like Phyllida Barlow’s installation in the British pavilion, and did:  grand, large-scale, confident, arbitrary, celebratory mess:-

I thought the American work by Mark Bradford was strong.   Maybe it’s because I’m more attuned to the aesthetic.   And the spaces are coherent:-

Overall, there is a strange ambiguity between the idea of national pavilions, constructed with a pre-second world war idea of separate national identities, competing in an art olympics, and, on the other hand, the global themes of film, dystopia, music and migration which are mostly on display.

I left out of my Venice tour, S. Maria dei Derelitti, next door to S. Giovanni e Paolo, because I couldn’t immediately identify it.  I notice the guidebooks are a bit short on eighteenth-century Venice, maybe an inheritance of Ruskinian prejudice that medieval Venice was so fine, but later Venetian architecture no good.   It was the church of the Ospedaletto, with a façade designed by Baldassare Longhena:-

Next door to S. Giovanni e Paolo is the Scuola Grande di San Marco.   More lions:-

I ended up at S. Maria dei Miracoli, a beautiful, nearly perfect, fifteenth-century church from the time of Bellini:-

As so often happens in Venice, I walked much further than I had planned to, drawn by the character of the nondescript streets between the Arsenale and the Giardini, which are a long way in character from the Piazza San Marco.

I went to see the Chiesa di San Pietro di Castello, which annoyingly closed the precise moment I arrived:-

But I enjoyed its cloister:-

There was a lot of washing hung out to dry:-

And I admired the many lions guarding the gates to the Arsenale:-

I wanted to find the Chiesa di San Francesco della Vigna.   But, instead, got lost:-

And ended up in the Campo di SS. Giovanni e Paolo by mistake:-

We had an event last night to celebrate the launch of our now annual Friends’ Week, together with a small, pop-up display of work relating to the life of Hugh Casson PRA, part of a recent gift of his sketchbooks by his three daughters.   Neil Bingham, the Curator of Contemporary Architectural Collections in the Department of Design, Architecture and Digital at the V&A (I forgot to give him his full title) spoke about Casson’s life and work:  how he had been trained as an architect at Cambridge by Kit Nicholson (he wrote a book in the late 1930s called New Sights of London);  worked during the war as a camouflage artist;  and was appointed Director of Architecture at the Festival of Britain when only 38 (he was knighted in 1952).   Bingham made the point that, from the beginning, he was very good at connecting the different factions of architecture, writing as Astragal in the Architects’ Journal.   I think of him as being responsible for the financial sustainability of the RA after being elected President in 1975, founding the Friends in 1977, the Royal Academy Trust in 1981, and its American Associates in 1983 (he liked nothing better than touring America).   But Neil Bingham made the point that he was at least as important as a connector – of people and ideas – being so well connected himself.

Alongside the pleasures of exploring Stoke-on-Trent, I was able to walk up the old railway track which runs beneath Alton Towers by the river and enjoy the banks of bluebells and the field laid out for archery:-

On Sunday morning, we went to see the gardens at Trentham, the ruined Barry house of the Dukes of Sutherland which was demolished in 1911 and of which now only the ruined sculpture gallery and Grand Entrance remain:-

The gardens were maintained for public benefit, with a dance hall, until the proximity of a local colliery led the Sutherlands to transfer its ownership first to the property developer John Broome, when much of the statuary is said to have been removed, and subsequently to the National Coal Board, when it was vandalised.   In 1996, the estate was acquired by St. Modwen’s Properties who have done a great deal to revive it without public funding, following plans drawn up by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan and Tom Stuart-Smith and with planting by Piet Oudolf.   At the far end of the parterre is the copy of Cellini’s Perseus which we borrowed for the Bronze exhibition:-

And on the main road, we stopped to admire Charles Heathcote Tatham’s great, neoclassical mausoleum:-

We finished our day in Stoke-on-Trent by going to visit the Wedgwood Memorial Institute, a wonderful, over-decorated, mid-Victorian building with a mass of terracotta decoration, including the months of the year.   It was funded by public subscription and built on the site of Wedgwood’s second factory before he moved out to Etruria:-

Immediately north is the old town hall – a fine piece of flamboyant Victorian baroque, designed in 1854 by G.T. Robinson:-

Opposite was a neoclassical building which I haven’t been able to identify:-

And we went to see the Middleport Pottery, which was closed, but admired the ruined industrial buildings next door:-

I had been to the Bethesda Chapel;  but was still pleased to see it again – one of the great monuments of Methodism, opened in 1797 for a congregation of 600 after a dispute between the New Methodist Connexion and the Wesleyan Methodist Church, and enlarged in 1819 by J.H. Perkins, the headmaster of Hanley School, to accommodate 2,500:-

The best of the places we went to on our tour of Stoke-on- Trent was the Gladstone Pottery Museum, a beautifully preserved set of old industrial buildings in Longton, one of the Six Towns, some parts of it dating back to 1787 when a pottery first opened on the site.

What came across was the diversity of skills involved in the making of even quite ordonary earthenware, particularly once jiggering and jolleying had been brought in.

We started (wrongly) in one of the bottle oven kilns, filled with saggars:-

Then we went into the Engine House:-

Then, we saw the room in which the saggars were made:-

It reminded me of the terrible loss of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, which likewise shows the processes of early industrial manufacture and the small-scale production and hand skills it involved, vivid and unromanticised.

I have been swotting up on the life of the 16th. Earl of Shrewsbury, who was responsible for the fantastic gothicism of Alton Towers, by reading the relevant chapter of Rosemary Hill’s biography of Pugin.   He only inherited Alton Abbey, as it then was, in 1827 on the death of his uncle, the 15th. Earl, and it was the 15th. Earl who had created a grand picturesque garden, with gothic temples, a pagoda and a reconstruction of Stonehenge, described by John Claudius Loudon in 1833 as ‘the work of a morbid imagination joined to the command of unlimited resources’.   Once, the 16th. Earl had succeeded to the title, he was at the heart of the Catholic revival, a friend of Ambrose Phillipps, patron of Pugin, and commissioned him to add to Alton Towers and to build a great Castle on the other side of the Churnet Valley:-