We arrived at dusk, driving down the Churnet Valley, with banks full of bluebells and wild garlic.   The station itself is castellated Italianate, opened in July 1849 and presumed to have been desogned by Henry Arthur Hunt, the architect for the North Staffordshire Railway, which ran alongside the river and brought day trippers out from the Potteries to visit Alton Towers:-

We had already arranged to go and see Patrick Kinmonth’s fashion exhibition in Chatsworth, but being in the neighbourhood, gave ourselves a sneak preview.   The state rooms on the second floor have all been blackened out in order to provide a theatrical installation of the ball gowns and state apparel of the Victorian Dukes, interspersed with the extravagant fashion outfits worn by Stella Tennant when she was a model:-

I preferred the gloomy Roman portrait busts:-

I was pleased to see the accounts of the second Duke’s grand tour in 1689 to 1691 as he travelled down through Germany, presumably to keep out of the way of events back home, while Chatsworth was being built:-

I liked the stiff collars of the eighth Duke:-

And it’s always a treat to see the Chapel, with its rich reredos, with a figure of Justice by Caius Gabriel Cibber:-

Last stop on our Staffordshire tour was St. Giles, Cheadle, Pugin’s ‘perfect revival of an English parish church of the time of Edward I’, commissioned by the Earl of Shrewsbury and full of incense, encaustic tiles and polychromatic decoration:-

We spent yesterday going round Stoke-on-Trent with a very knowledgeable local guide who knew and was able to tell us the whole history of the Six Towns – their origins in sixteenth-century coal mining, the beginnings of pottery making in the 1680s, the still rural character of the industry in the eighteenth century (there was a model of Etruria in the Stoke Museum with worker’s housing alongside the factory and the canal), the municipal grandeur of the civic administration in the nineteenth century and the amalgamation of the Six Towns in 1910.   This seems to have led to the progressive collapse of the industry, following the passing of the Clean Air Act, with absentee proprietors, slum clearance after the war and increasing conservatism in design.

But I can’t post any photographs until I have access to wifi.

For good measure, I’m posting a few photographs I took last night of the streets round Fournier Street as I wandered back to Aldgate East:-

I was on my way yesterday to see the new exhibition of work by Anthony Eyton RA and Julie Held in the newly built gallery behind Eleven Spitalfields.   Much as I admire Eyton’s work – the fact that he still goes out and paints every day aged 94 – I was also impressed by the installation by Clarisse d’Arcimoles in which she has painstakingly recreated the front room of an impoverished Irish hairbrush maker, as shown in a photograph of 1902.

This is the photograph:-

And this is the reconstruction:-

Before the discussion in the Comments section goes any further, I wish to declare – and have on other occasions – my deep and abiding admiration for the writings of W.G. Sebald.   I first came across The Rings of Saturn in the Travel Bookshop (I have long misrembered it as the Norfolk section of Stanford’s Map Shop in Long Acre).   I was so impressed by its qualities of deep rumination about history, memory and the past that I asked Robert McCrum, the then books editor at the Observer, if I could write about Austerlitz on its publication (https://www.the guardian.com/books/2001/sep/30/travel.highereducation).   I have looked the review up to remind myself of what I thought and felt when I first came across his writings and it is – rightly – a long eulogy, half written in the style of Sebald himself.   So, I have been influenced not just by Sebald’s style – the long rambling sentences – but also by his awareness and understanding of the relationships between people, places and history. 

One of my deepest regrets is that the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery turned down a commissioned portrait of Sebald by Michael Sandle and I have been trying to persuade the University of East Anglia – so far unsuccessfully – to commission him retrospectively.

If by any chance you’re interested, I’ve just been tipped off how to locate the programme I recorded a couple of months ago with several current residents of Spitalfields, including Dan Cruickshank, Marianna Kennedy, who lives in Fournier Street, the printmaker, Adam Dant, who lives in Club Row, and Tim Whittaker who runs the Spitalfields Trust.   It’s not straightforward to find.   You go to https://www.mixcloud.com/Resonance/ and enter Charles Saumarez Smith.   The programme is almost entirely about the politics of conservation, beginning with the battle to preserve Elder Street from its destruction by British Land in the mid-1970s, the establishment of the Spitalfields Trust in 1977, the gradual gentrification of Fournier Street, to the more recent battles over Spitalfields Market, Bishopsgate Yard and, most recently, Norton Folgate.   It’s a bit messy because it was unscripted and recorded live, but not necessarily the worse for that.

I’m sure that Fournier Street has featured plenty of times in my blog before.   It certainly appears in the book.   But I normally see it on winter mornings when the sun falls on the houses on the north side.   Tonight, I saw houses on the south side lit up by the evening sun, including Hawksmoor’s Rectory, commissioned as a minister’s house in July 1725.   It was originally expected to cost £800, was £1,000 a year later, and ended up costing £1,456 8s. 10d. by the time it had been completed in 1729.   Next door was Marmaduke Smith’s house, the largest in the street, lived in when I first knew it by Michael Gillingham.   The fine door case is from No. 14, known as Howard House and built for William Taylor, a ‘carpenter and gentleman’, then leased by weavers, Signeratt and Bourdillon-

I have spent a disproportionate amount of time this week meeting people for early moding breakfasts at The Ned, Nick Jones’s staggeringly opulent conversion of the old headquarters of the Midland Bank, bang in the heart of the City and within walking distance of our offices in Blackfriars.   It was apparently designed in 1924 and only opened in 1939, the last blast of the old Empire, the banking hall dominated by a forest of grand green African marble columns.   It’s also a monument to the pre-war Royal Academy, designed by Edwin Lutyens, who was President from 1938 to 1944, having been elected in 1913, and sculpture by Sir William Reid Dick, who was elected an ARA in 1921 and only died in 1961:-