We had a screening this evening of Bruno Wollheim’s admirable documentary about the work of the late John Golding as a painter:  showing how his success as a writer and teacher deflected him from turning properly to being a painter until he had an exhibition in the early 1970s at the Rowan Gallery;  how he gave up teaching at the Courtauld in the expectation that he could support himself through the sale of his art;  but how the exhibition at the Royal Academy ‘New Spirit in Painting’ in 1981 turned the art market away from abstraction towards figuration.   There was much lively discussion after the showing of the film as to whether or not it showed Golding accurately.   The answer is that it’s not a film about him as a writer or curator, but about his art.

I have been reading Dan Cruickshank’s fat new book on Spitalfields, which is stuffed full of recondite information about the area and his fascination for its changing social and architectural character.   It is advertised as ‘TWO THOUSAND YEARS OF ENGLISH HISTORY IN ONE NEIGHBOURHOOD’, but zips through the first millennium and a half at speed until we get to the development of William Wheler’s estate south of the ‘Spittle Field’ by speculative builders in the 1670s, followed not long afterwards by Nicholas Barbon’s development of the nearly adjacent Old Artillery Garden, which produced an area of small houses, already occupied by ‘Weavers and Throsters’.   Alongside the development of cheap housing came the fruit market, which opened in 1684, and Truman’s Brewery, which took over an existing small brewhouse on Brick Lane in 1679 and was already flourishing by the end of the seventeenth century.   He writes particularly well of the huge influx of Huguenots in the late seventeenth century, who came in force as a result of the dragonnades, and brought with them craft skills in the silk industry, a determination to enjoy freedom of worship and to succeed in trade.   It was the prosperity of the small group of master weavers in the next generation which led to the construction of the grand houses in the group of streets immediately behind the church on land owned by two sharp Somerset lawyers, Charles Wood and Simon Michell.   But what is good about Cruickshank’s account is that he is not just interested in the Huguenot grandees in their double-fronted houses in Fournier Street, but also in the artisans and workers who lived in small brick houses in Cock Lane (now Redchurch Street) and Club Row.

I was walking past Centre Point last week after seeing Margy Kinmonth’s film about the Russian Revolution and was struck by its constructivist appearance, still in the top 30 of tall buildings in London, once despised as a work of Richard Seifert (Pevsner described it as ‘coarse in the extreme’) and because it was left unoccupied for so long by Harry Hyams.   It’s now listed, admired by Historic England for its ‘delicately modelled surfaces’, and in the process of conversion from offices to luxury flats:-

The garden is gently dissolving into winter, all burnt orange as the leaves have stayed longer than usual.   I have been watching it out of the windows:-

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I ended up in Dalston, which I don’t really know (and haven’t included in the book), admiring the door pediments in Graham Road:-

The gardens in Fassett Square:-

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I spent the first part of the morning making modest corrections to the latest print-out of my book on East London (what Mark Fisher calls ‘The Book of the Blog’), which is inching its way towards publication in late April.   I am having to think whether or not it amounts to anything more than an incomplete topographical guide – a collection of miscellaneous and unconnected observations of places and buildings.   One of the things which connects it is the Regent’s Canal, stretching both north and south of where we live, an alternative system of transport and communication which one can walk from Limehouse to Islington, but also an alternative community of graffiti, gasometers, river boats and back gardens.   I walked up it to Broadway Market and London Fields, beginning with the stretch next to Queen Mary:-

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I finally made it to a screening of Margy Kinmonth’s film Revolution:  new art for a new world, which she has made in advance of what will presumably be an orgy of commemoration of the Russian Revolution next year, including the Royal Academy’s own exhibition Revolution:  Russian Art 1917-1932, which opens on February 11th.   It gives an incredibly clear and graphic account of the impact of the Revolution on the practice of the arts, including painting, sculpture, graphic design and cinema:  a brief period of Utopian idealism when everything seemed possible, followed by a long period of socialist realism, when the Leningrad Academy resumed its supremacy and many of the artists were sent to the Gulag.   Margy has discovered and interviewed many of the children and grandchildren of the artists which gives an immediacy to the narrative.

I spent part of the morning looking at the way that the RA Schools can develop after the completion of our scheme for Burlington Gardens.   The building is currently a palimpsest:  a layer of Sydney Smirke’s original utilitarian spaces, created by the use of cast iron girders supporting the exhibition galleries above;  then, Norman Shaw coming in as Surveyor in the 1880s and making various changes, as well as adding an extra set of studios at the back;  then a series of mezzanines inserted into the original spaces, thereby cannibalising them.   Many of these accretions can be stripped away:-

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I should have said that I also went last night to see Charlotte Verity’s exhibition in Purdy Hicks, which has left the backstreets of Southwark for a smart new gallery nearly opposite South Kensington tube.   Seeing the pictures in a very crowded room was nearly the worst way of appreciating the quiet and meditative qualities of her pictures of plants and branches in the winter sun, but I have at least been able to enjoy the book which has been produced alongside the exhibition with short tribute essays by Paul Hills and Edmund de Waal and a longer interview.

Going to the opening of the Design Museum in its grand new west London emporium has made me think about its antecedent Boilerhouse Project which was no more than a creative cell in the basement of the V&A where Stephen Bayley held court in a glass office surrounded by piles of magazines.   I have discovered that John Pawson actually designed one of the early exhibitions which I half remember – a big wedge which required one to crouch down in order to see the objects on display.   The other exhibition I remember was an exhibition on Taste in which Stephen had asked various luminaries to select objects representative of their taste.   Alexander Shouvaloff, the then Director of the Theatre Museum, selected Michelin maps.   I hope and assume (actually, I think I know) that someone is documenting its history.