I have now been sent an image of a watercolour of the new Unilever House, as done by James Lomax Simpson, its original architect and (unusually for an architect) a Board member of Lever Brothers. It’s dated 1929. Note the Lux wagon parked outside:-
With kind permission from Unilever Plc, from an original held in Unilever Archives
I started the day with a meeting with the Head of Records of Unilever who gave me a booklet about the history of Unilever House. It was built on the site of the gardens of Bridewell Palace, which, in 1553, was given to the City of London as a workhouse. In the early nineteenth century, there was a gasworks between Bridewell Prison and the river. The gasworks closed in 1873 and De Keyser’s Hotel opened on the site the following year to serve continental travellers from Blackfriars Station. The hotel was in turn requisitioned in the first world war as the headquarters of the Royal Flying Corps and was acquired as the headquarters of Lever Bros. in 1924. But the hotel was inadequate to the task and the old building was demolished in 1930, the year that Unilever was established, to make way for the new company headquarters.
I have only just discovered that Anthony Bryer, my first cousin by marriage, died on Saturday. He was a big figure in my childhood – teaching at Birmingham University, living in Harborne, a deeply erudite Byzantinist and great authority on Trebizond. Each year he organised an International Symposium of Byzantine Studies which was a mixture of scholarship and showbiz and was mistrusted by the profession for the same reason that Steven Runciman was mistrusted for being too worldly. We spent Christmas 1976 with him in Dumbarton Oaks, alone with a fridge full of frozen food and twisted cigars which he had bought in the local supermarket. Bryer, as he was always known in the family, was much in my mind as I read the Runciman biography as he is quoted as a friendly critic of Runciman’s more esoteric Byzantine scholarship.
It’s probably a benefit to Hastings that it is so hard to get to, although there has been talk about upgrading the line for as long as I remember. It means that it has retained a great deal of its seaside shabbiness – the peeling stucco in Wellington Square and the junk shops in the Old Town. I like it:-
I went down to the Jerwood Gallery for lunch because I wanted to see its exhibition of 100 Modern British Artists which shows off the best of two collections of Modern British Art, the Jerwood and the Ingram. I was pleased to see that there is a policy of indicating whether or not the artists were RAs and that the great majority were – Dod Procter as well as Laura Knight, Glyn Philpot, William Roberts, the landscape artists of the 1950s, John Aldridge, Tristram Hillier (a very good artist represented by a particularly memorable Crucifixion) and Richard Eurich, through to Carel Weight, the now too forgotten guru of the RCA, and Mary Fedden. There is a presumption, fostered by the Bloomsbury Group and not helped by Alfred Munnings, that the RA in the mid-twentieth century was hopelessly reactionary, but this exhibition does much to refute this, showing a great deal of work influenced by surrealism and social realism, as well as the neo-romantics.
I have been mourning the possible closure of Walsall Art Gallery, which was one of the great beacons of cultural revival in the late 1990s, made possible by the lottery, one of the first works by Adam Caruso and Peter St. John, invented and presided over by Peter Jenkinson, bringing art out of major metropolitan areas into ex-industrial towns. I remember travelling to it on a small branch line from Birmingham with a group of Japanese tourists and admiring its stately entrance hall and upstairs galleries. So what has gone wrong ?
We had the annual visit last night from history students at Queen Mary who come to see our house as part of a course in eighteenth-century domestic life. I never feel that it is completely satisfactory as an example because the house is a composite and, to an extent, a replica, built in the early 1740s by a local builder on the site of a much larger house owned by Archibald Hutcheson, a crypto-Jacobite. But in 1854 Samuel Briggs cut an archway through the middle of the house to convert it into a carriage works, so that for most of the twentieth century you could drive through it and, before we bought it, it was an exhaust pipe garage. So, it is better as an example of the changing social fortunes of Stepney than it is of how to live in an eighteenth-century way.
I went for a brisk walk on Martinsell to enjoy the great natural amphitheatre overlooking Wootton Rivers and the woods which have grown up along the earthworks of the Iron Age fort:-
It was the weekend of our annual visit to Oare, normally in the height of the summer, but this year in the autumn, with a multitude of rare varieties of apple, the herbacious borders past their best, the trees in the avenue a brilliant orange, and pumpkins piled up for Halloween. Each year we admire the greenhouses, the immaculate range of tools hanging in the potting shed and the compost bed, and this year the apples and onions all classified in boxes. Going round the garden, we were able to refer to a printed catalogue which details every tree and plant, where it was acquired and when it was planted, which even I, as a non-horticulturalist, admired.
After a week of discussion about the decision to axe art history, it has become clear that it was not a direct decision of government (Gove has denied responsibility and Cameron has claimed that it was his favourite subject), but instead was decided by AQA on grounds of the cost and difficulties of administering the exam: in which case it is surely the responsibility of the Chief Executive of AQA to find a way of examining the subject in a way that is manageable; and the responsibility of the current government to make sure that this is done.
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