We went for a meeting with LVMH which began in the exhibition on the history of Louis Vuitton at the Grand Palais, drawn from its archive of trunks. It could have been a bit dry, but was animated by being curated by Olivier Saillard, the director of the Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris, included relevant fashion, and was designed by Robert Carsen, who has created a series of intelligently theatrical installations:-
I have been sent a link by Tom Stuart-Smith to an article in Nature which suggests on the basis of a study in Toronto that proximity to trees is worth the equivalent of an extra $10,000 a year in terms of quality of life (what they call the cardio-metabolic condition). I thought of this research yesterday morning as I walked across Hyde Park to the dentist and felt my spirits lift in the Spring sun (11 trees per city block is worth $20,000):-
Years ago, when we were staying in Los Altos hills in California on the southern perimeter of San Francisco, we were taken to vìsit a local winery called Ridge. Since then I have always kept my eye out for their wines, although seldom been able to afford them, not least because, to my knowledge, they are only available from a wine merchant in Southwold and our local branch of the Bottle Apostle. So it was a pleasure when attending an event last night to celebrate – and consume – some of the world’s greatest wines to find that, in between the Louis Roederer champagne and the Chateau Lafite Rothschild, the main course was introduced by Hugh Johnson as being accompanied by Ridge Monte Bello Cabernet Sauvignon 1991.
We had a site visit of our building project this morning with Sir Peter Luff, the chairman of Trustees of the Heritage Lottery Fund. It’s interesting seeing the project through the eyes of its biggest funder and someone who has not previously seen the site. Even I was impressed by the scale of it: 100 people working on site, what is said to be the largest temporary roof structure in Europe, deep excavations to create new art handling facilities, the floor removed to create the new gallery behind the main staircase. Every time I go round there is more to be seen, more change, and more of a sense of a radical transformation of the building and of the site as a whole, particularly in the areas behind-the scenes in Burlington House.
This is the crane:-
In wandering around Aldgate at the weekend, I was struck by the ambiguity of it as a neighbourhood: forever on the threshold of the City; in the eighteenth century, bounded by the walls of the city to the north of Bevis Marks and Poor Jury Lane, intersected by Leaden Hall and Fenchurch Street. As pbmum, one of my correspondents, has pointed out, it used to be known as Gardiner’s Corner after a large neo-baroque department store at the junction of Whitechapel High Street and the Commercial Road (opposite the tube station) which sold clothes to mariners, from socks to an Admiral’s Hat. Now the boundary of the City is moving eastwards with huge new office buildings crowding out the old roundabout. What is odd and impressive is the way Petticoat Lane and the Sunday morning market survive, but only just, weaving their way northwards from the tube station nearly to Liverpool Street:-
I found myself attending the announcement of the winner of this year’s Keynes Prize in Keynes’s library in 47, Gordon Square (he actually lived in number 46, but bought the house next door for his books). The prize was only started last year, but already feels grandly honorific. Last year, it was won by Amartya Sen. So, the question in everyone’s mind was whether or not there was anyone of comparable international intellectual significance. The winner is Tim Berners-Lee. An email was read out in which Berners-Lee extolled the significance of the worldwide web as a vehicle for the freedom of expression. It felt like a good result.
I have not been following in detail the controversy surrounding the proposed closure of the Sir John Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design, but have been encouraged to do so by Bob and Roberta Smith, a stalwart campaigner on its behalf.
Cass himself was a great east end philanthropist, a Tory MP, sheriff, master of the Carpenter’s Company and a Commissioner for the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches. There’s a statue of him in the Guildhall and a monument in St. Botolph’s:-
I thought I should go and see the Annie Leibovitz exhibition at Wapping Pumping Station for old time’s sake (my first exhibition at the NPG was of her Portraits in 1994) and also to see the interior of the old pumping station whilst it is still extant and semi-open to public view. It has lost none of its old industrial glory, built in 1890 by the London Hydraulic Power Company:-
I’ve never quite got to grips with Rotherhithe, but this morning walked through it along the Thames Path on the way to the Saturday morning market in Spa Terminus. St. Mary Rotherhithe, where the Mayflower was moored before setting sail in 1620, was rebuilt by John James in 1714 in a much less ornate style than the Hawksmoor churches north of the river:-
I went to the opening of the new Heong Gallery in Downing College, Cambridge, partly because I was keen to see the new gallery space in the old Edwardian stables, later turned into bicycle sheds and now adapted into a well-judged gallery space by Adam Caruso of Caruso St. John; and, equally, to see and admire its first exhibition of works from the collection of Sir Alan Bowness, the former Director of the Tate, inventor of the Turner Prize, son-in-law of Barbara Hepworth and, like Michael Baxandall, a graduate of Downing (he read modern languages). The gallery space is austere and quite minimal, not just in its scale, with a steeply pitched roof light and dark encaustic tiles. Bowness’s collection is, as one would expect, strong in the St. Ives School – Lanyon, Scott, Terry Frost, a particularly beautiful Patrick Heron. Then there’s a Kitaj, who he describes as sharing an anarchist background, not how I think of either of them.
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