I have spent the day reading Andy Beckett’s very lively analysis of the early 1980s, Promised You a Miracle UK80-82, my Christmas present from Otto. I find it odd to read an analysis of a period I lived through. Some of it is familiar: Chariots of Fire; the success of Brideshead Revisited; Greenham Common; the Royal Wedding; the Sloane Ranger Handbook; the New Romantics; the rise of individualism; the Right to Buy; the invasion of the Falklands. But I don’t remember anyone being especially worried about the threat of nuclear war. What I remember most vividly was sitting in south London watching the 1979 election and two friends describing, extremely cogently and much to my surprise, why they hoped that Thatcher would win.
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Spitalfields Trust
In honour of my visit to Norton Folgate, we watched an archival programme, dating from 1985, about the middle-class settlers in Spitalfields. It shows Dennis Severs expounding his philosophy of historical reconstruction, Dan Cruickshank describing the original circumstances of construction of Elder Street, and Eric Elstob talking about moving into Fournier Street, but, best of all, it has Douglas Blain describing the origins of the Spitalfields Trust, which involved a squat in Elder Street in 1977 and the occupation of the offices of British Land until they allowed the sale of two of the original Elder Street houses. Blain says that one day people will be grateful for the work of the Spitalfields Trust in preserving historic properties. We are, Douglas, we are.
Fournier Street
I know I’ve done blogs on Fournier Street before, but I still can’t resist photographing its beautiful, still surviving door surrounds and remembering that this part of Spitalfields, now as lush and prosperous as a New England village, wasn’t necessarily going to survive forty years ago:-
Christ Church, Spitalfields (1)
I spent part of Christmas reading Owen Hopkins’s admirable short monograph From the Shadows: The Architecture and Afterlife of Nicholas Hawksmoor, which made me look afresh at Christ Church, Spitalfields in the light of his very clear account of the way that Hawksmoor was influenced by the interest of his eccelesiastical contemporaries in the churches of the Primitive Christians, which may have given Hawksmoor some of his characteristics of bold, unornamented, structural clarity:-
Elder Street
In order to understand the nature of the argument surrounding the development of Norton Folgate, it is important to see it in the context of Elder Street, one of the best of the surviving Spitalfields streets, where Mark Gertler lived and later Raphael Samuel and now Dan Cruickshank. The city looms nearby. But there is still a domestic presence resisting the incursion:-
Norton Folgate
I have managed to miss out on the arguments surrounding the redevelopment of Norton Folgate, an area of semi-derelict warehouses on the edge of Spitalfields. So, on a sunny post-Christmas morning, I decided to investigate. Blossom Street is an unexpected cobbled street leading up north from Dennis Severs’s house in Folgate Street and is lined on its eastern side by a series of still surviving, well preserved, but currently unused industrial warehouses. The City and Bishopsgate are within spitting distance. It’s easy to see the development potential: another big office block. But equally easy to see why the development has been resisted and alternative plans put forward for the renovation of the warehouses.
These are the warehouses:-
Christmas Film
Happy Christmas
I am writing to wish all the readers of my blog a Happy Christmas, to thank you for your loyalty to it through the course of the year, for the nice comments made the day before yesterday when you may have thought I was switching off, and my one lone reader in Japan who unfailingly logs in. I am posting a view out of the window last weekend (the windows need cleaning) with my best wishes:-
RA Library
Not my last blog of the year, but the last from the RA where I have had the rare pleasure of working in the library, using the wonderful resource of the early manuscript Minutes of Council and General Assembly, some of the surviving manuscripts, including Fuseli’s draft notes of his lecture about Leonardo’s Last Supper, and a host of early printed books, which are available as they were, more or less in the same form, to the early students:-
Dean Street
My last formal meeting of the year was held in the new Soho House for a change (I am not a member). It gave me a chance to check that the last remaining rococo shopfront, dating from 1791, remains intact on a stationers and newsagents at No.88, Dean Street:-
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