I walked past Smithfield Market yesterday and stopped to admire Horace Jones’s great cast iron buildings (he also designed Leadenhall and Billingsgate). It opened in 1868, although the area had been used as London’s major livestock market since the twelfth century at least. Smooth field as it was known:-
I had a meeting yesterday in an office which overlooks the north transept of St. Paul’s. I have always thought of St. Paul’s as a cool, rather rational building, the product of Wren’s abstract and mathematical mind (see the biography by Lisa Jardine which is as much about him as a scientist as an architect). But seen up close it is pure Roman baroque, devoted to the glories of post-Fire reconstruction and the grandiosity of late seventeenth-century London’s commercial success:-
I have always found the Temple insuperably confusing, apart from the tube station. Where does the Inner Temple become the Middle Temple ? Who has chambers where and what is their pecking order ? How much of it is original (not much) and how much postwar reconstruction ? But now that I have to go back and forth between Blackfriars and Piccadilly several times a week, I am gradually learning my way around. The bit I like best is King’s Bench Walk which at least looks original, not a neo-Georgian pastiche. No. 4 is said to be by Wren (do I believe this ?) and was built after the fire of 1677 (no, that is not a misprint):-
In clearing out the sculpture store in the basement of Burlington Gardens, our collections staff discovered a cache of papers described as Artists’ Memorabilia. They alerted our archivist. It included the Roll of Obligation of the Society of Artists, the antecedent body which broke up in a succession of disputes as to how it was run, prompting a small group of four, led by William Chambers, going to see George III to establish the Royal Academy. The Roll of Obligation hasn’t been seen or known to scholars since the 1920s. It includes Chambers’s name and those of all the rebels scratched out in high dudgeon when they left the Society. Reynolds’s name is a long way down the list:-
Gainsborough is higher up:-
We celebrated the start of building work in Burlington Gardens last week with a performance tonight by the two person performance group, Carnet de Voyage. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. It was a combination of classical music, piano and jazz, arranged and performed by Rosey Chan and Mimi Xu to a backdrop of short films by Mike Figgis, who also played the trumpet. The idea was to demonstrate that it is possible to devise new conventions in performance and the relationship between the arts and that anything is possible in the new building.
I happened to be walking past the old Fountain Restaurant underneath Fortnum and Masons this evening and discovered that it was the first night of its new incarnation as 45 Jermyn Street, ultra smart and posh traditional, by Martin Brudnizki, the Swedish designer who did Scotts on Mount Street, has totally transformed the fortunes of the Royal Academy’s Academician’s Room, and has now radically changed the old haunt of afternoon tea and knickerbocker glories:-
I have just been listening to Peter Hennessy talk about the loss of Lisa Jardine on the Today programme. I saw her for the last time on Friday. It was unspeakably sad to see someone who was always so wonderfully and life enhancingly funny and ebullient with the life nearly completely drained away. I sat with her and thought of all the many times I had seen her over the years: how furious she was with me when she was not made a Trustee of the National Gallery; how helpful she was when I was thinking of leaving the National Gallery; sitting in the garden at home and her talking about her father. Thinking also about her contributions to scholarship, her work on Francis Bacon, her biography of Wren and the Royal Society, on Anglo-Dutch cultural relations. She was a force of nature.
I walked past the Palm Tree, our nearly local pub, although I’ve never actually been into it, and admired the view through the window, some of the architectural detailing and the eponymous palm trees in the park next door. It’s the last house left standing in Mile End Park. Pubs seem to have had a preservation order when Rachel Whiteread’s House on Grove Road, just north of the railway track, did not:-
I could scarcely bring myself to record the appearance of Victoria Park today because it was so ostentatiously, flamboyantly and nearly nauseatingly autumnal, like some scene of the Fall in western Massachusetts which I’ve always thought was to be avoided. But in the end, amateur photographer that I am, I succumbed to a couple of shots:-
I walked down Stepney Green this morning, thinking (correctly) that it would look good in the morning autumn sun, including number 37, the local Manor House, originally built in 1690 for Dormer Shepherd, an East India Company sea captain, then owned by Mary Gayer, and by the Council after the war:-
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