Category Archives: Uncategorized
Anglesey Coastal Path
I took the day off yesterday to walk the southern stretch of the Anglesey Coastal Path, a stretch from Moel-y-don, down by the Straits of Anglesey, heading westwards, partly along the sea shore, otherwise across fields to the south of the Regency houses which took advantage of the views across to Snowdon. It was a transcendent green:-
The Goring Hotel
I went for dinner for the first time in my life in The Goring Hotel, a whole new experience of the country in London, stuffed full of wedding parties (or maybe it was the Garden Party) and with the opportunity to play croquet on the lawn, odd in its location just near Victoria:-
Fordcombe (2)
I have been puzzling over the group of farm buildings on the road north of Fordcombe as to why I could not find out more about them because it’s a group of such obvious architectural quality (as Marie Willey says, like a photograph from Edwin Smith). The answer is that it is the home farm for Anthony Salvin’s demolished South Park in the parish of Penshurst, not Fordcombe, described by John Newman (rightly) as ‘a wonderfully romantic group by Devey’. It’s romanticism is part original, with a group of seventeenth-century farm buildings, and part self conscious as the work of George Devey, who was trained as a painter by Cotman, marked the beginnings of the vernacular revival.
Farshid Moussavi RA Elect
Realising that I had not seen much work by Farshid Moussavi, a recently elected RA, I called in at the shop she has designed for Victoria Beckham in Dover Street. The doorman looked rightly suspicious as he rolled back the door for me, but it has an intriguing use of a grand sculptural staircase stretching up to the first floor and down to the basement, like the one that Koolhaas did for Prada in New York, together with an angular cross geometry which is extended into the seating. The crossover between fashion and art gallery moves one step closer, not least with a Damien Hirst displayed alongside the clothes.
Conrad Shawcross RA
I walked out into the courtyard of the RA at lunch-time and witnessed the full glory of its invasion by metallic triffids designed and installed by Conrad Shawcross. It’s the prelude to this year’s Summer Exhibition:-
Fordcombe (1)
Just north of Fordcombe on the road to Penshurst there is an old sign advertising the sale of eggs and herbs. One turns off into a farmyard which is magnificently bucolic, disordered in a way which is now rare. We didn’t buy any herbs, but I did take the liberty of photographing it:-
Middle Farm
Over the years we have many times passed Middle Farm just near Charleston on the A272. This year we stopped to stock up. It has grown into a vast capitalist enterprise with every possible variety of food and plant and, most impressively, beer, cider, perry and gin, from specialist suppliers throughout the country, not just Harveys, the local brewers:-
Bohemianism
The last session we were able to attend at Charleston was a discussion on the history of bohemianism, based on Vic Gatrell’s recent book, The First Bohemians: Life and Art in London’s Gokden Age. But the use of the term for eighteenth-century Covent Garden felt wrong. As Gatrell himself admitted, the term derives from the nineteenth century romanticisation of the life of the artist, first used in France in Henri Murger’s Scènes de la Vie Bohème (1845) and, in England, in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848). What Gatrell is writing about is conventional low life which was a matter of necessity, not choice. Fiona McCarthy argued the case for Byron and William Morris being regarded as bohemians. Possibly. Both espoused a version of an alternative lifestyle. Most convincing was Antony Penrose describing the extraordinarily hedonistic life of his father in the south of France alongside Picasso, Man Ray and his mother, Lee Miller.
Silver spoon bohemianism
Charleston Festival (2)
A very varied diet at Charleston today. Sofka Zinovieff and Selina Hastings talked about their upper-class relations – Selina’s father who was the Earl of Hastings and worked in Mexico with Diego Rivera and Sofka’s grandfather, The Mad Boy, who was the lover of Lord Berners. Juliet Stevenson read poetry by Emily Dickinson as orchestrated by Bill Nicholson. A session on ‘The Language of Fashion’ was organised by Justine Picardie. We ended with Benjamin Britten’s Phantasy Quartet followed by a balletic performance inspired by The Waves.
In the intervals, I walked up the track to see the Downs:-
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