I read this morning about the recent extension to Lea Bridge Library and thought that I would go and see it. The original library is 1909, funded by Carnegie, a fine bit of municipal classicism:-

Studio Weave have added a pavilion behind it – a place to work and have coffee, a modern-day pavilion:-

It’s nice to find a library so busy and expanding.

I should have recognised that the restoration of Leighton House was inevitably much more complicated than it appears from a brief survey of the press coverage online. In particular, I left out the role of the Friends and their trustees, chaired by Sir David Verey, who have obviously made a big contribution. The HLF gave a grant of £1.6 million in 2018. The total project cost is reported as £9.6 million. So, presumably a big chunk of the difference was made up by private fund-raising and charitable donations, a great achievement for a small organisation. I also assume that there were a lot of specialist advisors as well. These things are never straightforward. I probably should have studied the names of the donors inscribed in the floor more carefully. Anyway, however it was done, it’s a remarkable achievement.

Phew ! Maybe some sanity will be restored to British politics. Like so many, I spent yesterday in a state of anxiety that the Conservative party, or at least a portion of it, might have forgotten why they kicked Johnson out only three months ago and were fantasizing that maybe he was the only person who could win them another election in 2024. But, in the end, reality seems to have won out. 57 of his ministers had resigned because of the appalling incompetence of his leadership, not just the lies, but the laziness and ineptitude. Had all 57 forgotten or decided that there could be a Johnson Mark 2, full of the trustworthiness which he has so signally failed to demonstrate for the last 58 years of his career ?

It’s a great relief.

I have been trying to figure out how it is that the transformation/renovation/restoration of Leighton House has been so successful. Part of it must be financial – one feels that no expense has been spared to get the best result, so a credit to the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea which has overseen and presumably partly financed the restoration. Part of it must be due to judicious oversight on the part of the long-standing Senior Curator, Daniel Robbins, who has overseen two phases of the restoration since 2008. And part of it is a willingness to commission reproduction furniture where the originals are unavailable, including very good new furniture and fittings in the café commissioned from Syrian artisans working with Turquoise Mountain. It looks to me to be a model of good practice, with printed guides to works of art in each of the rooms, excellent and well-informed volunteer guides, and – not insignificant – good disabled access.

We went to the redesigned Leighton House, which has been really beautifully and expensively re-presented, with a new staircase, shop and café to the east added intelligently and in character by BDP, not a firm much associated with sympathetic additions. It used to feel very local authority, not much visited and drab, but has now been done up with funding from the National Heritage Lottery Fund (£9.6 million in toto) – a triumph.

This is Lord Leighton by G.F. Watts:-

Emilie Barrington (she was his next-door neighbour), Portrait of a Girl Seated (c.1885):-

An alcove in the upstairs studio:-

The decoration of the Arab Hall:-

I went to the funeral of my (distant) cousin, Kate Duncan-Jones, who I knew when my parents lived outside Oxford and, also, as the executor of Dame Helen Gardner who had left a portion of her estate to support the acquisition of literary portraits by the National Portrait Gallery. She was in her early thirties when I knew her – tall, a bit shy, slightly ethereal, already a fellow of Somerville where she taught till she retired. The service was held in St. Barnabas, Jericho, wholly appropriately as a monument to the Oxford Movement, very high church as was her grandfather, the Dean of Chichester. (Her grandmother, Caia, was brought up alongside my grandmother, Bee, who was not her sister, but her first cousin, so the kinship was remote):

I’m interested by the new policy of the City to try and attract visitors at the weekend (see below) because, of course, it has done everything in its power over the last ten years to damage, if not destroy, its historical character: big high-rise office blocks loom over the streets blocking out the daylight; they are planning to destroy the old Museum of London building instead of turning it into something exciting; the plans for the future of the Barbican are not exactly reassuring; the Custom House could become something exciting on the riverfront, but there is no evidence of any imagination in the plans for its future.

So, what is Chris Hayward to do to get people back into the City ? I think the key will be the plans for the Barbican to be developed by Allies and Morrison. They should be extended to include the old Museum of London and the area round Smithfield Market. They should involve young architects in developing ideas. They should turn Smithfield Market into a mega-food hall. They should make the Museum of London into a Museum of Photography. They should be imaginative and creative instead of aggressively commercial. But that might require a lobotomy of the City’s planning authority, turning in the opposite direction from the one they have been so actively pursuing.

It’s like Boston in 1980.

https://on.ft.com/3eGm3Mq

We missed Frieze last year, and this year only went to Frieze Masters. We did what we always do – start at Sam Fogg.

Flagellation (c.1450):-

Then saw a Hammershoi, The White Door (1888) at Agnew’s:-

There was an amazing Cosmetics Jar, deaccessioned by the Newark Museum, still with its lending slip at Ariadne:-

A Cosmetic Dish (c.1550 BC):-

And an Inscribed Stele (1st. Century AD):-

A rock crystal and gold reliquary (10th. Century) at Gisele Croës:-

Lucio Fontana, Battaglia (1947) at David Zwirner:-

Amazing Eileen Gray plates (c.1920) at Prahlad Bubbar:-

Then, I stopped recording.

The attached article published online by Apollo spells out the current hope for the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. It will require the various heritage agencies, including Tower Hamlets and Historic England, to come together in support of a plan to reinstate Bell making in the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. It would enable not just the historic fabric of the building to be preserved, but its original use as well, which was what gave it its extraordinary character as a piece of living history, more exciting, I thought, than equivalents like Ironbridge and Styal Mill.

https://www.apollo-magazine.com/whitechapel-bell-foundry-open-market

Am re-posting Oliver Wainwright’s excellent account (see below) as to why Niall McLaughlin’s New Library at Magdalene was the best possible winner of this year’s Stirling Prize, but also because I hadn’t spotted the plaque with the inscription Homo Faber, a recognition that so much of the building’s quality is about the quality of its construction and use of materials, the sense of building for eternity, not just next week.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/oct/13/magdalene-college-cambridge-library-riba-stirling-prize?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other