I have been sent a copy of Libby Purves’s exceptionally sensible and level-headed article in this morning’s Times, which I was for some reason able to read online (We squander our heritage in wasteful demolitions (thetimes.co.uk).

It puts the case very clearly. Not everyone loves the existing Marks and Spencer building in Oxford Street, but this is no reason to knock it down. Most people, especially the next generation of young architects, accept that we need to change our views towards wasteful and unnecessary demolition, but not apparently Marks and Spencer, who have been jubilant at the recent decision of the high court, which I hope may have alienated some of their customers.

I have been reading the absolutely excellent and illuminating book by Amy Thomas, The City in the City: Architecture and Change in London’s Financial District, recently published and beautifully produced by MIT Press. 

It helps to explain a lot about the radical changes in the architecture of the City in recent decades: essentially since Big Bang when the City’s traditional ways of working which were were conservative, allowed time for long lunches and were based on trust were replaced by a much more aggressive, testosterone fuelled style of trading requiring the exchange of information on huge, self-contained trading floors. 

I am sure I am over-simplifying, but it obviously helps to explain the eruption of big, aggressive, free-form buildings which pay no attention to, in fact, deliberately look down on, the existing more traditional streets of the City.

There are questions, however, which are perhaps inevitably unanswered because of the timing of the book.

The first is what exactly happened – if anything – post the 2008 crash. 

The new style of buildings post-2008 is more anonymous.  The great skyscrapers are over 50 stories high and  accommodate shops and gyms within the building, so that workers never have to go out on to the street. 

But do people actually like this style of working ?  If all work can be done on a laptop, why not sit in a café or at home, rather than in an anonymous open-plan office, as people learned to do during COVID ? 

The fourth chapter ends with a question. ‘As real estate strategists and their clients begin to decrease their real estate holdings, and as desks disappear from offices and resurface in co-working hubs, cafes, snugs, and sitting rooms, the question is: What value does the City have in a digital, postpandemic (not to mention post Brexit) world ?’ (p.297)

This presumably helps to explain the current orgy of destruction and the City’s willingness to disobey its own code of practice with 75 buildings in the City currently scheduled for redevelopment.

The book shows very clearly that the culture of the City can, and has, changed very fast in the past. 

Maybe it has done so again and we are only just waking up to its consequences.

We went to lunch at Arlington, Jeremy King’s new restaurant – actually, also his old restaurant, formerly the Caprice.  It could not have been nicer.  The thing which was striking is how well Eva Jiřičná’s luxurious, polished interiors have worn after more than forty years.  And Jeremy himself was there as we arrived, the best possible host as ever, making sure that everything is in immaculate order.  The only person who was missing was Tony Snowdon who always insisted on eating there, even though the photographs are by David Bailey.

A great treat.

I went on a tour of UCL Marshgate, the vast new building constructed on the opposite side of the river from Zaha Hadid’s Olympic swimming pool:-

It is designed to be open to use by the local community, although accessibility is not the first characteristic that came to mind.  Impressive, certainly.  It is education on an industrial scale.  5,000 students.  Cross-disciplinary.  No books (books have to be ordered from Bloomsbury).  The brief specified no lecture theatre as public lectures are dead, although this changed during construction.  It only opened in September, so it is only running in.  Beautiful in the abstract and only the first of a series of buildings for UCL at the south end of Olympic Park:-

It has taken me a long time to realise how surprisingly nice the Barbican is as a place to explore beyond its arts centre, full of unexpected views and gardens visible from its pedways:-

I spent the morning exploring the area round the old Museum of London, which is now scheduled for demolition if the City of London planning committee gives the Corporation of London permission to demolish the building, although this would seem to be contrary to its own recently issued planning advice to retain existing buildings where possible.

I don’t think I had appreciated how complex a site Powell & Moya were given for the Museum of London, some of it the space on top of a roundabout:-

It was required to occupy a narrow site south of the tudorbethan Ironmonger’s Company:-

What I had never experienced before is the strange charm of the lawn to its east, the Barber-Surgeon’s meadow, a small oasis in the heart of the city with a surviving fragment of an old Roman fort:-

Presumably much of this will disappear in the plans for its redevelopment, along with Bastion House, which the City authorities say is falling down:-

The last museum I planned to include in my survey of art museums since the Second World War (actually since the foundation of the Museum of Modern Art) was the new MOMA, as redesigned by Diller Scofidio + Renfrew, which re-opened in late 2019.  I planned to visit it in April 2020 and had made all the necessary arrangements, but then COVID came.  I’ve not been to New York since.

I was looking up comments on it – there are remarkably few that I have been able to find, apart from the usual bland puffs which appear when a new museum opens – when I came across by the purest accident a review of my book which I had forgotten.

I am putting it on to my blog as a way of thanking the author, but it comes with a request: what has been the response to the new version of MOMA ? 

https://connectwith.art/art/books/book-review-the-art-museum-in-modern-times/

I was very glad to have been able to hear the talk by Dan Pearson (landscape) and Mary Duggan (architect) on their joint plans for Lambeth Green next to the Garden Museum.  I was involved in the second stage of the architectural selection.  Two things struck me: how much the plans had evolved since the competition through discussion and collaboration, so that the scheme feels more organic and less purely architectural, a symbiosis of walls and planting and garden sheds/pavilions; the second was how large the space now seems between the church and the roundabout and how much will be achieved by a thoughtful intervention into an otherwise somewhat arid area of tower blocks, the road, and the fortified, medieval entrance gate of Lambeth Palace.

https://gardenmuseum.org.uk/events/talk-dan-pearson-mary-duggan-on-lambeth-green/

The current planning system, and particularly the protection of historic buildings, seems to be a shambles.

After a lengthy public debate as to whether or not it was sensible for Marks & Spencer to pull down their landmark building and replace it with an extremely indifferent office block, it went to a lengthy planning enquiry and Michael Gove as Secretary of State – very unusually – refused permission.  But now Marks & Spencer have got the High Court to overturn the Secretary of State’s decision.  What an incredible mess !  And what a waste of public money.

Does the Secretary of State not have proper legal advice ?

The real estate sector may breathe a sigh of relief.  But it reduces efforts to encourage re-use of buildings to rubble as M&S pour the most grotesque and ugly scorn on issues of public opinion and climate change.

https://www.dezeen.com/2024/03/01/marks-spencer-oxford-street-demolition/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Dezeen&utm_content=Daily%20Dezeen+CID_f48041dcea57c75e00c1ae99f324f7cd&utm_source=Dezeen%20Mail&utm_term=Marks%20%20Spencer%20wins%20rights%20to%20demolish%20Oxford%20Street%20flagship

A very brilliant and informative lecture by Thomas Marks about Elizabeth David and her (mostly postal) relationship with Lett Haines, Cedric Morris’s partner at Benton End.  It helped to humanise Benton End, now stripped of its contents, with so many photographs of the kitchen, including the cooker (very basic), the refrigerator, and detailed menus of what they ate.  It seemed surprisingly sybaritic for the 1950s, but then there was apparently a very good delicatessen in Dedham, as well as a good butcher in Hadleigh.  Maggi Hambling made the soup.

Slightly surprisingly, she left her library of cookery books to the Warburg Institute in 1992.  They are mostly on the fourth floor under Banqueting, apparently well thumbed and with her book plate inside.