It has rightly been pointed out that my post on Jeremy Dixon’s and Edward Jones’s joint lecture last Monday grossly abbreviated their presentations.

What for me came out clearly was that for the first phase of their career, they worked very closely in parallel.  Both trained at the Architectural Association, where both came under the influence of, and made friends with, Bob Maxwell.  They were both members of the so-called ‘Grunt Group’, a pejorative description by Peter Cook which Jeremy particularly dislikes (according to Cook, ‘The grunt of the Grunt Group was ‘a grunt of seriousness and aestheticism (though it had its origins in the actual throatal noise made by some of its members and their generally quiet English manner))’:-

They were both hired by Derek Walker in 1971 to work at Milton Keynes:-

They both (separately) entered the competition for Northampton Town Hall in 1973, which Jeremy won, and then Edward helped with:-

Post-1973, their paths diverged.  There was not much work about, particularly the sort of public projects, including social public housing projects which had been available in the 1960s.  Jeremy worked in partnership with his wife Fenella, initially on smaller-scale housing in west London and then after 1984 on the Royal Opera House after they had been invited by Bill Jack of BDP to enter the competition for the Royal Opera House and won it through a very complex, non-architectural process of competition.  It was a project of large-scale and complex urban design, not helped by the well-mobilised opposition of the local community (the image which was submitted for planning approval is by Carl Laubin):-

Meanwhile, Edward went into teaching (he had a particularly big influence through his teaching in Ireland) and then moved to Canada to work on Mississauga Town Hall before they jointly decided to work together in 1989.

I discovered long ago that it can be invidious to try to separate how they each worked because for the later part of their careers they have worked so closely in partnership that any attempt to differentiate their approach is liable to over-simplification. 

One of the consequences of attending the memorial event for Mark Brockbank last night is that I re-met my old friend, Bill Neave, with whom we went on holiday in a small village, Acqualoreto near Todi, in the summer of 1977. I had remembered that he was a very good photographer. In fact, I thought that he had studied photography in Brussels. He had kept photographs of the holiday which he has now kindly sent with permission to reproduce them, which I do because they are stills from another era .

There is a photograph of Mark Brockbank as he was before he became a big wheel in the insurance industry:-

I like the picture of us all stuffed into what must have been Bill’s rented Fiat (it’s me looking out of the back window):-

I once had some hair, a lot of it:-

It was so beautiful:-

Jeremy Dixon and Edward Jones gave the Inaugural Robert Maxwell Lecture on Monday, a chance to look back on their long careers, particularly during the period before they worked in partnership when they sometimes collaborated, as when they worked for the Milton Keynes Development Corporation in the early 1970s and on the aborted project for a new Northampton Town Hall, but more often separately, which helped to illuminate the differences in their approach to architecture.

Jeremy was probably more disillusioned by the failures of the Modern Movement in the 1970s following the project that they both worked on at Netherfield at Milton Keynes:-

He then treated housing more traditionally at St. Mark’s Road, a key project of the period:-

And he was deeply interested in the materiality of architecture, as demonstrated by the library he did for Darwin College, Cambridge:-

Edward, on the other hand, after a period teaching in Cornell and at the Royal College of Art, was more interested in issues of urban design and in the 1980s went full-blown monumental. I had never looked at his designs for Grand Buildings on the south-west corner of Trafalgar Square. Imagine if it had been built:-

And, of course, he did Mississauga Town Hall:-

Only three days to go in which to visit Goldsmith’s Fair….

We went to a memorial event of our friend, Mark Brockbank. It is strange how one can know someone very well, but not know much about how they make their living, in his case as a titan of the insurance world. When I first met him in 1973, he had recently trained as an accountant and had not yet joined Willis, Faber Dumas. He was a person of obvious intelligence, keen on opera and bridge. He deeply disapproved of the fact that I drank beer from cans and hitchhiked. The article below gives the gist of his career in establishing the Brockbank Group and selling up when he was not yet fifty to live in Montagu Square, Miami, Monte Carlo and Mykonos. But he was not an obvious plutocrat: an interesting and complex person who was interested in architecture and, as was said at the memorial event, was very loyal to his friends. He used to ring up very regularly and I will miss his calls.

https://www.theinsurer.com/news/remembering-mark-brockbank-one-of-lloyds-most-influential-underwriters/

I went last night to see a small, but very choice exhibition of the work of Simon Lewty, show by Art First in their gallery in St. Mary’s Walk, just south of Walcot Square. It shows the full range of his later work, including a large-scale work from his Serpentine exhibition which has survived the fire of some of his work from this period.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/jan/06/simon-lewty-obituary?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

We went to Hadleigh yesterday and admired the vigorous seventeenth-century wood carving on the front of a house which was once an Inn called ‘The Flying Chariot’:-

One of the things that Jim Grover who organised the exhibition on Nugent Cachemaille-Day found frustrating was that there is no easily accessible image of him, in spite of the fact that he was reasonably well known and only died in 1976.

There are actually two likenesses listed in his entry for the DNB, one held by the British Architectural Library and apparently reproduced in Architect and Building News in July 1934, the other in private ownership, presumably his daughter, Ruth Day, born in 1940. Neither are available online.

If anyone reading this is in the RIBA, could they send me a copy of the photograph which I can forward to Clapham ?

This morning, I bicycled to Clapham to see St. James’s Church, Park Hill, south of the Common, which is open on Tuesdays and Fridays from 11 to 2 and has an excellent exhibition (till October 15th.) both on the church and its architect, Nugent Cachemaille-Day.

The current church replaced a gothic revival Church, which was bombed in the war on the night of Monday 16th. September, a week or so into the Blitz.  It took a long time to build a new church.  £56,000 came from the War Damage Commission, £10,000 had to be raised from the Congregation.  The architect was Nugent Cachemaille-Day.  The new Church was consecrated on 13 September 1958.

The exhibition includes original architectural drawings, discovered in a drawer in the vestry.  Born 1896, educated at Westminster and then the Architectural Association, he was working for Louis de Soissons in 1920 when he did a beautifully detailed plan of Welwyn Garden City. After working as an assistant to Goodhart-Rendel (their style is similar), he set up in practice in 1929 and specialised in church buildings, including St. Nicholas, Burnage in Manchester which opened in 1932 and was – presumably still is – boldly brick and abstract, presumably more Scandinavian than Corbusian.

This is one of the drawings of the church:-

The Church from outside:-

The stained glass windows are by Arthur Erridge, who worked for Powell and Sons before the war, and Wippell in the 1950s till his death in 1961:-