We had a wonderful – and very Lowenthal-style event (suggestive, fluid) – to celebrate the volume of essays about the life and work – and ideas – of the late David Lowenthal who died five years ago, but whose influence lives on through his books – most of all, The Past is a Foreign Country, published in 1985.

The question which was never answered was whether he was part of the Establishment or not. His father, Max Lowenthal, was a prominent Liberal lawyer in New York and Washington. David went to Harvard and was a GI, working during the war for the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA. Then, he studied geography at Berkeley, California and got interested in the ecology and sociology of the Caribbean, which he studied in depth under the auspices of Philip Mason at the Institute of Race Relations. He was hired by Noel Annan to be a Professor of Geography at University College, but took early retirement in 1985, which gave him freedom to write critically, but empathetically, about issues of heritage: the interpretation of the past through books, films and historic sites.

He was so broad-ranging that he is impossible to pin down: a critic of heritage, but deeply interested in all aspects of the past and how it is interpreted. Actually, not part of the Establishment, because so intependent-minded and such a deeply intellectually self-reflective liberal.

https://www.pagesofhackney.co.uk/webshop/product/david-lowenthals-archipelagic-and-transatlantic-landscapes-his-public-and-scholarly-heritage/

An interesting, relatively low-key shortlist for this year’s Stirling Prize. I’m an admirer of Witherford Watson Mann’s transformation of the Courtauld Institute, but can’t quite see it winning. The new Faculty of Arts building at Warwick University is immensely impressive and on a grand scale. But I think I would put my money on what looks like a very thoughtful housing scheme in Clapham by Sergison Bates, since new housing is the order of the day.

https://architecturetoday.co.uk/stirling-prize-2023-shortlist-revealed/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Stirling+Prize+2023+shortlist+announcement&cmid=50fbdd00-ee00-4ffb-a452-706eaf7cc51d

I have just read the admirable short biography by John Holden, late of Demos, of Ralph Dutton who owned and reconstructed his family’s Victorian house of Hinton Ampner, employing Gerald Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, as its architect, just before the Second World War. It’s a fascinating, but in some ways frustrating, story because although Dutton seems to have had a wide circle of friends, many of them writers, including L.P. Hartley, James Lees-Milne and James Pope-Hennessy, none of them seem to have much to say about him, other than complimenting him on his impeccable taste and enjoying his hospitality. The only alternative glimmer of him appears in a characteristically waspish letter from Evelyn Waugh to Nancy Mitford about a review he had written of Dutton’s book on The Victorian Home: ‘I took the writer to be a bumptious young puppy. I hear he is an aged and wealthy pansy’. Anyway, it has particularly good information on the taste for what Osbert Lancaster described as ‘Vogue Regency’ and a generation of Old Etonians who ran the arts.

It can be ordered direct from its excellent publisher, Pallas Athene (https://pallasathene.co.uk/shop/ralph-dutton-of-hinton-ampner-a-man-and-his-home-by-john-holdenbrbrforthcoming).

Having been highly critical of the apparent sloth of the British Museum in dealing with its thefts, I am delighted that they have recruited Mark Jones as its interim director, having nothing but admiration for his stewardship of the V&A – the development of its galleries, its excellent exhibitions programme, and his ability to balance tough management with scholarship, all of which skills he will need in such a demanding, even if only temporary, role.

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/sep/02/sir-mark-jones-put-forward-as-interim-director-of-british-museum

This is the church with the gravestone commemorating Maurice Wilks who was ‘responsible for the world’s first gas turbine driven car’, as well as developing the Land Rover, unrecorded on his tomb. A very peaceful churchyard down a lane north of Dwyran:-

Many is the time we’ve driven past this handsome, part-Romanesque church which was open today.

This is how it was pre-restoration in 1928:-

A good roof:-

Its font:-

And a decorative memorial:-

We went to Port Penrhyn to buy fish – it’s the small harbour between Bangor and Penrhyn Castle, laid out by Benjamin Wyatt in 1790 and used for the transport of slate, still a small working harbour:-