Howard Smith, one of my readers, has tried to post a comment about Sir Michael Hopkins, but has not been able to and the truth is that I don’t know how the system works myself, so I am posting it myself, because it refers to one of their works which is less often referred to involving the total renovation and reconstruction of the Manchester City Art Gallery in 2002 (I might add that I remember visiting it myself not long after it opened and being very impressed by the way it combined the original Charles Barry building with the old Athenaeum behind, a model of sympathetic and intelligent stitching together of two historic buildings and an important moment in marking the move of the Heritage Lottery Fund as it then was from supporting prestige London projects to a much wider distribution of funding):-

MANCHESTER ART GALLERY

Michael Hopkins and Partners were responsible for a significant expansion of Manchester Art Gallery, completed in 2002 for the Commonwealth Games. This is their only art gallery project, as far as I am aware and is not as well known as their other buildings in the UK. I was a member of the curatorial team that helped deliver it. The brief was complex: to link two important buildings by Sir Charles Barry, the Grade I City Art Gallery and the Athenaeum, respecting their integrity whilst creating a new building on an adjacent car park site. This was achieved by inserting a glazed atrium, enabling views through from adjacent streets that features an imposing central staircase (echoing that in Barry’s Art Gallery) flanked by exposed lifts. A dramatic bridge with glass-block floor is at first floor level. Hopkins’s muscular modernism of steel and glass contrasts successfully with the beautiful mellow stonework in Italianate style of the former rear of the Gallery. The new building has two floors of galleries and educational facilities. The existing historic galleries were sensitively refurbished to current standards, retaining elements of decoration from an earlier scheme. The Athenaeum’s first and second floor (formerly a members’ lecture theatre) were converted into display spaces.

Viewing the Art Gallery’s façade little is revealed of the extensive changes but walking around the now completed street block, one encounters the new build exterior: exposed concrete frames, bronze sub-frames and stone panels complementing both historic buildings. Throughout the new build, Hopkins and his team devoted tremendous care in the detailed design, for example with the lighting modules and subtly modulated cast concrete ceiling panels. They provided Manchester with a first-class gallery that plays an important role in the city’s cultural life.

It was a pleasure to visit Windsor Castle. Its building history is so horribly complicated. Norman in origin, Queen Elizabeth apparently added the Long Gallery, which was later converted by Jeffry Wyatville into the King’s Library (a perfect Tudor fireplace survives, as well as a Rysbrack bust of Elizabeth which came from Queen Caroline’s library, now lost, designed by William Kent at St. James’s Palace). Then, Hugh May added the State Apartments, with ceiling paintings by Verrio, only for it all to be redone by Wyatville under George IV:-

I read somewhere that Michael Hopkins was influenced by Jim Richards’s The Functional Traditional in Early Industrial Buildings. This seems plausible: a combination of intelligent and non-academic problem-solving with the use of good quality materials both new and old and a strong infusion of East Anglia, where they have built a lot. I know that in 1990, Michael and Patty helped donate Eric De Maré’s beautiful photographs to the RIBA, including those he had done for Richards’s book.

We have both been mourning the death of Sir Michael Hopkins, a good friend to us both, who I first got to know when he and Patty were the masterplanners for the V&A in the mid-1980s, brought in by David Mellor and Terence Conran to bring some order to the immensity and complexity of its Victorian layout. Not long afterwards, they won the competition for the Glyndebourne Opera House, a brilliant and beautiful project which fits so well in its bucolic surroundings, characteristic of their work in combining the latest technology with the most traditional materials. Over the years, I have visited many of their projects and greatly admire how different each can be, from the simplicity of The Round Building at Hathersage (his obituary in the Guardian is by Fiona MacCarthy, whose husband, David Mellor commissioned it) to the Piranesian complexity of the subterranean depths of Westminster underground station. He remained admirably un-self-important, happiest bumbling around on a small tractor on his estate at Blackheath or on a boat out on the river. We will miss him.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/jun/19/sir-michael-hopkins-obituary

Two weeks ago, the Wedding Cake at Waddesdon was still under scaffolding. Now it’s been unveiled in its full glory:-

It’s quite something:-

A Meissen goat commissioned for Dresden:-

The wood carving in the dining room:-

I have only just discovered that the article I wrote about the Farrell Centre in Newcastle for the June issue of The Critic has already appeared online. It’s a product of Terry Farrell’s generosity to the city where he was brought up and the university where he was educated:-

https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/june-2023/a-bid-to-inspire-future-architects/

I had seen that I am advertising a work by Romilly, but I couldn’t find it. Now she has sent me the link (A Different Planet — Romilly Saumarez Smith). I have added the picture to the randomised photos which appear every time you open the blog, just to add a bit of variety. The picture is by Lucinda Douglas-Menzies, a brilliant photographer of both objects and people.

As readers of my blog will know, I have a long-standing interest in the development of East London – in fact, ever since my blog was set up in early 2014.

So, I was pleased to attend an event involving many of the people involved in attracting the Olympics to London – not the big name politicians, but the civil servants and urban planners, many of whom worked for the London Development Agency, an agency which reported through an independent board to the Mayor, but was funded by the Department of Trade and Industry (to an outsider, the structure of government agencies involved in the Olympic bid is far from straightforward). They have collaborated in producing a book written by Michael Owens and Ralph Ward, two of the key players (Michael Owens was the Head of Development Policy at the LDA, Ward its Head of Sustainable Development) called Playing the Game: How the Olympics came to East London, which seems to be only available on Kindle, although I spotted hard copies for sale at the Bow Arts Trust, where the discussion took place.

We walked from Stratford to Bow while the two authors (mainly) reflected on the process of regeneration. From the walking tour, I picked up the following, but don’t guarantee that I have recorded the points correctly (they appear somewhat differently from how they do in the book):-

1. A key moment was in the late 1990s when plans for the regeneration of Stratford were drawn up by Arup as engineers and Fletcher Priest as architects for Stuart Lipton of Stanhope who, with Chelsfield, had bought large tracts of land in Stratford off British Rail, presumably recognising its future development opportunities. Big chunks of this land was subsequently bought by Westfield for the new Stratford Shopping Centre, which was key to the regeneration of the area before anyone had thought of London hosting the Olympics.

2. It is hard now to remember how rough the area was between Stratford and the River Lea before the creation of the Olympic Park. We stood on the site of what was known as Fridge Mountain and the area apparently was the source of many of the knock-off goods sold on Oxford Street, as well as of allotments which became a battleground over development.

3. In order to bid for the Olympics, Hargreave, an American firm of landscape designers, were hired to landscape an area of desolate tarmac. Their involvement is one of the more impressive things that was done and key still to the success of the project.

4. Ken Livingstone wasn’t remotely interested in sport, but he was in urban regeneration and seems to have been good at attracting a group of independent-minded and free-thinking people to work at the LDA.

5. The lesson at the end seemed to be that the bureaucrats felt that the success of the project was not the quality of the planning process and setting objectives, but allowing a certain inventive freedom in how the plans were drawn up. It sounded very likely.

I’m glad the history is being written because it’s so complicated even if – perhaps especially if – you hear it from those who were so closely involved.

It is only relatively recently that I have discovered the glories of Peckover Butchers in the Roman Road, a carnivore’s dream where one gets the best possible and most attentive service from its proprietor, Gavin Peckover, who sources a lot of his meat from a single farm in Essex. It is always absolutely delicious and he gives advice on cuts.

This morning he was complaining about the long hours he has to work and the relentless pressure on prices of the supermarkets. In many parts of the country, butchers have been driven out of business. Please support Peckovers and encourage it to survive:-