Tag Archives: England

Snape

We went to two concerts at the Maltings, both by the Monteverdi Choir with John Eliot Gardiner conducting and Isabelle Faust playing the solo violin – a mixture of partitas and choral works, more like a church service than a concert.   In the second concert particularly, Isabelle Faust gave an astonishing virtuoso performance of two Bach sonatas for solo violin (Nos. 2 and 3), helped by playing a Stradivarius and the resonant acoustic of the great barn.

In the interval a rainbow appeared over the marsh:-

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Pullens Yard

We made a short excursion this morning to see the Pullens Yard Open Studios, a bit of unexpected late nineteenth-century urban development just south of the Elephant and Castle where James Pullen, a local builder, created an estate of 12 blocks intersected by workshop yards, now occupied by a miscellaneous collection of artists, writers, clothesmakers and a florist, serviced by the Electric Elephant Cafe:-

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Canterbury Cathedral Stained Glass

We slipped into the Chapter House of Canterbury Cathedral in order to see the exhibition of Romanesque stained glass from the South Window.   Some of the figures date from before the fire of 1174, so are amongst the earliest stained glass in the country, designed by an artist known only as the Master of Methuselah.   They are what remains of 86 figures originally placed in the clerestory of the choir, so invisible to the human eye.   This did not prevent an extraordinary display of vigour and humane realism:-

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Cotesbach

I haven’t been to Cotesbach since December 1973.   It’s a Queen Anne house, added to in the later eighteenth century, and owned since 1759 by generations of Marriotts, who tended to be parsons as well as Leicestershire landowners and whose family papers are now preserved as an educational trust:-

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Ideal House

I don’t know why I’ve never previously registered the grand black polished façade of Ideal House, just down the street from Oxford Circus tube station and immediately opposite Liberty’s.   It was designed by an architect called Gordon Jeeves, a Scot (all early twentieth-century architects seem to have been Scottish), working with the American art deco architect, Raymond Hood.   It’s not surprising that it looks as if it’s strayed from the streets of New York because it is a small-scale copy of Hood’s building in New York for the American Radiator Corporation:-

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St. John, Bethnal Green

A trip to the local polling station gave me a chance to document the church tower of St. John, Bethnal Green, designed by Sir John Soane in 1826 for the Commissioners of the 1818 Church Building Act at more or less the same time that he was designing St. Peter, Walworth and Holy Trinity, Marylebone.   It’s the standard model of Comissioners’ church:  a big, barn-like interior to maximise the number of pews;  ornament restricted to the church tower, which is characteristic of Soane with a small pepper pot, which was originally planned to be much higher:-

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Wolfson College

I have just been to a lecture by Neil MacGregor at Wolfson College, Oxford to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Wolfson Foundation.   It managed to weave together poverty in Hogarth’s England with the development of obstetrics in the Gorbals, the importance of William Hunter as a collector and the role of Sir Hans Sloane in the foundation of the British Museum, ending with the importance of museums in the development of global citizenship and the ways in which the Wolfson Foundation has supported health in the body and in the mind.

I had never actually been to Wolfson College which must have been under construction when I lived outside Oxford.   It was designed by Powell and Moya in the late 1960s, when they were also doing Blue Boar Quad for Christ Church after the success of their design for Christ Church Picture Gallery.   I was told to admire the view of the Cherwell which I did:-

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St. Thomas’s Burial Ground

In cutting through from St. John of Jerusalem to London Fields, I have several times been surprised by the survival of the burial ground behind the site of St. Thomas’s Chapel on Mare Street, where the Rev. W. Bates established a nonconformist chapel in 1672 on land owned by St. Thomas’s Hospital and where there is now a Greek Orthodox church:-

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In the garden

It was extremely nice, and rather unusual, to have a day at home, sitting in the garden and listening to, first, Lisa Jardine, magnificently forthright about her life on Desert Island Discs, immediately followed by the PRA talking about his life, his paintings, the Summer Exhibition, and his deep knowledge of early twentieth-century music on Private Passions.   The garden looks good at this time of year:-

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Burlington Gardens

For the last three years I have paid scant attention to the three figures who stand meditating outside my office window.   But as we prepare to decamp to Blackfriars whilst Pennethorne’s great building in Burlington Gardens is renovated, I thought I should record their appearance in all its sooty magnificence.   Like the philosophers outside the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, they stand sentinel, as guardians of learning:- image image

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