We went to a brilliant lecture by Edmund de Waal on the influence of William Morris on himself and others. He traced the influence of Morris’s writings and teachings on generations of craft practice, based on the example of a rock solid medievalising table which Morris constructed for himself when he was living in one room in Red Lion Square (hand built and communal). De Waal went on to describe the ways in which the writings of Morris were absorbed by Bernard Leach and other members of the Japanese craft tradition in Kyoto, including Shoji Hamada; Continue reading
Tag Archives: England
Frederick Wiseman
I have spent the last couple of days immersed in watching, and thinking about, Frederick Wiseman’s long film about the National Gallery for a brief (very brief) appearance on the Today programme. His technique is rigorously anthropological : he immerses himself in the life of an institution for three or four months, films everything as scrupulously as possible, and then sees what emerges through a long editorial process. The result is an extraordinarily detailed set of observations as to how the National Gallery and its staff at all levels, and particularly its education department, explains and interprets the paintings in the collection to different audiences, from the blind to a single individual donor. I think the lesson of the film, if there is a lesson, is that the nature of individual experience of paintings is ultimately unknowable. The film opens with a long slow sequence of paintings viewed silently without interpretation; and it ends with another long slow sequence set to ballet. These silent sequences come across as a more profound experience than any amount of historical, cultural or contextual explanation.
Kirby’s Castle
In examining the history of Bethnal Green, I have become interested in the house known as Bethnal House or Kirby’s Castle, which occupied the site where the library now is. It was built in 1570 by John Thorpe for John Kirby, a merchant and was subsequently owned by the lawyer and natural scientist, Sir Hugh Plat. Plat used the garden to experiment growing grapes and the effects of different manures. In 1602, he published Delights for Ladies with instructions about how to preserve and bottle fruits and, in 1608, Floraes Paradise Beautified, which included instructions on how to make fuel brickettes. Pepys visited the house on 26 June 1663 when it was owned by Sir William Rider, Deputy-Master of Trinity House, and described how he had ‘a noble dinner, and a fine merry walk with the ladies alone after dinner: the greatest quantity of strawberries I ever saw, and good’. In 1727, it was leased to Matthew Wright as a private mad house, later known as the White House or Blind Beggar’s House and was run by the sadist employed to cure George III of his madness. Its use as a lunatic asylum is why the local park is apparently known as Barmy Park.
St. Paul, Shadwell
St. Paul, Shadwell lurks beyond the high wall of the old London dock across Shadwell Basin, one of the first of the Commissioners’s churches, designed by John Walters, who died in 1821, the year after the church opened, aged 39. It replaced what was known as the Church of Sea Captains and was described in Walters’s obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine as ‘simply neat, and elegantly chaste’:
York Hall and Baths
Just north of the Bethnal Green Museum is the York Hall and Baths where the citizens of Bethnal Green could come to box, wash their laundry and take a Turkish bath:-
Bethnal Green Town Hall
I had read somewhere that the back elevation of the recently renovated Bethnal Green Town Hall is one of the top ten pieces of new architecture in London. I was intrigued as I hadn’t registered this elevation (one enters on the opposite side). It’s a fine, aluminium, if (at least in the photograph) slightly surreal, sheath designed by Michel da Costa Gonçalves and Nathalie Rozencwajg of rare:-
Nettleswell House
I wish we had been able to afford to buy Nettleswell House when it was sold by the V&A for what now seems like a song in the late 1980s. I don’t think I quite appreciated its significance as a relic of sixteenth-century Bethnal Green when the ground was leased by Sir Ralph Warren, a former Lord Mayor. The house itself is part mid-seventeenth-century, part 1705 and part 1862. I remember it as the site of gloomy meetings:-
Bethnal Green Museum
I’ve always liked Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood and now the new decorated entrance façade by Caruso St. John:-
Hackney Road
Pevsner (or, more likely, Bridget Cherry) is dismissive of Hackney Road, but it has good examples of early Victorian terrace housing on the north side, surprisingly grand for the neighbourhood, which at the time was beginning its slide into slumdom:-
Keeling House
I was only shown Keeling House recently: a muscular and ingeniously geometric, early example of work by Denys Lasdun, when he was working for Fry, Drew, Drake & Lasdun in the mid-1950s. It’s more purely architectural than the standard LCC blocks, still surrounded by what would have been regarded as Victorian slum housing, now being done up, as has Keeling House itself:-
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