I went to Clapham to visit my cousin. It was cold and damp, but it gave me a chance to see Holy Trinity, Clapham, a large, barn-like and still evangelical structure, isolated in the middle of the common. Also, the larger houses on the north side of the common, with their relics of the Clapham Sect, and including no.29, a large house now being renovated which was once the home of Charles Barry.
This is Holy Trinity, which opened in 1775:
As the years go by, I become less hostile to the big Corbusian estates, based on the Unité d’Habitation, which were put up with such zeal by the London County Council in the late 1950s when the architects’ department was run by Leslie Martin. I’m more appreciative of their social ambition, however misplaced, and their abstract geometry, played out in their balconies, particularly when the sun shines. This is Withy House on Globe Road (architect apparently unknown):
Once a year, our house is turned up side down for the annual jewellery sale. In the garden, there are Polish condiments:
Indoors, four jewellers display their wares. This is Romilly’s stand:
I’ve been asked why it is that I’ve never written about Tower Hamlets Cemetery, given my taste for tombs. It’s true that it’s always been off my local map tucked between Mile End tube station and the railway track. So, I’ve been waiting for a half decent day to re-explore its neglected woodland:
I have been thinking a lot this week about the long career of Nick Grimshaw, whose 75th. birthday was celebrated rather belatedly at the RA. Besides thinking about what I think of as two of his best works, the Southern Cross Railway station in Melbourne with its parabolic roof and the Rensselaer Institute in Albany, New York, with its ovoid concert hall, what I remember best is a talk he gave at Wimbledon School of Art at the time of an exhibition of his architectural drawings in which he talked so fluently about the process of gestation of the structure of the Oxford Ice Rink whilst simultaneously illustrating the thought process by drawing on an epidiascope.
I am, for obvious reasons, interested in the architect James Pennethorne, the architect at the Office of Works who was responsible for the design of the University of London building on Burlington Gardens, now owned by the Royal Academy. What I hadn’t realised is how important he is to the East End too. Following his appointment as architect and surveyor to the commissioners of metropolitan improvements in 1839, he was responsible for the construction of Commercial Street in the 1840s to divert traffic from the docks away from the city and through the slums of Whitechapel to Christ Church, Spitalfields. More importantly, he was the person who drew up the plans for Victoria Park, laid out for the benefit of the working classes and based on the ideas of his mentor and teacher, John Nash.
I was asked to lunch today in the old Public Record Office in Chancery Lane where I would occasionally work transcribing official documents in the late 1970s. The PRO was founded in 1838 and the architect of its over-grand gothic building off Chancery Lane was none other than Sir James Pennethorne, the architect of our building on Burlington Gardens:
I have been trying to find out more about Millicent Rose, an art historian who published one of the first and best histories of the east end, which describes its origins as a series of different villages and neighbourhoods before it was a home to successive waves of migrants and the classic home of slums and poverty. The book was published by Cresset Press in 1951 and has never been reprinted. It turns out that she was the daughter of a general in the Indian army, born in 1913, went to Newnham College, Cambridge and attended the Courtauld Institute in the mid-1930s. A Marxist and mistress of Francis Klingender, a lecturer in sociology at the University of Hull, she apparently used to heckle Herbert Read when he gave talks at the ICA.
I was asked to talk tonight to third year students of Queen Mary about the history of our house. It wasn’t easy because so little is known of its history beyond the fact that it belongs to a piece of mid-eighteenth century ribbon development along the Mile End Road which was then, as it is now, the main road out to Bow, Stratford and Essex beyond. At the time, Stepney was still gentrified, a village outside London. Our house occupies the site of a larger house, which had a driveway off the Mile End Road and belonged to a crypto-Jacobite MP called Archibald Hutcheson, who had trained as a barrister, was a Fellow of the Royal Society, and married a wealthy widow who had previously been married to the Governor of Bombay. Continue reading
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