I started my Frieze day tour at the new Gagosian Gallery on Grosvenor Hill, tucked in behind Alfred’s Club, a grand new space, designed, like Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery, by Caruso St. John, helping to consolidate Mayfair as a place for art as well as fashion. The spaces look good for a small number of big pieces by Cy Twombly.
Tag Archives: London
Shepherd Market
I had a drink tonight in Shepherd Market (named after Edward Shepherd, its architect and the site of the old May Fair) and felt a sudden deep wave of nostalgia for its old, scuzzy character in the days when I worked – rather briefly – as a delivery boy for Heywood Hill. I have resisted nostalgia for old Soho, preferring its new found smartness to its old seediness, but in Shepherd Market I found myself missing the old ambiguity between aristocracy and tarts:-
Crossrail Place
We went to explore the new Norman Foster building which has been attached to the north side of Canary Wharf and will in due course house its Crossrail Station. It’s a mixture of ballooning high tech and craft detailing in the engineered wooden struts: currently a bit bland because it’s not yet functioning, but with an elaborate antipodean roof garden:-
Daily Telegraph Building
I walked past the old headquarters of the Daily Telegraph on Fleet Street yesterday morning and was impressed by its neo-Egyptian magnificence, once the home of right wing journalists, now of Goldman Sachs traders. It was designed by Charles Elcock of Elcock, Sutcliffe & Tait in 1928, more or less at the same time as Unilever House and with similar ostentation. The stonework carving was done by Alfred Oakley who became a monk:-
Gough Square
I thought I should start my day in Gough Square where I am due to give a talk tonight to a group of Johnson enthusiasts, if only to remind myself of the topography local to Samuel Johnson’s House and the fragmentary survival of eighteenth-century London as one takes a little alleyway off Fleet Street (Wine Office Court), up past the Cheshire Cheese tavern (rebuilt 1667) into Gough Square, where not only Johnson, but also Oliver Goldsmith lived. There is a quotation from Johnson on the wall of Wine Office Court: ‘Sir, If you wish to have a just notion of the magnitude of this great City you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and squares but must survey the innumerable little lanes and courts’. It’s a reminder of the tightly knit network of medieval alleyways and courtyards which still half survives in amongst the megalith office blocks north of Fleet Street; and also of the difference in surroundings between Johnson’s London, all alleyways and bookshops and taverns and the Inns of Court, and Reynolds’s London, a mile to the west, which was much more spacious, with workshops and shops and coffee houses in Covent Garden, close to the parks and the Court.
This is Johnson’s House:-
Stepney Green Court
On Sunday morning I went on a casual search for Bert Irvine’s studio which I knew had been on Stepney Green in a Jewish School – I assume the old Stepney Jewish Primary and Infants School on the south end of the old village green which was converted into municipal gardens in 1872. Instead, I found myself inspecting the back façade of Stepney Green Court next door, a noble set of artisans’ dwellings, designed by Solomon Joseph and built in 1895. I’ve photographed the ironwork detailing on the street front before, but I haven’t previously appreciated the scale of the buildings in two parallel lines off the street:-
Walthamstow Town Hall
Walthamstow Town Hall looks uncannily like the Boijmans Museum, belonging to the same family of 1930s Scandinavian, stripped-down, civic classicism. It was designed by Philip Dalton Hepworth who had been a student at the AA, had designed war memorials in the 1920s, and won the competition in 1932. It opened in 1941. Yesterday there was a rather wonderful Indian wedding, complete with horse and carriage:-
Essex House
In the William Morris Gallery I noticed the frontispiece of C.R. Ashbee’s pamphlet An Endeavour towards the Teaching of John Ruskin and William Morris, which was published by the Essex House Press in 1901, employing workers and equipment from the Kemscott Press which closed in 1898. Its frontispiece is Essex House itself, which was immediately opposite Mile End tube station:-
William Morris Gallery
After walking in Epping Forest, we stopped off at the William Morris Gallery, which occupies Water House, the third house that Morris lived in in Walthamstow, after being born in Elm House in 1834, then moving to Woodford Hall in 1840, and to Elm House in 1847, following the death of his father. I hadn’t been there since the exceptionally intelligent redisplay by Pringle, Richards, and Sharratt, which – deservedly – won Museum of the Year Award. This was a detail of the wood carving on a Morris and Company bench:-
A detail of his sample books:-
Epping Forest
After the glories of the trees in Devon last weekend, we decided this weekend to explore Epping Forest, that area of ancient woodland which connects Chingford to Theydon Bois. We parked on Golding’s Hill and found it surprisingly easy to get lost in the rides through the woodland copses:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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