Until yesterday I wasn’t really familiar with the area known as Somers Town, which was called after Charles Cocks, Lord Somers, and was developed during the 1780s to the north of the so-called New Road (now the Euston Road) and south of the Regent’s Canal.   Once an area of market gardens, it was originally a middle class neighbourhood, but went rapidly downhill when the big railway termini arrived, together with the Irish navvies required to build them.   Now it’s an area of social housing, where life expectancy is apparently ten years less than in Hampstead:-

One of the pleasures of visiting the Crick Institute was the opportunity to see the great roof of St. Pancras station, designed by William Henry Barlow, the Chief Engineer of the Midland Railway Company, up close.   When it opened in 1868, it was the widest roof span in the world:-

I drove past the Francis Crick Institute recently which is rising immediately to the north of the British Library and was impressed by its scale, its grand barrel-vaulted roof and its use of terracotta to reflect, but not replicate, Sandy Wilson’s use of brick in the British Library.   So, I was pleased to be invited to go on a site tour by Larry Malcic of HOK, who has overseen its design and construction.   It is indeed a huge project – ‘a cathedral of science’ as its Director, Sir Paul Nurse, calls it – broken up into four quarters, all open plan, with tiny offices for the Principal Investigators, in order to encourage social interaction:-

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I have only recently realised that the very Aldo Rossi-like building which greets one’s arrival to the increasingly impressive set of developments by Argent north of King’s Cross is by David Chipperfield.   With tubular cast iron columns, cast by the Hargreaves Foundry in Yorkshire, set out in a rigid rectilinear geometry, it could easily have come out of postwar Italy:-

Lunch at Spring in the New Wing of Somerset House (the work of James Pennethorne, not Chambers) gave me a chance to admire some of the detailing of the stonework in the river entrance off Embankment and round the courtyard, which was the work of some of the sculptors of the early Royal Academy. The keystone over the entrance on the river front was by Joseph Wilton, a friend of Chambers and was probably to Chambers’s design. It depicts Ocean and was flanked the the English rivers, mostly carved by Wilton, but three by Carlini. The urns flanked by tritons are likewise by Wilton:-

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I was able for the first time to go onto the roof of Unilever House this morning (Unilever employees only).   One gets a rather amazing view out across the city, down towards Tower Bridge, past the emerging Tate Modern behind NEO Bankside, the Rogers Stirk Harbour apartment buildings which have been shortlisted for the Stirling Prize.   It’s just behind the curved yellow building which Piers Gough did for the Manhattan Loft Corporation in 1999:-

Several people have said to me that, now that I am working in Blackfriars, the best place to have lunch is Sweeting’s.   It first opened in 1889, as someone remarked the year that Hitler was born.   I was invited there today by John Morton Morris whose father had always promised to take him there when he was a child, but always took him to Sheekeys or Simpson-in-the-Strand instead.   You have to be there by noon to get a table.   Then black velvet, smoked eel and fish pie.   A perfect meal to ease the return to London:-

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Before checking out on holiday, I am posting an unexpected view of Paddington Station which I took yesterday morning en route for breakfast at the headquarters of Marks and Spencer.   My eye was caught by the bold lettering in the distance on the 1930s office block – the so-called ‘Arrivals Side Offices’, now called Tournament House – which were added behind the Great Western Hotel by P.E. Culverhouse in 1933:-

I am gradually getting to know the neighbourhood round Unilever House.   It’s like a foreign country, the business and commercial district sandwiched between the Temple and the City.   Down Temple Avenue I was interested by the sculpture supporting the door on a building of the late 1880s:-