I know that I’m not the first person to admire the Albert Memorial, but finding myself seeing it for the first time in a long while (it’s not my part of town), I couldn’t help but be impressed by its Victorian imperial pomp, solid and confident and gilt, thanks to Jocelyn Stevens, at the end of the grass sward.   I went up to it to pay my respects before a meeting at the Serpentine.   Odd to think how much it was hated and reviled:-

Continue reading →

I went to the launch of a book about Quadrant 3, the unglamorous name for the conversion of the old Regent Palace Hotel by Crown Estate.   Many people may not register its scale and significance precisely because it is a combination of new and old, mixed use, combining shops like Whole Foods, Ugg Rapha and the Department of Coffee and Social Affairs at ground floor level (no more Jack Spade) with Zedel down below and offices above.   Jeremy Dixon, who was the architect for the project, gave a characteristically generous speech in which he praised the huge range of planners, consultants and builders who were involved, but I sometimes feel that he and his partner, Ed Jones, do not get enough credit for their very sophisticated approach to urban design, sensitive to history and context, but also capable of transforming the experience of a neighbourhood, as they did at Covent Garden.  No more ‘blood on the needles and steam on the urine’ as Graham Morrison is reported to have said.

I was slightly shocked to discover that planning permission has been sought to turn 55, Broadway, the monumental headquarters of London Transport, into luxury flats.   For nearly a century, it has been the great temple of the Underground Electric Railways Company of London, designed by Charles Holden in the late 1920s, overseen by Frank Pick, and embellished with sculptures by Jacob Epstein which led to such an outcry that the size of the boy’s penis in Day was reduced (Pick offered to resign):-

This is Day:-

Continue reading →

I have often wondered about the metallic figure of Justice which glowers over the building at the top end of St. James’s Street where it meets Piccadilly.   The building was originally designed in 1909 as the headquarters of the Norwich Union Life Insurance Society by Ernest Augustus Runtz and  George McLean Ford, architects who had previously worked with Norman Shaw on the design of the Gaiety Theatre.   Justice was the work of Hibbert Binney and is oddly butch.   She stands over a man and woman who symbolize foresight and prudence, appropriate emblems of the life insurance business:-

On Friday night we watched a film which was made by Jenny Barraclough about the Summer Exhibition made for the BBC in 1976.   Many aspects of the exhibition remain the same:  the way that television loves to track the hopes and aspirations of the unknown entrant, the policeman who claims his work was bought by the Queen, the cartographer who gets his work accepted, the lonely old lady who doesn’t, the man in a camper van who can’t find his way to the back entrance;  the role of the President is the same and of the committee;  but some things are surprisingly different, most especially how truly terrible a lot of the work looks, and how much less veneered people are on television, more hippyish, less self-aware, so many with untrimmed beards.

I missed the excoriating reviews of Tate Britain’s exhibition of Victorian sculpture.   I don’t understand why it should have attracted such odium apart from a general vendetta against Tate Britain and a high-minded aversion to an art form which was genuinely popular.   It seemed to me to be a perfectly coherent and well displayed attempt to get a modern audience to engage with the different varieties of Victorian scupture in all its aspects – medievalising, classical, reproductive and commemorative – and including the work of many now forgotten, but rather wonderful sculptors – John Gibson, Henry Armstead, Mary Fraser Tytler (who married Watts) and George Frampton – most of whom, I note, were trained in the Royal Academy Schools.

I normally only see Shoreditch Town Hall late at night when it is mobbed by teenagers, but, in passing it today, I realised how grand it is and how fine some of the detailing.   It was designed by a little known architect, Caesar Augustus Long, in 1866:-

Continue reading →