I went to Andrea Rose’s leaving party last night.   It was held not in the British Council, where she has been the long-standing Director of Visual Arts (she joined the British Council in 1979), but just outside, with hordes of the art world present.   It seemed appropriately symbolic, since there were many references to the fact that she was a formidable member of staff and not always in agreement with official policy.   She will be a great loss.

I was interviewed on Japanese television this morning about eighteenth-century gardens.   I was asked if I knew about the response to Linnaeus when he visited London.   I didn’t.   The answer is that he came to London in July 1736 to visit Sir Hans Sloane, the founder of the British Museum, and Philip Miller, who was chief gardener of the Chelsea Physic Garden.   Apparently neither of them was impressed by Linneaus’s new system of classification, since it was too obviously sexual.   They preferred the taxonomy of John Ray.   Thomas Knowlton, who was Lord Burlington’s gardener at Londesborough, thought the Linnaean system ‘altogether whimsicall and ridiculous’.   But I could find no confirmation of the suggestion that Linnaeus called a particularly prickly plant after Miller in revenge.

My interest was pricked by a statement that the beadles of Burlington Arcade wear the uniform of Lord George Cavendish’s regiment, the tenth Hussars, to find out more about Lord George Cavendish, the early nineteenth-century owner of Burlington House.   There is not much information about him online other than the fact that he was a grandson of the third Earl of Burlington (the architect Earl), son of the fourth Duke of Devonshire, and an MP for Knareborough, Derby and Derbyshire from 1775 to 1831 (61 years).   The admirable volumes of the History of Parliament tell me more.   He was educated in Hackney and Trinity College, Cambridge, an unusual combination for the son of a Duke (where in Hackney, I wonder ?).  A member of Brooks’s and a Whig, he lived mainly at Holker in Lancashire and inherited £700,000 from his uncle Henry in 1810 which enabled him to extend Burlington House and build the Arcade.   His politics were said to be abominable and ‘his manners insolent and neglectful’.

I had the pleasure of meeting representatives of Burlington Arcade’s not-so-new owners today (it was sold in 2010).   Not surprisingly, I’m interested in its history, built as it was alongside Burlington House, as well as its future, since it’s such a prominent part of the local neighbourhood.   It opened in 1819, the original shopping arcade and was progenitor of all those grand arcades in Brussels, Paris, Milan and St. Petersburg.   The architect was Samuel Ware, former student of the Royal Academy Schools, who was also responsible for the new main staircase in Burlington House for its then owner, Lord George Cavendish.   Part of the purpose of the arcade was to stop people throwing rubbish, particularly oyster shells, over the garden wall into the courtyard of Burlington House.   The front entrance was added by Professor Beresford Pite, designer of the cathedral in Kampala, in 1931:

Occasionally in the morning I allow my eye to wander down the Mall towards Buckingham Palace.   In writing a recent article about royal patronage for the forthcoming art issue of Vanity Fair, I found to my embarrassment that I couldn’t remember who was the architect of the main façade.   I guessed correctly that it was by Aston Webb, but got it wrong that it was done in the reign of Edward VII.   It was done in 1913, just before the first world war, as a setting for ceremonial duties for George V to replace the much more Germanic, mid-Victorian front by Edward Blore.   People always think of the twentieth-century monarchy as low key, but it doesn’t look low key to me: