We made a short excursion this morning to see the Pullens Yard Open Studios, a bit of unexpected late nineteenth-century urban development just south of the Elephant and Castle where James Pullen, a local builder, created an estate of 12 blocks intersected by workshop yards, now occupied by a miscellaneous collection of artists, writers, clothesmakers and a florist, serviced by the Electric Elephant Cafe:-
I was loitering outside the doors of the V&A waiting for them to open and remembering Roy Strong saying that whenever he walked back to the V&A after lunch he thought of Elgar: it’s that strain of slightly overblown pomp and nationalism. Anyway it looked as magnificent as ever in the morning sun:-
I failed to post photographs of St. Chad’s, a large barn-like church designed by James Brooks on a street just behind Haggerston School. Brooks became a student in the Royal Academy Schools, and set up in practice as an architect in Bloomsbury Square. In 1862, he moved to a house he designed for himself in Clissold Crescent in Stoke Newington. Commissions for east end churches, including St. Chad’s, came from fellow parishioners at St. Matthias’s, Stoke Newington who established the Haggerston Church Scheme. St. Chad’s is a good example of Brooks’s austere and muscular red brick Gothic, entirely appropriate to bring Anglo-Catholicism to Haggerston:-
We went to a preview of a television film that Margy Kinmonth has made with Eddie Redmayne on the impact of the first world war on art. He comes across incredibly well – knowledgeable and unself-important, with an interest in the subject based on reading art history at Cambridge. The Royal Academy appears because of the memorial outside to the Artists’ Rifle Brigade and because the female students in the RA Schools were employed to paint the dazzle camouflage on the ships employing the pictorial devices of cubism. We were so inspired by the number of pictures shown in the storerooms of the Imperial War Museum – works by Nevinson, Bomberg, Sargent and both Nashes – that we set off to see them.
We found the dazzle boats which were apparently found in a store in Duxford:-
Our trip to Cambridge was cancelled, so I spent the morning trying to make sense of Haggerston instead. I had never been to Albion Square, laid out in the 1840s by Islip Odell, a brick-maker, and was surprised and impressed by its stateliness, its sense of municipal improvement, with drinking fountains and public gardens:-
It’s years since I’ve been to the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, even though it’s so close. It was reasonably deserted on a Sunday morning with grand echoing cloisters no longer housing retired mariners, but with musicians practising in the Trinity Laban Conservatoire and a few Japanese tourists exploring:-
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