My latest bulletin on the progress of works in Burlington Garden involves a walk outside the so-called laboratory galleries at the back, looking up at the temporary roof in the middle of a thunderstorm:-
I poked my camera through a hole in the awning to take a photograph of the lantern over Sidney Smirke’s Octagon:-
I was wandering down Bond Street on Saturday morning trying to remember why the Time & Life Building is regarded as of such significance. Part of it, of course, is the presence of four grand abstract sculptures by Henry Moore set into the wall to the side of the building:-
The rest of the building is a rather bland and neutral American-style, postwar office block:-
That is precisely its significance: that it was built with dollars in the early 1950s as a mark of Anglo-American friendship, designed by Michael Rosenauer, a fashionable Austrian architect who was a friend of Oliver Messel and worked for Cecil Beaton before the war. The interiors were by Hugh Casson and Misha Black.
I was tipped off that there is a new and elegant building for Valentino on Old Bond Street which has been designed by David Chipperfield. Indeed, there is:-
As I was slightly early for breakfast, I made a detour on my morning walk across the parks to inspect the Victoria Memorial, one of those great and overblown monuments which it is easy to ignore. Its design was the result of an open competition held in the summer of 1901 which was won by Thomas Brock RA, who had recently completed an equestrian statue of the Black Prince for Leeds. It was paid for not by grant from parliament, but by subscription throughout the Empire. The work took some time to complete. The bottom half was unveiled on 24 May 1909 and the final monument in March 1911. It benefits from close inspection rather than just being seen out of the car window with good bas-reliefs round the basin:-
Another pleasure of visiting Photo London was having an opportunity to see and admire the luxuriant marine sculpture on the river front of Somerset House. I’m not sure who it’s by. John Bacon senior ?
I was asked to give a lunch-time talk to the Romney Street Group at the Athenaeum, that great Greco-Roman palace in Waterloo Place. It was designed in 1824 by Decimus Burton, who was only 24 at the time, the son of a builder contractor, James Burton, employed by Nash in the construction of the Regent’s Park Terraces. Decimus was educated at Tonbridge School and then the Royal Academy Schools and was taken under the wing of Nash at an early age to design Cornwall Terrace and Clarence Terrace. The Athenaeum was originally meant to match the United Services Club opposite, now the Institute of Directors, but by 1830 when it opened it had acquired more gravitas, with a bust of Athene, recently re-gilt, over the front entrance and a cast of the Parthenon Frieze below the parapet:-
I have become negligent in writing about buildings between Stepney and Burlington House because the number of those that I haven’t already written about inexorably shrinks. But yesterday I was walking up Bond Street and saw a building that was shown in a presentation last week and which I didn’t recognise. It’s towards the north end of New Bond Street (I was also encouraged to differentiate between New and Old), known as Medici Court. I assume from its name that it must be the building which was originally occupied by Joe Duveen, no less, and commissioned by him from the architect W.H. Romaine-Walker, who himself belonged to a family of art dealers. It’s in the style that I realise lots of people hate, but adds pomp and ceremony to Bond Street:-
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.
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:-
I attended a meeting yesterday to look at plans for the improvement of the public realm on Old Bond Street. Our attention was drawn to the view of the so-called Ferragamo building on the corner of Old Bond Street and Burlington Gardens. I had never really looked at it with its flèche reminiscent of Ste. Chapelle. It was built in the mid-1920s for Atkinson’s, a firm of parfumiers, and has prominent public lettering recording this:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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