London, and The Comyn Ching Triangle, Part 2

      

     And so, finally, to the architecture.  As I wrote in Part 1 of this post, the site is triangular, bounded by Monmouth St., Mercer St., and Shelton St.  I think the term for this in Urbanist circles is a boundary block - think doughnut/bagel here.

     At the time of the closure of Covent Garden wholesale market the Triangle belonged to the architectural ironmongers Comyn Ching (they had their showrooms in Shelton St.) and the gardens and yards at the centre of the block had been submerged in workshops, apparently including 3 working forges.  It is an example of the way small scale manufacturing, often highly skilled, developed in the industrial cites of England; think of the workshops of the 'Little Masters' in areas like the Jewry Quarter of Birmingham, or of the cutlery makers in Sheffield.

     Comyn Ching, a family firm, at some point decided to re-develop their property, and 1977 called in the 39 year old Terry Farrell.  Farrell was then in partnership with Nicholas Grimshaw.  As has been pointed out, Farrells work here represents a stylistic and methodological parting of the ways between the two men.

     Work commenced in 1978 and continued until 1990.  It soon came to be seen, rightly, as a paradigm of urban renewal.  The 'shanty town' in the midst of the site was cleared away to create a semi-public open space - Ching Court.  The twenty five properties that lined the perimeter of the site were very well restored and the three corner properties sold to a developer who had to work to Farrell's deign.  The detailing is superb, particularly the wooden porches and the two entrances to Ching Court.  The northern one is the more interesting in that it aligns with Tower Court across Monmouth St.  The visitor passes through a dark entrance passage and emerges in a circular quasi-external space at the head of the site that changes the direction of travel, with steps take the visitor down to the level of the paved courtyard.  It is all handled beautifully, quite stage managed, for instance that delicious glimpse you get of Ching Court from across Monmouth St. is just so London.

     As you might expect from a piece of Post-Modern design there any number of references and quotes in the architecture.  The porches, for instance, are a mixture of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Art Deco.  One of my favourite details is the hefty half-buried column on the corner of Shelton St & Mercer St.  Farrell's work here seemed to chart the course for a more considered approach to Postmodern design than that in America, but it was not to be.

    I do like some of Farrell's later work, but rarely, if ever, was it as good as this.

St Pancras New Church

      St Pancras New Church stands at the busy junction of Upper Woburn Place and the Euston Rd.  Very chaotic and noisy.  The west front now faces a large Neo-Georgian office block* (not bad in itself), but when built, the church overlooked the southern half of Euston Square.  (Sadly, that whole s half of the square was built over between the Wars.)  To the s, where the Bartlett School of Planning and the Memoir Club (a Hotel) stand, there was originally a small group of stucco villas. Not what one expect to see south of the Euston Rd

     I should at this point, I suppose, address the name of the church.  The church was built to serve the spiritual needs of the newly urbanised southern part of the vast and ancient parish of St Pancras.  St Pancras Old Church, which is some 3/4 mile north north east of the new, is the original parish church, around which a number of traditions have accrued, such as a Roman origin.  None of these claims, however, are supported by any evidence.  After consecration by the Bishop of London in 1822 it became the parish church and the Old Church reduced to the status of Chapel of Ease. Since then the original parish has been split up.  The Old church is the centre of the Parish of Old St Pancras and St Matthew and the New church the Parish of St Pancras and Euston.

    The church, and Woburn Lodge, the northernmost of that group of demolished villas, are the work of father and son William and Henry Inwood.  The church is in a monumental Greek Revival style with crisp ashlar masonry.  The order is Ionic, based on that of the Erechthion on the Athenian Acropolis.  The plan follows what was by then a long established Anglican form 'The Basilica after the Ancients', particularly as developed by James Gibbs at St Martin in the Fields, that is a with both a temple front and a west tower.  A bit weak that tower.  The east end is more complex and stranger still.  Where to begin?  Perhaps with the central apse.  I hardly need to say that Ancient Greek architecture did not use the apse.  This one has attached Ionic columns.  And then there are vestries, copies of the famous caryatid porch of the Erecththion.   Because the porches also contain entrances to the crypt, the sculptor of the caryatids, Charles Rossi, departed from the design of the originals to carry inverted torches and water jugs to symbolise mourning and death, while behind, lurking, silent and remote in the shadows, are sarcophagi.  It is all very sculptural, the east end, so that the overall effect is not so far from the English Baroque of Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh.         Unsurprisingly the church has been the subject to much criticism and ridicule over the years.  For me the main criticism is that it just doesn't rise to the occasion.  The detailing is very good, but the location just demands something bolder.

     The interior too disappoints, but in a different manner.  There is a towering octagonal narthex under the tower, but the nave is just one enormous room, daunting, cold, and lacking the numinous.  The ceiling is anti-climactic; again something bolder is required. Where is the 'mysterium tremendum et fascinans'?
      No furnishings of note either, certainly nothing to match the scale of the interior, some fine monuments though.  The most interesting feature are the columns (cast iron?) that support the gallery.  I think Charles Holden added the current columns in the apse, when he designed a new High Altar in 1914, but I may be wrong.

* 'Nettlefold House', 1928, by George Vernon (1870-1942).  As office and showroom for the architectural ironmongers Nettlefold & Son.

Effi o Blaenau

     An unexpected trip to the Odeon Cinema in Swansea yesterday evening to watch the Welsh language film 'Effi o Blaenau' directed by Marc Evans.  It's all a bit complicated but the script is an adaptation, by the producer Bronwen Cennard, of a one-woman play, 'Ipigenia in Splott' by Gary Owen.  It is based ultimately on Euripides' play 'Iphigeneia in Aulis', but how one gets from Aulis to Splott and then Blaenau Ffestiniog we couldn't work out.  An intellectual leap too far for us - even after having it explained to me via ai it takes some swallowing.*  In fact, I would go so far as to say it is incoherent.  Anyway, the bf liked it very much but I was circumspect in my praise.  I found it interesting.

     My reservations rested almost solely upon the rather cliched imagery - the shot of the main character laying face up in the bath, the ubiquity of the drone shot.  The inert camera. We've seen enough of them by now.  But then, I suspect, this film isn't about setting out a new direction in cinematography.

     The film opens with Effie and her friends preparing for a night out in Llandudno, getting shit-faced on vodka and perhaps pulling.  All three of them are essentially solipsistic hedonists, living from weekend to weekend.  Perhaps there is nothing else to do in Blaenau Ffestiniog - where apparently is is always winter and always wet, but Snowdonia is not Splott.  The urban landscape, the alienation and the grittiness may always be with us, but the rain is not. We can assume they are unemployed, but they can still find the cash for a Saturday night on the tiles.  Effi is certainly no example of the Jungian individuated person, she is self-regarding and callous.  Here is the Meaning Crisis.  The substance abuse is simultaneously both destructive, and a search for transcendence.  

     And then something happens and meaning presents itself to Effi.  In fact, it presents itself three times.  The first time in the form of a former soldier, Lee.  Lee has lost his right leg in either Afghanistan or Iraq.  At this point Effi ' has a sort of epiphany and we see her in a different light.  She is shown as kind, softly spoken and loving.  She gathers meaning to herself in his vulnerability. (I thought that perhaps Lee would be her salvation but realised soon enough that it was too early in the film for this to happen.)  Her second epiphany is during her pregnancy, with another vulnerable body to care for.  Finally, for a third time meaning is presented to her, and this time is not snatched away, in the person of her neighbour's young daughter.  It is in the last place she would look, being on her own doorstep, and the offspring of woman she despised.  Each time she chooses to take on responsibility and find meaning there.

     The acting was excellent; the star Leisa Williams very good at eliciting sympathy for an, at times, repugnant character, Effi, without ironing-out her flaws.  The supporting cast too, is very good; credit in particular to Carys Gwilym as Effi's grandmother, and Owen Alun as the hapless Kev.

     It is at times this compelling film is very raw, and some scenes were particularly affecting.  Effi is no mere sacrificial victim.  She makes choices and she has agency, but she is also feckless.  It is all very well for a middle class reviewer in the Guardian, to see this a 'savage indictment' of the system, but Effi's chaotic life is downwind of the extreme bodily autonomy that the Guardian seems keen to promote.  In the end her life gathers some meaning when she becomes friends with her neighbour.  It's that simple.  When we accept to love and care, to take responsibility, we limit our agency.  What this film presents us with, perhaps, no doubt, unwittingly, is a spiritual journey in which Effi, through the most painful catharsis, learns to place the needs of others above the needs of her own ego and thereby finds meaning.

    Whisper it, but this film is quietly conservative.  Could almost have been written by Jordan Peterson.

     I honestly don't think I'd want a return visit to the Odeon.  Before the film there was half an hour of adverts and trailers.  It wasn't so much the adverts we disliked, but the trailers which seemed designed to discourage attendance.  The worst was that for Christopher Nolan's adaptation of the Odyssey, which looked terrible.  On the strength of the trailer, one to miss, I think.

Effi o Blaenau

2026

Producer:               Branwen Cennard

Director:                 Marc Evans

Cinematographer: Eira Wyn Jones

* None of this mythological framework is at all obvious in the film.  Like many will, and have, I came to this film without preparation.  As Lola Salem has recently said in The Critic, "Art is not about diversity, or access, or urban regeneration. It is not about measures that are ontologically extrinsic to it. Art is first and foremost about art, and the artefact owes us nothing".

London, and The Comyn Ching Triangle, Part 1

       Back to London for a couple of nights this week and the RIBA TAG Summer Party.  It was a busy day; the Zurbaran exhibition at the National Gallery in the morning; lunch with a friend in the excellent Fromagerie in Lamb's Conduit St; a visit to St Pancras New Church; dinner at that perennial favourite Caio Bella; and finally the party and afterwards the pub (The Queens Larder, Queen Square).  I didn't get back to my hotel 'til nearly eleven.

     That morning, on the way to the National Gallery, I paid a return visit to The Comyn Ching Triangle.  The redevelopment of the site is an early and, I think, highly successful project by the English architect Sir Terry Farrell (1938-2025).  Before things went a bit wrong.  As an example of urbanism, and the burgeoning Post Modernist style it is fascinating.

     The triangle is bounded by Monmouth St to the nw, Mercer St to the e, and to the south by Shelton St.  (Does Shelton St follow the bed of a lost London river?)  It forms part of the area called 'Seven Dials'; a development of the 1690s of what was then known as 'Cock and Pie Fields'.  The developer was Thomas Neale.  Almost uniquely in Britain, it uses a Baroque urban form known in France as an 'Etoile' , or star, with streets radiating from a central point, or Rond Point.  The Point du Vue is in this particular etoile is a Doric column, an accurate replacement (of the 1980s) for the lost original.
     The subsequent history of the site is bound to Covent Garden, London's wholesale fruit and veg market, to the s.  As the market waxed in size and importance warehouses were erected in the streets to the north, slowly spreading up the slope from the market to Longacre and tumbling down the other side, spreading intermittently along Neal St almost as far as Shaftesbury Avenue. Shelton St to the east of the triangle towards Neal St. still gives a good example of how atmospheric and forbidding this area could be - the street like a deep ravine between tall and austere classical brick facades; a place of almost permanent shadow.  North of the market the demographic became increasingly working class; in some parts of Seven Dials north of the triangle there were slums.

      That said, I think that whole area of Covent Garden before the closing of the Market in 1974 must have been immensely fascinating and evocative - the chaos of the market; the theatres, and the Royal Opera House; the Gentlemen's clubs, such as the Garrick; the classy restaurants and the greasy spoons, the myriad of pubs; and the artisans in small workshops serving the market and the theatres.  All of this just rubbing along.  The BBC documentary of 1972 'How does your Garden Grow?' described it as 'the home of the most urbanised working class in the world - the Covent Garden Londoner'.

     But it couldn't carry on.  The market, sadly, had to go.  The first official official proposal to move the market was made in 1914.  In the 1940s, during WWII, two grandiose schemes were made for the area (and the rest of London); firstly there was the Royal Academy London plan of 1942; and then there was the Abercrombie plan of 1945, which sort of became official government policy. Both plans were high-handed, almost megalomaniac in their scope and ambition, requiring the wholesale demolition of much of the city.  The Abercrombie plan, for instance, required the total segregation of pedestrian and traffic (we have encountered this before at St Cuthbert's Village, Gateshead).  Vast swathes of the Covent Garden area were therefore to be sacrificed for an urban motorway and a housing scheme rather like the Barbican/London Wall.  Finally, when in the early seventies a new market was erected at Nine Elms in s London, the whole area became open to re-development.

     That wholescale re-development did not occur.  It is a long, and possibly complicated story, but it was defeated by a combination of closely related factors: increasing public dissatisfaction with the Post-War architectural settlement, strong local opposition and an increasingly focal, if not forceful, conservation movement.  The defeat of the then status quo at Covent Garden completely changed government policy.  The Abercrombie plan was suspended; with plans for the decking of Oxford St and the wholesale demotion of Whitehall scrapped.  The conservationists had won and the Modern Movement was in tatters. 

Further reading/viewing

Simon Jenkins: Concrete bungle: how public fury stopped the 1970s plan to turn London into a motorway | Planning policy | The Guardian

Though slightly tangential to this post there are some excellent colour photographs of the market in operation here

Terry Farrell, Academy Editions, 1993

Terry Farrell Selected and Curent Works, Images Publishing Group, 1994

Currently Reading......

    ....Gormenghast.

     I am almost two thirds through this massive and extraordinary novel series, having completed 'Titus Groan', and now crawling to the conclusion of 'Gormenghast'.  ('Titus Alone' lies ahead.)  Thy are the work of the artist and illustrator Mervyn Peake (1911-1968) and were written over some fifteen years from the mist of WWII to 1959.  'Titus Groan' was published in 1946, 'Gormenghast' in 1950, and 'Titus Alone' in 1959.  A further novel was attempted but it remained unfinished at his death, to be completed by his wife.  They sort of defy categorization - certainly defy my limited powers of description - beyond saying they belong to a wider literary family of British fantasy writing like Tolkien and Lewis. Though the sequence makes for an uneasy bedfellow with the work of those two titans of the genre.  Harold Bloom thought them superior to Tolkien, rating them so highly that they deserved a place in the canon.  I am no not sure that that has happened and perhaps they are now somewhat neglected.

     All of this is made the more remarkable when one considers how fragile Peake's mental health was during that period of writing - at least two stays in hospital.  Worse however was to come.  By the time of the publication of 'Titus Alone' he was developing Dementia.  Parkinson's followed.  It was a pitiful end.

    All of a sudden I have a social life.  Family lunch Sunday, dinner with friends tonight, and London tomorrow (God willing) for the RIBA TAG summer party on Thursday and a visit to the Zurbaran exhibition at the National Gallery.  See you at the weekend.

    

David Hockney (1937-2026)

     I am writing this an hour or so since the announcement of the death of the British artist David Hockney, and I must that admit that in that time I have been feeling a bit emotional.  Oh, nothing that heavy - no tears, no wailing nor gnashing of teeth, just a sense of loss and the sense of a door closing upon a world.

     His was a very full life beyond the capabilities of most of us.  Not only an artist, in quite a range of media, but a printmaker, a designer for the stage, photographer and occasionally a writer. He leaves behind a large corpus of work for the art historians to mull over in the future; the embodiment of the Protestant Work Ethic.  He was after raised in a Methodist family.  Some of this work is perhaps not as good as other work; there was sometimes a risk of banality.  And I find a lot of the work done in the 80s harsh and rebarbative. And I'd rather pass over the stained glass window he designed for Westminster Abbey.  And yet, with such a voluminous body of work over so many years it could not be otherwise.

     For me his greatest periods (there were two) were, firstly the Late 60s and early 70s when he first discovered California, and his art took off in a new figurative direction, and then brought back to London, not only his then boyfriend & muse Peter Schlesinger, but what he had learned under that bright West Coast Sun and applied it to a slightly shabby, down-at-heel, but culturally dynamic London.  It was the time of Jack Hazan's film 'A Bigger Splash', and Schlesinger's book 'A Checkered Past'.  Of mixing with the Beau Monde.  A time of large canvases -  'Portrait of An Artist' and 'Mr & Mrs Clark and Percy', and at the other end of the scale of a series of ravishing pencil-crayon portraits of friends and lovers that are quite masterly.

    The second is marked, after a long sojourn in California, by his return to England in the 1990s, to the landscape of the East Riding and particularly the Yorkshire Wolds. It sparked a period of creativity that had lasted until his death; one that saw the most exceptional creativity and growth in him as an artist.  The creation of huge monumental artworks both painting and new media, as well as the most intimate, using an i-pod.  His ability to work on both scales was something, perhaps exceptional, as was his ability to find a subject matter everywhere and in everything, which suggest an almost inexhaustible curiosity.  He was also, I suspect, what one might call, an intellectual artist.  I suppose in this post I might have depicted him as an almost Romantic artist in his response to his environment; he was an artist who was always deeply aware of the history of art and the craft of art.

    A few minutes ago I was sitting drafting this post long-hand, sitting at the kitchen table, on which stands a most Hockney-ish object - a vase of tulips.

St Cuthbert's Village II

     I now want to skip over the Pennines to Manchester and this BBC documentary, from 1974, about the redevelopment of the city on the 1960s.  Erroneously, the notes to this video claim it is the infamous Hulme Crescents; it is actually the Coverdale Estate, nicknamed 'Fort Ardwick' by the disgruntled residents.  It was designed by Manchester Corporation Architects Department, in collaboration with Bison Concrete Northern Ltd.  It was constructed, like St Cuthbert's Village, using prefabricated concrete slabs - the 'Bison Concrete Wall-frame System'.  The estate consisted of flats, maisonettes and houses.  As with the other two estates mentioned in this post, its failure was precipitous, and the film presents a churlish council struggling to keep up with the effects of its redevelopment policy, including apportioning blame to its own tenants.  'Fort Ardwick' was finally demolished in 1992

     The local MP Gerald Kaufmann said of it,

     'The scale of the buildings is often daunting. I have in mind Fort Beswick and Fort Ardwick in my own constituency. The design is frequently all too forbidding. That is why the two estates are called "Forts". "I am on the Fort", constituents tell me. Such developments are often unsightly. The approaches are not attractively landscaped and are often strewn with litter and debris.

     'Refuse disposal is too often haphazard and infrequent, and this can lead to the proliferation of insects and vermin which are already fostered by design defects. There was a penetrating article recently in The Guardian pointing this out. The caretaker service often is insufficient to meet the needs, where the service exists at all. Too many developments in my own constituency and that of my hon. Friend have no caretaker service."

     'The despair of some tenants can be summed up in a remark made to me by a lady who lives on Coverdale Crescent, more commonly known as "Fort Ardwick", which is now perhaps the best known deck access development in Britain. A few weeks ago, on one of my visits to see the estate, I had a long discussion with a number of the residents. One of them said to me, "If Labour wins the election, it ought to do two things: abolish the House of Lords, and demolish Fort Ardwick."

  

     We underestimate the complete dislocation that working class people suffered as a result of these schemes.   By the end of the 60s the Post-War vision of the New Jerusalem began to crumble and few years later it seemed that Modernism was itself defeated.  For some on the left, including perhaps the director of Get Carter, Mike Hodges, it caused a cognitive dissonance.  The failure of such estates as St Cuthbert's Village, really wasn't the result of corruption, but an intellectual failure.  I think, that in some respects, it caused the breaking of the social contract.