City of London I

The City doth now like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning: silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless sky

      A  flying visit to the capital for the TAG awards at the Art Workers Guild in Queen Square last week. Quinlan Terry won a Life Time Achievement Award.

    Next day a trip into the City of London by underground from St Pancras through soot-lined cuttings to Barbican.  A walk down to Cheapside - doing my best to ignore those monstrous office blocks Terry Farrell imposed on London Wall in the mid 80s - and St Mary-le-Bow.
     The medieval church was destroyed in the Great Fire and was rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren, in turn that church was severely damaged in the Blitz and was rebuilt after the War by Laurence King.  St Mary's was one of the most expensive   the interior is based on the Basilica of Maxentius in Rome - though it does require some imagination to make that leap.  The plan is indeed basilican, but with very narrow n & s aisles and a very wide nave. To me, it seems to be an early example of the emerging English Baroque school that was centred on the Office of Works.  The tower is faced in Portland Stone; the church itself of brick.

     Laurence King (1907-81) is an architect we have encountered before in this blog at Walsingham.  He was an architect much favoured in Anglo-Catholic circles at the time, a stylistic chameleon.  At Walsingham, for instance, he worked in both Modernist and traditional styles. He seems to have been both influenced by Sir Ninian Comper & the Alcuin Club, and the 'Back-to Baroque' of the Anglo-Papalist SSPP & Martin Travers.   Though it is essentially the rebuilding of the church built by Wren, Laurence's furnishings and decorative scheme tend to give the church a dated feel. Not only that, they raise the temperature of what is already an intense architectural space. 

    From there I walked into a fascinating area of narrow lanes and low rise buildings.  I suppose if you want an idea of what the City was like before the Blitz and before the buildings of all those Temples of Mammon, an idea of what the City was like in Dickens' time this would be it.  I then walked up towards the Mansion House and St Stephen Walbrook, finding myself beside James Stirling's domineering No 1 Poultry.  It is a prime example of insular Post Modernism. Its gestation the result of one of the most acrimonious planning disputes of the 1980s in which developer Peter Palumbo sought to build a office block by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.  This was opposed by various amenity societies.  The result, for both sides, was pyric.  The Mies scheme was halted in its tracks but the amenity societies failed to halt the demolition of the existing buildings on the site, and Palumbo turned to Stirling for a new scheme. That got (obviously) planning permission, but Palumbo lost interest and put the building on the market before it was complete.  Stirling's building really is a dog's dinner - like the curate's egg 'Good in parts'.  Overpowering and decidedly clunky in places. Graceless.  The architectural critic Jonathan Meades has said that, "His buildings, like their bombastic maker, looked tough but were perpetual invalids, basket cases."

     Sadly St Stephen's was closed so I headed further east through a warren of courts and alleyways south of Cornhill to St Mary Woolnoth.  This one of those buildings that inspired Post Modernism.  It is bold, assertive and it is the work of Wren's pupil, and then assistant, Nicholas Hawksmoor.  It is also rather small, but it has immense heft.   The west tower is possessed of a strange almost chimerical beauty, and the north wall, on Lombard St is one of the most powerful compositions in all of British architecture.  It is, however, in a filthy state and in sore need of a clean.  The church is faced completely in Portland stone.  The w door, like the doors under the tower at St Mar-le-Bow are based on a deign by the French architect Mansard.

    The interior is an almost completely top-lit centralised liturgical space; plan is a variation of the Byzantine 'cross in square'.  Echoes of Antiquity: it could be read as either atrium or basilica.  Rather like St Mary-le-Bow, is intense space - both churches are after all crammed with a lot of architecture, and would have been more so in the case of St Mary W when the galleries were in place.  They were removed by that arch-Goth William Butterfield when he restored the church in the mid 19thcentury, and the gallery fronts side against the outer walls.  (Though the galleries, I think, must have been rather narrow.)  Hawksmoor gave the altar a ciborium in emulation of the one in St Peter's in Rome.  The ciborium is partially supported by two Solomonic columns which were associated the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. In the plasterwork of the ceiling above the altar is a depiction of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove ready to descend upon the bread and wine at the Holy Communion to make them the body and blood of Christ.

     

Bath in November II

   

     Tuesday, our final day in the city.  The morning was spent mainly shopping; in the afternoon, however, we visited the art collections in the City.

     Our first stop was the Victoria Art Gallery, the municipal gallery and collection.  It is housed in a splendid turn-of-the-century building by the Scots architect J M Brydon (1840-1901).  Eclectic and lavish - the detailing is very fine.  On a corner site with a circular, rather French vestibule linking (like a hinge) the staircase etc. with the first floor gallery.  The latter is a single, long top lit space with a coved ceiling and walls coloured blue, which makes a welcome and splendid foil to the pictures.  (Such a contrast to the dreary grey and white colour scheme at the Glynn Vivian Gallery, here in the infernal city.  Both art and architecture deserve better.) 
    Pictures are displayed 'skied', as they would have been in the past, and anti-clockwise around the room chronologically (?).  The overall effect is very confident.  Highlights are work by the local artists Rosemary & Clifford Ellis, and the portrait of the furniture maker Charles Baker by George Frederick Swaish (no, I haven't heard of him either).

     Later, as the light began to fade we walked up Great Pulteney St. to the Holburne Museum.  I've talked about it briefly before. The collection is a marvel, of national standard.  It is the work of Sir Thomas William Holburne, 5th Baronet  Menstrie (1793-1874).  Sir Thomas lived in Cavendish Crescent with his three sisters.  At the time of his death his collection numbered some 4,000 objects.  In 1882 his sister, Mary, bequeathed the collection to the city.

    The second home of the collection was the splendid former Bath Savings Bank in Charlotte St. (George Alexander, 1841).   In 1911, however, the collection trustees bought the former Sydney Hotel at the far end of Great Pulteney St., and employed Sir Reginald Blomfield to convert the building into a gallery.  The result, unsurprisingly, is rather Frenchified - he was, after all, the author of the two volume 'A History of French Architecture'.  The museum opened to the public in 1916, in the midst of WWI.

    The collection, which now numbers some 13,000 objects, is, as I have said, quite spectacular.  There are objets d'art, ceramics, textiles, furniture and paintings.  Artists include Guardi, Zoffany, Brangwyn, and Gainsborough.  In particular there is a room dedicated to the Northern Renaissance, and it is utterly splendid.  A real Schatzkammer.  Some stunning panel paintings.  I was particularly impressed by a portrait 'Unknown Man' attributed to Jan Cornelis Vermeyen.

Salisbury Cathedral: Furnishings

     Just back from a couple of nights in London, but more of that in another post

     If you have been reading my cathedral posts over the years you may be aware of vicissitudes of these buildings have undergone over the centuries.  This is particularly of their furnishings, which are venerable not only to changes of theology, and liturgy, but also taste. All the Medieval Cathedrals of Great Britain, have since the Early Modern Period, been subject to repeated (and very often self-conscious) purging of furnishings, especially the art.  Salisbury was no different.  After the iconoclasms of the 16th & 17th centuries, the cathedral underwent two seismic re-orderings firstly under Wyatt and then Sir George Gilbert Scott.  Much effort has been expended since in gradually undoing latter, when there was an effort, I think successfully, to re-order the interior in the manner advocated by the Alcuin Club.  Out went Scott's metal choir screen, the marble High Altar, the gasoliers and the encaustic tiling.  The architect, William Henry Randall Blacking (1889-1958), who trained under Sir J N Comper, was the consultant. Sadly his work in the Trinity Chapel has itself succumbed to the vagaries of fashion with terrible results - the 'English' altar has been removed and the new glass is far too dark.  The place has become a horror.

     What I haven't mentioned so far in these series of posts on the cathedral is the role the cathedral played in the liturgy of the British mainland in the Middle Ages, when the Rite of the Cathedral - what is known as the Sarum Rite - became the predominate liturgical expression not only in England, but in Scotland and Wales.  Some of the Medieval furnishings such as the pulpitum, and (apparently) the Rood beam, survived until the fell hand of Wyatt swept them away.

     Like Lichfield, Salisbury is rich in monuments.

Work in Progress: San Pietro delle Immagini

     Currently working on this, the façade of the Sardinian Romanesque church of San Pietro della Immagini - St Peter of the Images.  The images being a Deposition group of polychromatic sculptures that was once housed in the church.  St Peter's is situated in the small town of Bulzi. 

December

 

December by John Clare (1793-1864)

While snow the window-panes bedim,

The fire curls up a sunny charm,

Where, creaming o'er the pitcher's rim,

The flowering ale is set to warm;

Mirth, full of joy as summer bees,

Sits there, its pleasures to impart,

And children, 'tween their parent's knees,

Sing scraps of carols o'er by heart.

And some, to view the winter weathers,

Climb up the window-seat with glee,

Likening the snow to falling feathers,

In fancy infant ecstasy;

Laughing, with superstitious love,

O'er visions wild that youth supplies,

Of people pulling geese above,

And keeping Christmas in the skies.

As tho' the homestead trees were drest,

In lieu of snow, with dancing leaves,

As tho' the sun-dried martin's nest,

Instead of ickles, hung the eaves,

The children hail the happy day -

As if the snow were April's grass,

And pleas'd, as 'neath the warmth of May,

Sport o'er the water froze as glass.