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.

Ruskin and St Marks, Venice

     Nobody has written so movingly, or powerfully, about architecture as the English critic and polymath John Ruskin (1819-1900).  I read this description of the facade of the Basilica of St Mark years ago and it has stuck with me ever since.  It is superlative.

     'And now I wish that the reader would image himself at the entrance into St Mark's Place, called the Bocca di Piazza (mouth of the square).  We will push fat through into the shadow of the pillars at the end of the 'Booca di Piazza'.  Between those pillars there opens a great light, and in the midst of it, as we advance slowly, the vast tower of St mark seems to lift itself  visibly from the level field of chequered stones; and , on each side, the countless arches prolong themselves into ranged symmetry, as if the rugged and irregular house that pressed together above the dark alley had been struck back into sudden obedience and lovely order, and all their rude casements and broken walls had been transformed into arches charged with goodly sculpture, and fluted shafts of delicate stone.
     And well may they fall back, for beyond those troops of ordered arches there rises a vision out of the earth, and all the great square seems to have opened from it in a kind of awe, that we may see it far away; - a multitude of pillars and white domes, clustered into a long low pyramid of coloured light; a treasure heap, it seems, partly of gold, and partly of opal and mother-of-pearl, hollowed  beneath into five great vaulted porches, ceiled with fair mosaic, and beset with sculpture of alabaster, clear a amber and delicate a ivory, - sculpture fantastic and involved, of palm leaves and lilies, and grapes and pomegranates, and birds clinging and fluttering among the branches, all twined together into an endless network of buds and plumes; and in the midst of it, the solemn forms of angels, sceptred, and robed to the feet, and leaning to each other across the gates, their figures indistinct among the gleaming of the golden ground through the leaves beside them, interrupted and dim, like the morning light a it faded back among the branches of Eden, when first its gates were angel-guarded long ago.  And round the walls of the porches there are set pillars of variegated stones, jasper, and porphyry, and deep-green serpentine spotted with flakes of snow, and marbles, that half refuse and half yield to the sunshine, Cleopatra-like, 'their bluest veins to kiss' - the shadow, as it steals back from them, revealing line after line of azure undulation, as a receding tide leaves the waved sand; their capitals rich with interwoven tracery, rooted knots of herbage, and drifting leaves of acanthus and vine, and mystical signs, all beginning and ending in the Cross; and above them, in the broad archivolts, continuous chain of language and of life - angels, and the signs of Heaven, and the labours of men, each in its appointed season upon the earth; and above these, another range of glittering pinnacles, mixed with white arches edged with scarlet flowers, - a confusion of delight, amidst which the breasts of the Greek horses are seen blazing in their breath of golden strength, and the St mark's lion, lifted on a blue field covered with stars, until at last, as if in ecstasy, the crests of the arches break into a marble foam, and toss themselves far into the blue sky with flashes and wreaths of sculptured spray, as if the breakers on the Lido shore had been frost-bound before they fell, and the sea-nymphs had inlaid them with coral and amethyst.'

John Ruskin, 'The Stones of Venice' Vol II

St Paul, Plasmarl & St Peter, Newton: Part 2

     

     A blustery day, but sunny.  A bus ride (finally!) across the city to that most salubrious of Swansea's suburbs, Newton.  To a place of private roads, hidden villas, occasional glimpses of the sea, and St Peter's church.  Another Late Victorian/Edwardian church by that prolific architect Edward Bruce Vaughan, but in far better condition than poor old St Paul's up the valley in Plasmarl.

    St Peter stands on a corner amongst pine trees, solid, well-massed and not a little comfortable.  Quarry faced snecked masonry of Bridgend Sandstone.  Some rich detailing (Bath Stone) all in the best Bodley and Garner mode.  Some of it even put me in mind of Melrose Abbey, that remarkable Late Gothic building in the Scottish Borders.  Incomplete s tower, massive and intriguing.  As at St Paul's Plasmarl the e end more interesting than the nave.

     The rich detailing continues inside, but on the whole it's a rather dull interior - short nave of three bays and longish chancel, oddly the walls are in the same snecked masonry as the exterior.  Sedilia, otherwise no fittings of real note. 

     In all a bit disappointing, really.  Perhaps Bruce Vaughan can be thought of as a competent though pedestrian architect with, however, flashes of brilliance.

St Cuthbert's Village I

Apologies, for the version of this article I posted earlier, for some unknown reason an previous draft was published ,and not the finished article.  Mea culpa.

     I want to go back now to the Tyneside of the early 1970s and one of the locations used in the film 'Get Carter', the Modernist St Cuthbert's Village, Gateshead.  (I really can't show you the scene in question, not simply because of any reasons of copyright.)  It serves as a prime example of the sort of urban re-development that took in the first three decades after the end of WWII in Britain's major cities, as local and national government tried to solve the housing crisis.  It was miles away, figuratively and physically, from the 'New House Book'.

     St Cuthbert's Village was the work of the local council, and was opened by the Prime Minister Harold Wilson on April 7th, 1970.  It was, I suppose, quite a coup for the local council that the Prime minister should give his support in such a way.
    What was produced, however, was a sort of simulacrum, a stand-in for an actual village, like one of those cream substitutes so beloved of food manufacturers Post-War.  Grey and hulking.  It had neither church nor green, nor school.  Facilities were planned but they were late off the starting block and arrived after the residents.  There was no traditional urbanism.  It was a sort of enclosed community, introverted and not wholly integrated in the warp and weft of the community that surrounded it.  A sort of ghetto.

     The concept belonged to the Borough Architect, A Leslie Barry.  He talked of a 'village community', but all that actually meant in practice is that, like a good many architects and planners of the period, he wanted the strict segregation of pedestrians and motor vehicles.  The site was a steep slope on the south bank of the Tyne, opposite Newcastle city centre, between between Bensham Rd and Askew Rd..  The estate overlooked a rail marshalling yard and the High Level Bridge that carried the East Coast Mainline into the midst of the city.  Historically, the area had been known as Windmill Hills, and before slum clearance in the mid 60s, the site had contained a dense network of terraced housing.

     The actual design was shared, it seems, between Douglas Wise (of Douglas Wise & Partners) and Clifford Tee & Gale, consulting architects to the contractors Stanley Miller Ltd.  The majority of the buildings etc. were constructed of pre-cast concrete sections using the 'Miller Wise Mouchel' system (MWM for short).  The estate consisted of a single tower, or point, block and a dense checker board of four, six & eight storey maisonettes, everything connected by a series of aerial walkways.  It was designed to house 3,500 people. Construction began in 1967, and the cost all in, was, I believe, £3,700,000.  At the time it won a government award for 'Good Design in Housing'.

   1987 View of St. Cuthbert's Court and six-storey blocks
   The University of Edinburgh Tower Block Project

   1987 View of St. Cuthbert's Village
   The University of Edinburgh Tower Block Project

     However there were problems almost immediately - flats were damp and roofs leaked, and it was difficult to heat the flats.  The project limped on for some 25 years, waxing in problems both structural and social, before it was demolished.  Its fate matched that of another council estate of the period, the nearby Clasper Village.

The New House Book II

      A second tranche of images from Terence Conran's 'New House Book' of 1985.

    The first image is a page of photographs taken in Leon Krier's Belsize park flat.  In the mid-eighties I began to know the place quite well.  There was, I think, a grand piano in the room, though I may be mistaken.  The library was at the front looking out on to the street.  The rustication in the hall contained all sorts of storage, with a tiny bathroom at the far end on the right. Anyway, outside of the world of the country house, I think it must be one of the stylish rooms I have yet experienced.  I wonder if it still exists.