Something Nice To Eat

     Cookery means the knowledge of Medea and of Circe and of Helen and of the Queen of Sheba. It means the knowledge of all herbs and fruits and balms and spices, and all that is healing and sweet in the fields and groves and savoury in meats. It means carefulness and inventiveness and willingness and readiness of appliances. It means the economy of your grandmothers and the science of the modern chemist; it means much testing and no wasting; it means English thoroughness and French art and Arabian hospitality.  It means, in fine, that you are to see imperatively that everyone has something nice to eat.

     So said that eminent Victorian John Ruskin, and who's to argue with him.  He is thus quoted at the beginning of this beguiling 'short' (some 20 mins) directed by Sarah Erulkar, for the Gas Council.  As the dedicated reader of this blog will know I have a certain soft spot for these short films, documentaries, made to be shown in British cinemas before the main feature.  'Something Nice to Eat' is one of my favourites.  It is erudite, intelligent, playful and deeply stylish. Visually, it is a feast.  It may even be described as quintessential 'Sixties'.  After all, the model Jean Shrimpton does make 'a brief but intriguing' appearance.
     I have written briefly about Erulkar before on this blog, when I made mention of her wonderful film for the GPO 'Picture to Post', which is another visual feast. In 'Something Nice to Eat' her cinematographer was Wolfgang Suschitzky, who was also, you'll remember, the cinematographer for 'Get Carter'.  Between them they create some arresting and inventive imagery; food in particular is photographed in abundance and with sensuousness.  The fruit and veg stalls in Berwick St market are piled high with produce, both mundane and exotic; the butchers and the fishmongers displays are splendid. War and Post-war Austerity, this film may be saying, is over, banished.  Much use is made too of Schlieren photography (by Ronnie Whitehouse). The result is rather Psychedelic.  

     In both films Erulkar was also the script writer.  Here her words are narrated by David de Keyser, and the recipes presented by John Addey.  The cookery consultant was Margaret Costa of The Sunday Times Magazine.  Music by Johnny Hawksworth.

     In all a very classy production, especially when one considers it is essential an advert for the latest gas appliances.

    

 Something Nice to Eat

1967

Producer:               Anthony Gilkison Associates, The Gas Council

Director:                 Sarah Erulkar

Cinematographer: Wolfgang Suschitsky

Currently reading....

 

....'The Great Fortune'.

    Since my latest London trip I have been reading 'The Great Fortune' the first book in Olivia Manning's remarkable 'Balkan Trilogy', and, yes, I have read them in reverse order.  My excuse, if excuse I needed, was that I was reading them in the classic penguin orange spine edition, and it was a question of reading them when I found them.

     'The Great Fortune' was published in 1960, it is set in Bucharest, at that most inauspicious time, the outbreak of World War II.  Guy Pringle, who works for the British Council, returns to the city with his new wife Harriet. Through her eyes we watch as the small British community, and their Romanian friends, react to the approaching cataclysm.  Chiefly among them is Yaki, Prince Yakimov, a beguiling, English educated, down-at-heal Russian aristocrat.  His is perhaps the most memorable character in all three novels of the trilogy, and his story - the story of his downfall - forms their main sub-plot.

    At this point I had written, 'Like her contemporaries, Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Bowen, Olivia Manning was Anglo-Irish'.  She saw herself as participating in that 'usual Anglo-Irish sense of belonging nowhere'.  However I doubt that either statement carries any water, and in any case I don't get the sense it was so important to her or her literary output as it as it was to Elizabeth Bowen.  
     Anyway, back to the 'Balkan Trilogy'; The Spoilt City' appeared in 1962, and 'Heroes and Friends' in 1965.  All three novels are essentially auto-biographical.  As she said to a friend: "I write out of experience, I have no fantasy. I don't think anything I've experienced has ever been wasted."  Indeed not, for nearly two decades later a second trilogy appeared, The Levant Trilogy.

     In 1987 BBC adapted both trilogies for television, producing a series entitled 'Fortunes of War'.  It starred Emma Thompson and Kenneth Brannagh as Harriet and Guy Pringle.  And it was through this adaptation that I discovered the novels.  Both books and series are recommended.  I think you will enjoy them.

English Cottage interiors

     

    This book originally published in 1989 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in hardback, as part of the 'Country Series' which may eventually have extended to some 46 titles.  The subsequent publishing history is rather complex.  Then W&N was bought by Orion in 1991 the series was then reissued in paperback under the subsidiary imprint of Phoenix Illustrated.  I believe that the numbering of the books was changed, though I may be wrong.  Eventually the publishing of the series passed to another subsidiary imprint 'Seven Dials Publishing'. 

     Anyway, to the volume in question, the paperback edition of 'English Cottage Interiors', published in, I think, 1991.  The author is Hugh Lander and the photographer Peter Rauter.  Actually, it's never explicitly said who the photographer is; it is merely implied.  While the text is copyrighted to the authors, the photos are copyrighted to the publishers.  For me the photographs make the book.  Whenever possible, Mr Lauter used natural lighting; the results are quite atmospheric.
     It really is a lovely thing, a sort of Coffee table book in miniature.  The interiors featured range from the self-conscious to the utilitarian; the urban to the rural.  It is just the sort of thing that, for both financial and cultural reasons, could not be produced today.

Up on the Downs

Up on the Downs by John Masefield 1878-1967

Up on the downs the red-eyed kestrels hover,
Eyeing the grass.
The field-mouse flits like a shadow into cover
As their shadows pass.

Men are burning the gorse on the down’s shoulder;

A drift of smoke
Glitters with fire and hangs, and the skies smoulder,
And the lungs choke.

Once the tribe did thus on the downs, on these downs, burning
Men in the frame,
Crying to the gods of the downs till their brains were turning
And the gods came.

And to-day on the downs, in the wind, the hawks, the grasses,
In blood and air,
Something passes me and cries as it passes,
On the chalk downland bare.

     As I have done for over a year now, I am beginning the month with a poem.  This month however marks a slightly new tack; previously, using John Clare's 'Shepherd's Calendar', I have been able to couple the poem with the month.  I suspect this will now prove more difficult to do, so I have decided to simply post poems I like.

     I associate this poem with the Uffington White Horse, high upon the downs in south Oxfordshire.  As far as I know there is no other connection other than it was chosen by Sir John Betjeman for his tv anthology 'The Queen's Realm' of 1977, and coupled with aerial shots of the horse, and of other chalk figures.  (The poem was read, to great effect, by the South African born actress Janet Suzman.)  

     I pass the horse a few times a year as I travel between the Infernal city and London, and I try and make the point of looking from the train as we pass.  It is after all the oldest hill figure in Europe.  Twice now I have pointed the horse's presence to groups of American tourists but to little effect.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

Leon Krier

     Over the weekend I got to thinking about the late Leon Krier - it is just a year after his death - and I wondered if there were currently any plans for a retrospective exhibition of his work here in the UK.  A brief internet search drew a blank.  Perhaps you dear reader know otherwise?  If so let me know.

     

     A retrospective exhibition would be very appropriate, I feel, as Krier, architect, town planner, author, and  polemist lived in London for some twenty years from the late Sixties to the late eighties.  He initially worked for James Stirling and then taught at the AA (1972-74) and the Royal College of Art.  He was part of the intellectual life of the city, a key thinker in the emerging Post Modernist/New Classicism movement.  He was active in the Urban Design Group, as was Terry Farrell; and both were habitues of the Leinster Gardens headquarters of Andreas Papadakis's Academy Editions.  It must have been very exciting, very intense time.  During his time in London he published 'James Stirling: Buildings and Projects 1950-1974' 1975; 'Rational Architecture', 1978; 'Leon Krier; Houses, palaces, Cities', 1984.  And of course, it is here in the UK that, with the patronage of the then Prince of Wales Poundbury, was created.

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, Farrell's work here represents a stylistic and methodological parting of the ways between the two men.

     Work commenced in 1978 (the year the Urban Design Group was founded) and continued until 1991.  In some ways Farrell's work was experimental, instantiating the ideas that were being thrashed out in places like the AA, the Urban Design Group, and headquarters of Andreas Papadakis's Academy Editions in west London. It soon came to be seen, rightly, as a paradigm of urban renewal, a revival of the Geddesian approach of 'conservative surgery'.

     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 designs.  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 the passer-by gets of Ching Court from across Monmouth St.  It is just so London.

     As you might expect from a piece of Post-Modern design there any number of references and quotations 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.