The Queen Elizabeth II Memorial, part 2: The Triumph of Mediocrity

  

   Yes, just when you thought it was safe to go in the water....

    Today marks what would have been the Queen Elizabeth II's hundredth birthday.  So, with a rather muted fanfare the final designs for the Queen Elizabeth II Memorial in St James's Park have been placed before the public.  Well, I think I might be rather muted if this is the best that we can do.  The images are from the Cabinet Office, and they cannot even manage to spell 'Commonwealth'.  I really shouldn't complain about this because, as any reader of this blog will have seen, my spelling is, at times, atrocious.
     Anyway, this morning X, nee Twitter, is mildly a-flutter with posts about this, and the tweeters, including myself, are not happy.  There is a sense that the design, which promises to be 'more than a landmark'. does the Late Queen a disservice.  People have been voicing their disappointment that there will be no equestrian statue of her Late Majesty, as illustrated in Foster + Partners submission.  Sadly, it was never that likely, I think - the five designs that went out to public consultation were merely in the way of an 'Early Proposed Design Concept'.  As Foster + Partners later(?) admitted the equestrian statue was merely there for 'scale'.  As I wrote in my previous post on this project, consultation was a P0temkin exercise.  Not only that, it was highly misleading. People supported the Foster scheme on the assumption that a) it was a serious concrete proposal and b) they were going to get an equestrian statue.
     So, what are we likely to get? Well, thanks to Foster + Partners and Lord Janvrin and his committee* we shall have the following: On the Mall we have a bronze statue of the Queen, by Martin Jennings, standing atop a stone pier, and (beyond the gates designed by Sir Aston Webb) an area with a bronze bust of the Queen on a stone plinth, by Karen Newman; followed by another area with a 'Commonwealth Compass' designed by Sir Norman Foster himself. At some point there will also be a bronze statue of the Late Duke of Edinburgh by Martin Jennings, a new bridge over the lake with a balustrade of cut glass inspired by Queen Mary's Tiara, which the Queen wore on her wedding day.  And then there is the sculpture by Yinka Shonibare, 'The Commonwealth Wind Sculpture'.  Apparently, there will be themed gardens with places for relaxation and reflection.   
     The words, reflection reflect and contemplation, re-occur throughout the material provided by the Cabinet Office; the Prime Minister is quoted thus on the Government website: "As our longest‑serving monarch, Queen Elizabeth II devoted her life to public service. The nation will commemorate her extraordinary reign with a memorial that offers a place of reflection for generations to come."  Nice to know everybody is on message.**

     Lord Foster says, "With a serene and contemplative atmosphere, there will be opportunities to rediscover – or perhaps for some to discover – the legacy of Her Majesty."  What does that even mean?

     We told that the design attempts to reflect (that word again) the Queen, as the Chairman of the Committee has written, "Our task has been to recommend a memorial capturing her role, her personality and what she meant to so many of us - whilst being of public benefit which was so important to her."  But how is that possible when so much of her private values, such as her Christian faith is omitted?  The official memorial website, run by Kanda Consulting, does talk about her 'private faith', but does not mention any concrete expression of that.  I remain sceptical.

     The result of all of this seems to be a design teetering on the incoherent.  We are given a bit of this and a bit of that.  Some of it, such as the new bridge - the 'Bridge of Unity' - strikes me as tawdry.  As for the sculptures by Foster and Shonibare, the latter looking rather like the ghost in Jonathan Miller's 1968 tv adaptation of 'Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad', ate, a profound level, quite meaningless.  It is the triumph of mediocrity.

     I honestly believe that an equestrian statute would have been enough.

     

* Valerie Amos, Amelia Fawcett, Joe Garner, Alex Holmes, Keay, Sandy Nairne, and William Shawcross.  Nice work if you can get it.

** The Queen Elizabeth II Memorial website is no different.  It just bristles with insincerity.  As I said above the website is run/managed by Kanda Consulting, the Competition Website by Malcolm Reading Consultants.

'Checkered Past: A Visual Diary of the '60s and '70s'

But I sat back and looking forward

My shoes were high and I had scored

I'd bolted through a closing door

I would never find myself feeling bored

     I've been neglecting the blog of late, certainly neglecting the visual side of things, not being that happy.  It's all become a bit wordy.  Then lunchtime, for some reason, I suddenly thought of Peter Schlesinger's wonderful book 'Checkered Past: A Visual Diary of the '60s and '70s', published 2003 by Vendome Press.  I discovered this book on Ben Pentreath's Inspiration Blog over a decade ago now, and it has been a firm favourite of mine ever since.  It is a book of a slightly melancholic beauty.  Schlesinger's photographs are ravishing, sometimes possessing an ethereal quality, the result I think of the use of film.

     'Checkered Past' documents the American artist's ten years, or so, living in London from the late '60s to the late '70s.  When David Hockney returned to Britain in 1968, Schlesinger - then his lover - followed.  They settled in the then slightly seedy Notting Hill in w London.  In those days those grand stucco houses were subdivided into flats and bedsits.  It was a life poised between the bohemian and the Beau Monde.  A life that included, amongst a cast of seemingly thousands, such 'Somethingofthechamelon' favourites Cecil Beaton, Patrick Proctor, David Hockney, Min Hogg, Gala Mitchell, and Celia Birtwell; the social, the arts, applied arts and the intellectual. Socialites and plutocrats.  A life partially covered in Jack Hazzan's 1973 film 'A Bigger Splash', which purportedly covers the aftermath of the end of Schlesinger's relationship with David Hockney, and the creation of one of Hockney's most well known paintings, 'Portrait of an Artist'.

     It is a world that is slowly slipping from our grasp.  It essentially ended in the mid-70s after the Oil crises.  I think it was Sir Roy Strong, who moved in the same circles, who said that it was the last social great period, or words to that effect.  Certainly a more colourful world both in terms of the visual but also the character of those depicted.  There was definitely more place for the eccentric and the intellectual.

Checkered Past: A Visual Dairy of the 60s & 70s  Peter Schlesinger, Vendome Press, 2003

Happy Easter

 

Christ is risen!

A Happy Easter to you all

Though Thou didst do down into the grave, O Immortal One, Yet Thou didst put down the power of Hades and didst rise a Conqueror, O Christ our God:

Thou speakest clear to the myrrh-bearing women, 'Rejoice';

Thou didst bestow peace upon Thine Apostles ,

And to the fallen Thou hast brought resurrection!

Badger's Drift

     

     Off to Cardiff yesterday and a matinee performance of 'Badger's Drift' at the New Theatre.  This is an adaptation of 'The Killings at Badger's Drift', the first episode of the ITV detective series 'Midsomer Murders'.  The original screen adaptation of the novel by Caroline Graham was by Anthony Horowitz.  And I think, but am not entirely sure that the stage adaptation, written and directed by Guy Unsworth, was adaptation of the original screenplay rather than the novel.  It was, as can be imagined a bit meta at times; it might help to have some idea, at least, of the tv series. Anyway, this touring production stars Daniel Casey plus a very hard-working ensemble cast.  Fans of Midsomer will know Casey played DS Troy in the first six+ tv series.  I, though, am not a fan, (neither do I hate it); the theatre, however, was full of them, and that was good to see.  Interesting use of scenery etc, reminding me of a similar technique in the National Theatre of Wales adaptation of  Thornton Wilder's 'Our Town'. 

April

April by John Clare (1793-1864)

The infant april joins the spring

And views its watery skye

As youngling linnet trys its wing

And fears at first to flye

With timid step she ventures on

And hardly dares to smile

The blossoms open one by one

And sunny hours beguile

But finer days approacheth yet

With scenes more sweet to charm

And suns arrive that rise and set

Bright strangers to a storm

And as the birds with louder song

Each mornings glory cheers

With bolder step she speeds along

And looses all her fears

In wanton gambols like a child

She tends her early toils

And seeks the buds along the wild

That blossom while she smiles

And laughing on with nought to chide

She races with the hours

Or sports by natures lovley side

And fills her lap with flowers

Watkin's ire: 'Morality and Architecture'

 

   “The one who entirely devotes himself to the Zeitgeist is a poor wretch. The seek of innovation of the everlasting avant-garde has something castrating."

     'Morality and Architecture - The Development of a Theme in Architectural History and Theory from the Gothic Revival to the Modern Movement' is one of those texts, rather like 'Learning from Las Vegas' (1972) that helped break the strangle hold of Modernism on the architectural imagination.  It originated as a lecture given in 1968 to undergraduates at Cambridge by the then young  architectural scholar Dr David Watkin of Peterhouse.  He was 27.  It was first published in book form by the Oxford University Press in 1977.  My edition, by the University of Chicago Press, dates from 1984.

     That 'theme', Watkin argues, that architecture has become, since the 19th century, to be seen merely as a manifestation of 'something else' - e.g. religion or the 'spirit of the age'.  For example Pugin, for whom his preferred style of architecture, Gothic, was a confessional marker.  Not only that but the preferred style, of whatever colour, came to be seen as morally superior thing.  A thing of purity, and to reject that thing was morally reprehensible.

    The book then is rather like a 'Catena Patrum', a chronological catalogue of theorists, historians, and critics, many of whom once held considerable intellectual sway here and abroad but are now, I suspect, barely read. Watkins cast a wide net but the emphasis is upon British intellectuals of the past two centuries.  It commences in the first half of the 19th century with the Gothic architects and theorists, the British Augustus Pugin and the French Eugene Viollet-Le-Duc before passing on to the Arts Crafts architect and theorist, the sometimes esoteric, William Lethaby.  Whereas Pugin and Lethaby were excellent architects, and whose work I greatly admire, (indeed, I really rather like Pugin the polemicist).  The same cannot be said of Viollet-Le-Duc, for though he stands in a long chain of French architectural theorists right back to the late 17th century, some of his buildings, such as the church of Église Saint-Denis de l'Estrée, are execrable.

      So, into the 20th century and the names come thick and fast: Heinrich Wofflin, Bruno Taut, Le Corbusier, Lewis Mumford, Furneaux Jordan, Siegfried Giedion, Anthony Blunt, John Summerson, with their strange - if not overblown - rhetoric and, at times, dubious grip on architectural history.  Take Siegfried Giedion for example, here talking about the Arts and Crafts: 'The circle around William Morris strives for morally pure forms."

     Finally we reach Sir Niklaus Pevsner (1902-1983) - the whole of the penultimate chapter is dedicated to his writing.  It is an audacious act, for Pevsner was Watkin's Ph.D. supervisor.  Was there a personal animus at work?  According to wiki, Reyner Banham, the critic, in a review of 'Morality and Architecture' called it 'offensive'.  Writing Pevsner's obituary in The Spectator, 3rd September 1983, the architectural historian an critic, Gavin Stamp, writes of 'Morality and Architecture' as provoking 'bitter controversy'.

    Watkins shows how the Hegelian idea of the 'geist', the 'spirit', what Hegel referred to as 'Volkgeist' and 'Weltgeist' - usually referred to simply by the pre-Hegelian term 'Zeitgeist'.  Ernst Gombrich, quoted by Watkin, described 'This Hegelian wheel is really a secularized diagram of the divine plan; the search for a centre that determines the total pattern of a civilization is consequently no more, but no less, than the quest for an initiation into god's ways with man.'  It was increasingly used by critics, such as Pevsner, in the 20th century - rather like a priestly cast picking over the entrails of a sacrificial victim - to rather self-consciously promote Modernism.  And a cast they were: Reyner Banham, for instance, had been taught at the Courtauld by the likes of Niklaus Pevsner, Anthony Blunt and Siegfried Giedion, Giedion had in turn been taught by Heinrich Wofflin, who had been taught by Jacob Burckhardt.  Quite the catena.

     

     The literary equivalent of this book is Peter Carey's 1992 book 'The Intellectuals and the Masses'.  I suppose Carey's book can be seen as a repost to F R Leavis.  Both books are iconoclastic and may be considered as attacks on the Post-War settlement.

Further thoughts (04.04.2026):

     In 1961, alarmed at recent trends in British Modernism, Pevsner wrote an article entitled 'The Return of Historicism'.  Modernism of the functionalist variety, he thought, was under threat, things were definitely getting retardaire. (See also his response the construction of New Hall Cambridge by Chamberlain, Powell and Bon.) He was right; the 1950s & 60s, particularly in America (which Pevsner doesn't really mention in his article), saw the advent of an historically informed, poetic Modernism e.g. Louis Kahn (The Trenton Bath House, 1955); John M Johansen (The Bridge House, 1957); Edward Durrell Stone (The American Embassy, New Delhi, 1959), a sort of Postmodernism avant la lettre; the 1970s the emergence of a full blown Postmodernism.  Pevsner's pure Modernism of function had barely survived a generation*.  The Zeitgeist had simply shifted.

*  Not that it's hegemony had ever been total; much to Pevsner's annoyance there had been a number of Traditionally minded architects practicing throughout the post-war period.  In addition there were a similar numbers of interior designers producing traditional interiors that received a much more sympathetic coverage in the relevant press than trad architects did in the architectural press.

Further reading

'Morality and Architecture: The Development of a Theme in Architectural History and Theory from the Gothic Revival to the Modern Movement' David Watkin, Chicago University Press, 1977

'Morality and Architecture Revisited'  David Watkin, John Murray, 2001

'Pevsner: The BBC Years'  Stephen Games, Routledge, 2016

'Pevsner: The Complete Complete Broadcast Talks'   Stephen Games, Routledge, 2016

Oxford

 St Patrick

     Yesterday news reached 'X', Twitter as was, of a proposed new development for Oxford city centre - a place, I think, in sore need of help.  The proposal, by GP Clarendon Square Ltd, and designed by the traditionalist  Quinlan Terry Architects, is for the wholesale replacement of a shopping centre (in America called a 'mall'), the 'Clarendon Centre' dating from the 1984.  The images so far released into the public domain are very interesting.  This is from the planning application:

     "This proposal is for the refurbishment of the existing buildings through the opening up of the existing thoroughfares by removing the roof coverings and the opening of the very centre to form a large 41x42 metre landscaped square.

     "Quinlan Terry CBE has designed new classical design stone facades to the square and the existing elevations. These key elevations are Cornmarket Street and Queen Street."

     They represent a welcome return to traditional Urbanism, with a street and a large public square.  There are stone facades and neo-classical detailing, and correct scale.  All to the good.  (I suppose the usual suspects will complain.)

     And what I wonder will be the knock-on effect on places such as Newbury, in Berkshire, where there is a shopping centre of a similar age - empty and forlorn - awaiting redevelopment.

     Here are a couple of images of the Clarendon Centre proposal.  They have appeared on 'X' and in the Oxford press so not quite sure who to credit the images with except either 'Goldman Properties'/'GP Clarendon Square Ltd' or 'Quinlan Terry Architects'.