Back in London: The City cont'd

 From St Vedast, north along Foster Lane, past Goldsmith's Hall, and right into Gresham St. - past all those slick temples of Mammon - and St Lawrence Jewry next Guildhall.

     St Lawrence, which stands on the south side of Guildhall Yard across from the Guildhall itself, is another church by Sir Christopher Wren that was destroyed in the Blitz and subsequently rebuilt.  The architect in this case was Cecil Brown - who I know nothing about.  In contrast to the sober work of Marshall Sisson at St Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe, Brown's work is much more effusive, commensurate with St Lawrence's role as the official church of the City Corporation. (It was the Corporation that helped fund the Post-war restoration.) The result is rather - shall we say? - worldly, perhaps a little fussy.

 

      The east side of Guildhall Yard is occupied by the Guildhall Art Gallery, designed by Richard Gilbert Scott, son of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, grandson of George Gilbert Scott Jr, and great-grandson of Sir George Gilbert Scott Sr - that's quite the architectural dynasty!  It was Sir Giles who restored the Guildhall after the War, and Richard who designed the Guildhall Library on the west side of the yard and that weird looking cloister along the western half of the Guildhall façade. Anyway Richard Scott's art gallery holds the Corporation's own collection, and all of it, whether the architecture, the art or the hang, was a bit of a disappointment.  All rather vulgar really, but that, I suppose, is plutocratic taste for you.

     From Guildhall Yard I headed north back to St Bartholomew the Great, a parish church sheltering in a fragment of a 12th century Augustinian priory.  I think it must be largest ecclesiastical building to have survived from the Middle Ages in the City of London. The exterior is hemmed in the with buildings, the interior dark and mysterious. Atmospheric.  It really deserves a post to itself.

     In the afternoon, after lunch at 'Le Pain Quotidien' - yes, I know, another chain, but I was pleasantly surprised - I met up with a friend and we went off to the obscure and dusty Petrie Museum (part of the University of London) before trying the new Ta'mini Lebanese bakery in Marchmont St. Dinner at Franco Manco, Bloomsbury.

Back in London: St Vedast, Foster Lane

 

    From St Martin to St Vedast Foster¹ Lane, not the most famous of the City Churches - it is not even in 'Oranges and Lemons' - but without a doubt it is the best of post-war restorations in the City, the work of Stephen Dykes Bower (1903-1994).  A example of what, with a mind, could be achieved in those straightened Post-War years.  It is the only City Church where I have worshipped.

     St Vedast², though in origin Medieval, is a Wren church, but built some years after the Great Fire when the Medieval church (patched up post-Fire) finally gave up the ghost.  Other names have been associated with rebuilding; in particular, Nicholas Hawksmoor who, as Sir John Summerson put it, 'we may suspect had a hand in the interpretation' 0f the spire.  Kerry Downes in his biography of Hawksmoor for Thames & Hudson says nothing.  Anyway Wren's church has a nave and s aisle, separated by an arcade of Doric columns.  There is no chancel as such. 

     The church is quite hemmed in by buildings - there is no churchyard. The only two walls to the street are the w on Foster Lane (ashlar) and to the s. This s wall is very interesting - the furthest section w is the base of the tower and is ashlared, the next section is of brick, the rest of rubble stone.  No doubt this wall wasn't meant to be seen; I wonder if it is in fact Medieval? Of the other two walls, n and e, both are plastered. To the n of the church is a small and charming 17th century vestry hall and, on Foster Lane, the formidable looking rectory³ designed by Dykes Bower.  Dykes Bower linked these two buildings with a two storey classical cloister built against the n wall of the church.  The ground floor is open, the glazed upper floor designed as a library.  The resultant courtyard is the most charming of spaces.  A real hidden treasure.

    The interior is a faithful reconstruction of the original architecture. Of the furnishings, Dykes Bower skilfully mixed old and new: the organ loft was rebuilt; the altarpiece, pulpit and font cover garnered from other City churches that had been bombed or previously demolished - there was no attempt, for instance, to recreate the original altarpiece; a new marble floor, and new stained glass designed by Brian Thomas (who had worked with Dykes Bower at St Paul's) were installed and, finally, the nave was re-seated collegiate style that is with banks of stalls facing each other across the nave rather than orientated toward the altar. The s aisle was made into a side chapel. The result is excellent.  The space coherent and lucid.

     Looking round that morning I came across an intriguing Baroque sculpture high up on the w wall of the s aisle. It depicts the Holy Spirit in the form of a Dove surrounded the shekinah, the Uncreated Light of God, and cherubs.  It's really rather fine. Turns out it is a tympanum and was made to fit into the head of the middle window of the e end, making it a rather more sophisticated version of the dove on the St Martin Ludgate altarpiece in my previous post. The current altarpiece here at St Vedast, which was originally from the demolished St Christopher-le-Stocks, also contains a depiction of the Shekinah (with the Tetragram) in its pediment to signify that the altar is the resting place of the divine, just as the tympanum signifies the descent of the Holy Spirit on the unconsecrated elements, the bread and wine, in the Eucharist to make them the Body and Blood of Christ.

     The poet Robert Herrick was baptised in St Vedast's on 24th August 1591

 

1 Foster, in this case, is a corruption of 'Vedast'

2 St Vedast was a Gallo-Roman or Frankish saint.  His is a very rare dedication in England with only one other dedicated to him.

3 On the site of the Fountain public house, destroyed in the same air raid that wrecked the church.

Back in London: The City

 Oranges and Lemons,

 say the bells of St Clements.

You owe me five farthings,

say the bells of St Martins.

     Thursday was even colder, with a bitter, searching wind and the sky by turns bright and overcast.  Not really a day for sight seeing, but you can hardly spend the day in your hotel room, warm though it is. So into the City for a brisk morning's walk between City churches - a mini church crawl. I concentrated my efforts in the western part of the City. I took the tube from St Pancras/King's Cross to Barbican, and walked south from there, through Smithfield (St Bartholomew the Great not yet open) to St Paul's, re-tracing in part a walk through the City I made back in 2021. A pause for refreshment in Paternoster Square, before plunging into that tight, atmospheric network of lanes between the Ludgate Hill and the dreadful Queen Victoria St, which effectively severs this part of the city from the river Thames.  

     I was vaguely heading for St Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe, and the adjacent Wardrobe Place.  I came across the former almost by happenstance, standing at the end of a particularly dark and narrow alley. The church, which was gutted in the Blitz and restored by the architect Marshall Sisson (1887-1978), was originally the work of Sir Christopher Wren - one of his basilican planned churches; red brick and stone dressings and rather sombre.  His last City commission too.  The church is essentially free standing: to the s is a graveyard/garden, but to the n, and much more interesting and atmospheric, is a narrow passage between high walls. Sisson didn't make too bad job of the restoration, which included the walling-in of the aisles to form ancillary spaces.  Today its use is shared between the local Anglican parish and the Coptic church.  Standing there and thinking on the current condition of the Coptic church I felt deeply moved.  Nearby, hidden away in the dense urban fabric of this part of the City is the remarkable Wardrobe Place, a court built, post Great Fire, on the site of the King's Wardrobe. Not a giant article of furniture, but a sort of central store and supply for the King's household.

    Up the hill and over Ludgate to St Martins, a Wren church that escaped serious damage in WWII.  It is easy in today's City to forget the legends that surround it; Ludgate itself is associated with King Ludd, and St Martin with the supposed burial place of King Cadwallo, sometimes thought of refering to the Anglo-Saxon king Caedwalla (Brythonic name) and sometimes the Welsh king Cadwallon ap Cadfan - according to wiki that is.  But why the Brythonic element to both stories? The interior is atmospheric, more redolent of the smoky 19th century than Wren, but in need, I think, of restoration.  The altarpiece is original and rather fine, though it looks as it has been given a paint job at some point.  At the time I didn't quite notice the dove in the pediment - is it original or painted later? It looks a bit disconsolate.  Perhaps it is Georgian.  As we shall see in the next post there is a similar image of the Holy Spirit at St Vedast, Foster Lane, and, just outside the western boundary of the City in St Mary-le-Strand.  All evidence of a High Church Eucharistic theology of consecration (i.e. that it is the work of the Holy Spirit) that has largely disappeared from the Church of England.  Sadly.

     St Martin's forms part of the same Anglican parish as St Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe.

 

Back in London: The National Gallery

      From the York Water-gate, I made my way to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, via St Martin-in-the-Fields, which is an admirable building but worldly.  Deserving, though, of a post to itself.   In preparation for this post I was trying to remember when I was last at the National Gallery.  The last time I blogged about a visit was, I discovered, in 2016.  I simply can't believe that that last visit was so long ago.  I must have been there between times, surely?  One difference between then and now was immediately apparent, the massively increased security.  The security measure were present, also, on last year's visit to the British Museum.  Not sure what the following selection says about me, apart from I like Bronzino and I'm not so keen on tenebrism

     From that National Gallery I waked to St James, to do a bit of shopping, and then walked back to the hotel, stopping in Maison Bertaux for cake. For lunch I tried Gails in Bloomsbury - busy and a bit chaotic, food good - before walking south to Grey's Inn. Dinner in Hare & Tortoise, previous night dinner in the wonderfully 'Old Skool' Caio Bella in Lambs Conduit St.  Sinner that I am I had veal.

'The Driver's Seat'

 

     I think it impossible not to be intrigued by the cast list at least: Elizabeth Taylor, Mona Washbourne, Ian Bannen and Andy Warhol. Such a frankly bizarre mixture excites speculation, surely.  It promises so much, but whether this film, based on a novella by Muriel Spark, produced by Franco Rossellini and directed by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, lives up to the expectation is another matter.  I think, on balance, it does not.  Which doesn't mean that it is without merit.  I'm not sure whether it was intentional or not but 'The Driver's Seat' is a sort of mirror of 'Death in Venice': northern European heads south, to Italy, and in the fragmentary remains of a past civilisation encounters death. To put it simply.

     Its main fault is the sense of longuer. At times, also, it is quite impenetrable, and it has that odd quality of detachment, of anomie perhaps, that is a hallmark of Italian cinema. All that said the cast is excellent. Warhol's two short appearances on the screen are, as can be imagined, enigmatic.  His acting may best be described as 'intriguing'.  Taylor and Bannen make for an interesting double act - sparring, sinister and ultimately menacing.  There is a persistent and deep undertow of violence in this film; the mere threat of it stalks virtually every frame. It poisons every interaction. Taylor's character, Lise, could be described as a fount of violence; there is a scene towards the end of the film in which she seduces a rather naive young man, played by Maxence Mailfort, thereby initiating him into manhood, that is also, by necessity, a seduction into the world of violence.  Indeed, perhaps it is her that is the driving seat all along.  One may suppose that Griffi, who co-wrote the screenplay with Raffaele La Capria, was making some political point here, say, about the state of Europe in the early 1970s. But the problem is with such an idea is the manner in which Griffi, or Cavani, or for that matter in a different context Kurosawa, choreograph violence. It is ambiguous, for instance in an attempted seduction (or is it rape?) where the camera lingers long on the eroticised torso of the assailant as his hand descends to his unseen penis. There is even a flash of homo-erotica in the scene where the same male character is given a good going-over by the police.

     I think it is this aestheticism of violence, this ambiguity, that makes 'The Drivers Seat' a passable example of the decadence of early 70s Italian, and more broadly European, cinema - which means, amongst other more indigestible things, it is beautiful to behold.  The cinematography is indeed excellent, the work of Vittorio Storaro, and some of the Italian actors, particularly Guido Mannari, easy on the eye.

The Driver's Seat

1974

Director                 Giuseppe Patroni Griffi
Cinematogrpahy  Vittorio Storaro
Producer               Franco Rossellini

Back in London: The York Water-gate

      Well, back to London this last week.  We were heading there to see a production of Stephen Sondheim's 'Pacific Overtures' at the Menier Chocolate Factory. However due to family illness that fell through and I sadly made a solitary visit to the capital.

      The morning of that first full day in the capital, which was bright, crisp, and very cold, I had two objectives: The National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, and (as it was roughly en route) the York Water-gate.  The gate is perhaps a bit overlooked, is seen perhaps as a merely curiosity, rather like a folly on a country estate.  And up to point it is a curiosity, an almost solitary architectural relic of Early Stuart London and relic of a different attitude to the Thames.  A rare survival.  It is indeed all these things and also, and more importantly, a rather beautiful piece of architecture. Quite extraordinary in its way, bulky and sculptural; rather like an vastly oversized casket. I find it fascinating. 
     Built in 1626 of Portland Stone using the masculine Tuscan Order, the gate was designed as a monumental entrance to York House from the river.* (There would have been some sort of pier or landing stage on the river side.)  To the landward side the architecture is 'polite', or 'dilicate' as Serlio would have it, after all it faced the gardens and the house; to the river in contrast all is drama and bold rustication.  And that is the side I prefer.  It  Time and the city have since wrought great changes: York House has replaced by the rather lovely, and axial, Buckingham St.; the Thames has been embanked and is now several hundred feet to the south and the left over space is now Embankment Gardens - a setting that, perhaps, doesn't do the gate many favours. You could argue, I think, that even in its changed environment that the gate continues to act as a liminal structure between nature and the city. It is said to be based on 'la Fontaine Medicis', prob by Tomaso Francini, in the Luxembourg Gardens, Paris, but quite frankly I don't see it.

     And now for the question of attribution.  In the 18th century the Neo-Palladians believed, erroneously, that it was a work of Inigo J0nes.  A bit too lively I would have thought for that - Jones, after all could be a very dull architect. It is now thought to be the work of the mason and sculptor Nicholas Stone, though Sir John Summerson** suggested that was indeed built by Stone though to a design by Sir Balthazar Gerbier (crazy name, crazy guy!?!), but I haven't seen anything to confirm either suggestion.

*It is, in fact, all that is left of York House. Originally the Norwich House, the urban palace of the Bishop of Norwich, in the 16th century ownership swung between religious and secular. Later in the century it was the London home of the Archbishop of York - hence the name, but at the time of the construction of the gate it was back in secular hands and the  Duke of Buckingham.

** 'Architecture in Britain 1530-1830' - The Pelican History of Art pp150-151