City of London II

       From St Mary Woolnoth I walked down Lombard St hoping to get into St Edmund.  It was sadly closed, so I thought I'd shuffle over to Leadenhall Market.  The photograph below is of the main entrance of 24-28 Lombard St of 1910, by Gunton & Gunton (?) opposite to St Edmund's.  The other two photos are of the side elevation of The Royal Exchange.

     From Cornhill and for the first time in decades I took a London bus. intending to get off at Chancery Lane, but instead got off at Holborn Circus - one those half-hearted English attempts - like Corporation St in Birmingham - at some Parisian urbanism.  One of those non-places that now haunt the cities and larger towns of Britain.  A desultory and unforgiveable piece of work by the planners.  

     Just by the viaduct is another Wren church, St Andrew's Holborn.  It was not destroyed in the Great Fire.  It is a large church - Wren's largest (?) - basilican plan with short projecting chancel.  Fine plasterwork in the spandrels above the gallery arcade, somewhere between Mannerism and the Baroque. In the 18th century stained glass depicting the Last Supper and the Resurrection, by Joshua Price, was inserted into the e window and the panels on either side were painted with saints.  Restoration in the 1870s by Teulon, of all people, removed the organ case.  After the War it was restored by Seely and Paget.  Recent work by DaeWhaKang won award a RIBA award, not entirely sure why. Baptistry left feeling abandoned and unloved (and very cold).

     In all rather wordly.

     High Tory Henry Sacheverell was rector here in the 18th century.

     A walk up Holborn followed.  A rather work-a-day bit of London, but with some interesting architecture: the half-timbered Staple Inn, and almost opposite Alfred Waterhouse's blood red Holborn Bars (aka Prudential Assurance Building).  Extraordinary Gothic Revival building 1876-1901.  Very Northern - would not be out of place in Hamburg or Lübeck.

 Diversion up Brooke St to St Albans Holborn.  And - delight - the church was open.  It was my first visit. Originally built by William Butterfield.  Slum parish with extreme liturgical experimentation. Eventually one of the most richly furnished Victorian churches in London, filled with work by the likes of Bodley and Comper.  It must have been very atmospheric and quite overwhelming.  All that survives of that are Butterfield's immense w tower, and fragments of Comper's Stanton Chantry.  The church, as rebuilt by Adrian Gilbert Scott, is a variation of George Frederick Bodley's church of St Augustine in Pendlebury, Greater Manchester.  It's not at all bad, but the design bears no relationship to what Butterfield built.  Still, shadowy and mysterious.  And that's half the battle.

    The vast mural on the e wall of the chancel is the work of the artist and sculptor Hans Feibusch (1898-1988).

      

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.  I felt very happy to be back in the city, alive again.  Even with all its problems, there is nowhere quite like London.

    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 of Wren's City churches.  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 almost simultaneously.  He seems to have been both influenced by Sir Ninian Comper & the Alcuin Club, and the 'Back-to Baroque' of Martin Travers & the Anglo-Papalist SSPP.   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.  It would be improved if the ceiling was painted white.

    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 building 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 in the centre of the City.  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.  One suspects that parts have been cribbed from Rob Krier's 'Elements of Architecture'. 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.  He was assisted by John James and the master mason was Thomas Dunn.  The church is also rather small, but 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 Mary-le-Bow, is based on a design 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 - no wonder the Post Modernists loved it so.  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 19th century, and the gallery fronts placed against the outer walls.  (Though the galleries, I think, must originally 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 ceiling above the altar (by the wonderfully named Chrysostom Wilkins) 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 true of their furnishings, which are vulnerable 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.  It is possible to view these building, perhaps paradoxically, as both symbols of continuity and the vicissitudes of history.
     After the iconoclasms of the 16th & 17th centuries, the Salisbury 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 pulpit and some metal screens were allowed to remain, as were the remarkable wooden porches at the west end.  The architect, William Henry Randall Blacking (1889-1958), who trained under Sir J N Comper, was the consultant to this process. 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, and parts of Ireland.  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.