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, by Sir William Tite.

     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, but is a rebuilding of the Medieval church some twenty years later (the tower is partially Late Gothic).  A large church - Wren's largest (?) - basilican in 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 worldly.  Lacking perhaps the (mild) mystery of both St Mary-le-Bow and St Mary Woolnoth.

     The 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, particularly hard when you have to walk under the belly of the beast - and St Mary-le-Bow.

     St Mary-le-Bow is part of the lore of London: it is one of the churches mentioned in the rhyme 'Oranges and Lemons'.  It was the bells of the church that called Dick Whittington back to the City.  To be born within the sound of Bow bells is to be born a Cockney.
     The medieval church, founded by Archbishop Lanfranc in 1080, 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."  Certainly, this sort of Post-Modernism, like Farrell's at London Wall, never really dealt with Modernism - they were just lipstick on a pig.

     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.

     

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 - of whom I know next to 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 Foster Lane,¹ not the most famous of the City Churches - it is not even in 'Oranges and Lemons'.  It is, however, without a doubt 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 either 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 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 by 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.