St Bartholomew-the-Less

     Hidden away from Smithfield, in the grounds of St Bart's, is a small parish church, St Bartholomew-the-less. Very unprepossessing, simple Late Medieval tower of rubble masonry, plastered aisles.  An almost village feeling.  It could be almost anywhere in south-east England.

     Inside, a centrally planned Gothick church of about 1793 by that very interesting architect George Dance the Younger.  A paraphrase of Late Antiquity, fitting very well with 18th century, pre-Tractarian Anglicanism, with its emphasis on 'primitive' Christianity, what today is called the Patristic Period/Era.  Rather like another church by Dance, St Mary, Micheldever, Hampshire.* Not what one would expect at all. It's rather like entering an enormous chapter house.  A bit too cool for my tastes, but verging upon the sublime.  Subjected to a thorough-going nineteenth century restoration incl tracery in the clearstory windows where none existed before, and rebuilding the apse in French Gothic style.  Compare and contrast below.  Numerous monuments.

St Bartholomew the Less, Smithfield, London, the interior with a churchwarden standing in the aisle. Zincograph by W. A. Delamotte, 1844. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark. Source: Wellcome Collection. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/pukzxred

*And there is also St Dunstan-in-the-West, on Fleet St, 1830-3 by John Shaw senior.

St Bartholomew's Hospital

     Back to my visit to The Smoke.  After the Richard Dadd exhibition, I did some shopping on Jermyn St and Piccadilly before a hurried Pret lunch and the Metropolitan train into the City.  My goal was Smithfield and St Bart's Hospital and the recently restored Great Hall & Hogarth Stair.  As you can see from the photographs it was a wet and miserable afternoon.  We remain, however, in the same cultural world as Burlington House, and the early 18th century 'battle of the styles'.

 
     So, as usual, a little history.  St Bartholomew's Hospital was founded by Rahere in 1123.  He is a semi-mythical - real though many stories and legends have been spun around him.  I am sure, for instance, that as a child I was told (by the children's magazine programme 'Blue Peter', no less) that Rahere was  court jester to King Henry I.  In other accounts he was a minstrel.  Either way, after a misspent life, he went on pilgrimage to Rome and there suffered a 'life changing illness', repented, and entered into the priesthood.  Or something like that.  Rahere's initial foundation also included the Augustinian Priory of St Bartholomew.  The east end survived the Reformation and now forms the wonderfully atmospheric parish church of St Bartholomew-the-great, where you will also find a fine Late Gothic tomb on the north side of the chancel purportedly Rahere's burial place, see below.  A church where one can feel the old London, before the glossy towers took over. (In fact if you want to experience that old densely-packed London of alleyways and chop houses I highly recommend a walk around the area to the north of the church.*)

     The hospital survived the Reformation, and the other vagaries of history and remains - uniquely among such City instituions? - on the same site.  In 1723 the architect James Gibbs was appointed to the Trustees, and work began, in the early 1730s, on the replacement of  medieval and later buildings.  Gibbs conceiving the new hospital as four separate, rather palatial-looking buildings, grouped rather formally round a square.  Each building shaped, in plan, a little like a dumbbell.  The style is vaguely neo-Palladian - a design that doesn't quite obey the strict rules of Burlingtonian Palladianism.  Both the proportions and the details, from that perspective, aberant.  The North Wing, containing stairs and hall, was the first part of St Bart's to be replaced. The Great Hall is a vast, monumental space - a triple cube approx. 90 x 30 x 30 ft., occupying the entire first and second floor between the two terminal wings.  It was, perhaps, one of the largest secular spaces in the City when built. The Baroque plasterwork is by J B Michele, who also did the staircase ceiling.  The Hogarth staircase is in the eastern wing.  It is a dark, rich space.  Hogarth painted two vast canvasses 'The Pool at Bethseda' & 'The Good Samaritan', and others in his circle supplied the decorative panels.  It was, as I've said, a dull old day, and the there were conservation blinds in the windows, so perhaps it isn't fair to pass critical judgement, but I have to confess to a little disappointment.  A nice try and all that but not quite as good as his father-in-law James Thornhill.  It does, however, remain one of the few painted staircases of the that period to survive in London.

     Gibbs was one of the very few British architects to have trained under a serious European architect - maestro Carlo Fontana in Rome.  He was therefore steeped in the Roman Baroque tradition.  We have encountered Gibbs's work before at Wimpole Hall, in Cambridgeshire, and Houghton Hall in Norfolk.  Even considering the problems he encountered from the Palladian faction under the Earl of Burlington, it was a remarkable life - from rural Aberdeenshire, via Rome, to London.

Credit: St Bartholomew's Hospital, London: Elevation and a Plan of the Courtyard, with armorial Emblems of the Hospital and the Dedicatee.  Engraving after B Cole. Welcome Trust.

* there are other areas of this type to explore in the City: between Ludgate Hill & Victoria St; s of St Mary Le Bow; and s of Cornhill.

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.