London, and The Comyn Ching Triangle, Part 2

      

     And so, finally, to the architecture.  As I wrote in Part 1 of this post, the site is triangular, bounded by Monmouth St., Mercer St., and Shelton St.  I think the term for this in Urbanist circles is a boundary block - think doughnut/bagel here.

     At the time of the closure of Covent Garden wholesale market the Triangle belonged to the architectural ironmongers Comyn Ching (they had their showrooms in Shelton St.) and the gardens and yards at the centre of the block had been submerged in workshops, apparently including 3 working forges.  It is an example of the way small scale manufacturing, often highly skilled, developed in the industrial cites of England; think of the workshops of the 'Little Masters' in areas like the Jewry Quarter of Birmingham, or of the cutlery makers in Sheffield.

     Comyn Ching, a family firm, at some point decided to re-develop their property, and 1977 called in the 39 year old Terry Farrell.  Farrell was then in partnership with Nicholas Grimshaw.  As has been pointed out, Farrell's work here represents a stylistic and methodological parting of the ways between the two men.

     Work commenced in 1978 (the year the Urban Design Group was founded) and continued until 1991.  In some ways Farrell's work was experimental, instantiating the ideas that were being thrashed out in places like the AA, the Urban Design Group, and headquarters of Andreas Papadakis's Academy Editions in west London. It soon came to be seen, rightly, as a paradigm of urban renewal, a revival of the Geddesian approach of 'conservative surgery'.

     The 'shanty town' in the midst of the site was cleared away to create a semi-public open space - Ching Court.  The twenty five properties that lined the perimeter of the site were very well restored and the three corner properties sold to a developer who had to work to Farrell's designs.  The detailing is superb, particularly the wooden porches and the two entrances to Ching Court.  The northern one is the more interesting in that it aligns with Tower Court across Monmouth St.  The visitor passes through a dark entrance passage and emerges in a circular quasi-external space at the head of the site that changes the direction of travel, with steps take the visitor down to the level of the paved courtyard.  It is all handled beautifully, quite stage managed, for instance that delicious glimpse the passer-by gets of Ching Court from across Monmouth St.  It is just so London.

     As you might expect from a piece of Post-Modern design there any number of references and quotations in the architecture.  The porches, for instance, are a mixture of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Art Deco.  One of my favourite details is the hefty half-buried column on the corner of Shelton St & Mercer St.  Farrell's work here seemed to chart the course for a more considered approach to Postmodern design than that in America, but it was not to be.

    I do like some of Farrell's later work, but rarely, if ever, was it as good as this.

London

       To a sultry London on Sunday for a few days and hefty dose of culture, and (it could be argued) you can't get more cultural or arcane than an exhibition of Medieval Sienese religious art at the National Gallery.  That was Monday morning.  I intended to post everything in order over the next few weeks or so, but I still need time to form a response to the art on display, so I will have to return to this topic at a later date when my thoughts are clearer.  (You may, perhaps, want to read this 'reluctance' on my part as a tacit admission that I wasn't that impressed, but I couldn't possibly comment.)  The two photos below were taken in Covent Garden on the way to the National Gallery.  The first is a contemporary reconstruction of an entrance arch by Inigo Jones - one of pair flanking his church of St Paul.  Jones as Mannerist.  The second is Russell House, attributed to the English Baroque architect Thomas Archer.

     It's funny how on these little trips of mine themes sort of emerge from the serendipitous.  On this particular visit three themes emerged.  The first was Post-Modernism.  After the exhibition, and a visit to the remarkable Maison Berteaux on Greek St., I headed into Covent Garden via Seven Dials to buy a new shirt. I couldn't resist, however, popping into the Ching Court.  A triangular public space formed out of a chaos of backyards and sheds in the centre of the urban block created by Monmouth, Mercer and Shelton Streets - the so-called Comyn Ching Triangle. The result is a beautiful, serene piece of urbanism.  It is an early work (1978-86) by the architect Terry Farrell, combining, in a Geddesian manner, the old (Georgian terrace houses) and the new (three new architectural interventions - one at each corner).  How one felt the optimism of those heady days when it seemed that Modernism was finished!  I particularly like the detailing of the three wooden porches on the w side of the court.

     Afterwards lunch with a friend who now works for another friend Ben Pentreath, at his rather glamorous studio in Lambs Conduit St. We ate at 'La Fromagerie' over the street from Ben's office.  Quite the best gnocchi I have eaten in a long time.  A rushed supper at 'Hare and Tortoise' in Bloomsbury interrupted by extraordinary behaviour of a diner when her child misbehaved and that left the other diners open mouthed in disbelief.  From there to the Art Workers Guild where RIBA TAG was having a symposium and summer party.  I managed to arrive very late, all the chairs were taken, the speeches dull, and the heating on. I lasted half an hour before leaving.

Further Reading

'Terry Farrell' (Architectural Monographs No9), Terry Farrell & Frank Russell, Academy Editions, 1985

London and 'Celts: Arts and Identity'

     Another busy trip to London on Thursday.  The main reason for my visit was the exhibition 'Celts: Art and Identity' at the British Museum.  And I've been trying to quantify my response to it ever since as this exhibition raised some very interesting questions.  The premise of the exhibition is simple;  modern celtic identity is by and large a construct of Early Modernity based on a limited knowledge of the past and a series of assumptions that fed into, and were in turn fed by, that knowledge.  For the organizers of this exhibition the term 'celtic' is a cultural and not racial category.  The first mention of the 'celts' in written history was by the Greeks, who applied the term 'Keltoi' to people living in central Europe who traded with, and raided, the Classical world.  The Romans referred to the 'Galli'.  'Celt' was not a label that those people used about themselves - but then they left no written record.  And it is certainly not a name used, until the Modern Period, by those we now associate with celtic identities today - Breton, Welsh, Irish and Scots who became literate in Late Antiquity.  Since Thursday I've watched a BBC4 programme 'Meet the Ancestors' presented by Julian Richards and he assiduously avoided the label 'celtic' when he referring to Iron Age burial customs in England.  It was far too loaded a term.
     Now to the exhibition itself and the wonderful objects it contains. After a slightly wobbly start we meet 'things'.  Sculptures in the form of enigmatic warriors, or gods from central Europe and later grave slabs and the monumental Cross of St John (a cast) from Iona.  There are great swords and shields, and a spectacular horned helmet - votive offerings that have been recovered from rivers like the Thames and, here in Lincolnshire, the Witham where the ritual deposition of objects continued past the Anglo-Saxon 'takeover' into the Middle Ages.  Objects that because of their antiquity, and their use of a long forgotten visual and symbolic language, are mysterious, evocative things - not fully 'present' to us.  And there is gold - lots of it.  Torcs and penannular brooches and all manner of, well, treasure. The brooches, made in Ireland, are works of immense skill.  They are very small but they are decorated to within an inch of their lives.  Quite stunning.  And oddly, perhaps, it was the small things that remained with me the longest.  Anyway all of these objects are arranged chronological order from the Iron Age to Late/Post Modernity - today; from Paganism to Christianity and secularism.  Simultaneously moving across Europe from east to west.  From 'Hallstatt' culture, through the swirls of 'La Tene', through Classical Antiquity to Late Antiquity and what exactly?  And there, perhaps things get tricky; where perhaps that old, and persistent, clear cut notion of a dualism of 'Celt' and 'Anglo-Saxon' begins to soften.  One of the first objects on display is a gravestone, a 'Pictish' gravestone, and it is decorated with interlace and what are called 'Zoomorphic' animals.  Later on there is a wonderful gold item, a buckle I think, from the Sutton Hoo burial from near Woodbridge in Suffolk and it too is decorated with interlace and most incredible zoomorphic animal.  It is believed to be the work of an Anglo-Saxon goldsmith.  But which is the celtic object and which is the Anglo-Saxon?  They both contain the same motifs.  No wonder than that various other names have been coined to categorize these objects 'Insular', 'Hiberno-Saxon'.  Hanging bowls are another example: originating in late Roman Britain they continued to be made after the end of Roman rule (but in all likelihood outside the boundaries of Empire).  They are decorated with the swirls associated with 'La Tene' culture, and so are markedly 'celtic', but are overwhelmingly found in Anglo-Saxon graves.  In fact both interlace and the zoomorphic figure are believed to originate with the Anglo-Saxons, as did a number of smithing techniques such as chip carving, granular and filigree work, and cloisonné inlays that were taken up by goldsmiths working mainly in Ireland.  At this point in the exhibition it was these objects from Ireland that dominated; there seems to have been nothing comparable made in Wales or Brittany.  There was obviously more of a shared visual culture between the two, Celt and Anglo-Saxon, than we once believed.
     It is at this point historically that in architecture and in the visual arts that the 'celtic' slowly disappears giving way to firstly the Romanesque and then Gothic culture.  It is more, I think, than merely the politics of conquest and colonisation; both Romanesque and Gothic simply presented more compelling visual languages.

     And then the long 'Celtic Twilight', which makes up the final quarter of the exhibition.  That cultural 'half-life' that I find so fascinating.  It starts out, oddly enough, with English Antiquarians such as Lincolnshire's very own William Stukely (1687-1765), who was happy to accredit anything ancient and not obviously Roman to the 'Celts'.  Even odder was the view Stukeley, a Anglican priest, had of the Druids, who he saw as practitioners of an ideal rational, 'natural' religion.  He inadvertently started a trend that was picked up by the emerging Romantic Movement.  Iolo Morganwg (Edward Williams) is a notable example.  Williams, (1747-1826), was born in Wales, lived in London, and was a mason by profession and a radical in politics.  In London he was active in a couple of Welsh societies 'The Honorable Society of Cwmrodorion' and the 'Gweneddigion'. Like Stukely he re-invented the Druids as followers of 'Natural' religion.  A kin to Deism, I suspect.  He also re-invented the Early medieval Welsh past as a Golden Era of liberal politics - something that still occurs today; you only have to read 'The Rough Guide to Wales' to see that.  Like James McPherson, in Scotland, Morganwg was not averse to fabricating celtic verse.  In 1794 the first meeting of his Gorsedd was held on Primrose Hill, North London.  The ritual was claimed to be authentic.
      The exhibition has a number of items objects associated with the National Eisteddfod, which is a descendant of that first meeting in North London.  I was stuck immediately by their secularised religiosity; they either took there cue from 19th century Anglicanism - for instance the banner at the start of the exhibition, or the stole that makes up 'vestments' one of the officials, or looked as though they were designed by use by some group of ritual magicians like 'The Hermetic Order of The Golden Dawn'.  Perhaps there is some link through the radical Williams to Freemasonry.  Opposite are two Scottish paintings, both luscious in colour and heavily Late Romantic in feel - dreamlike one could say: the famous and fabulous 'The Druids; Bringing in the Mistletoe' by the Glasgow Colourists George Henry and Edward Atkinson Hornel; and the less well known 'The Riding of the Sidhe' by the Dundee artist John Duncan.
     Duncan contributed to Patrick Geddes's short-lived magazine 'The Evergreen', and 'Celtic' was to have a profound influence on the Arts and Crafts movement as it developed in Edinburgh and Dublin - what was called the 'Celtic Renaissance' in Scotland - and also affected Arts and Crafts design in England. In all cases it was essentially decorative, rather than architectonic. Both these paintings display a shift in attitude to the 'Celtic' from Stukeley and Williams, who saw in the Celtic as a progenitor of Enlightenment Values to one in which the Celtic is held up as an alternative to Modernity, a place of dream, of mysticism and other values (including unease) beyond the 'greasy till' of mercantilism (to use W B Yeats's telling phrase).  This view of the Celtic has its origin in the revolt of Romanticism, and is essentially conservative. It is there in the works of Sir Walter Scott and later W B Yeats and J R R Tolkien.
     I have in my collection of pamphlets and guides a catalogue of an exhibition held in Dundee Art Gallery in 1973 of the work of a contemporary of Duncan's called John 'Dutch' Davidson.  The title is 'The Hills of Dream Revisited'  An apt for this exhibition too, for in the nebulousness of the term, in the mystery of the art - of its not being entirely 'present' to us - 'Celtic' becomes the receptacle of both our wishes and our unhappiness.  We back project on to it.  And it is that that unites William Stukely, New Agers, New Celtic Christians, Nationalists and Romantics, radicals and conservatives.