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, and The Comyn Ching Triangle, Part 1

       Back to London for a couple of nights this week and the RIBA TAG Summer Party.  It was a busy day; the Zurbaran exhibition at the National Gallery in the morning; The National Portrait Gallery Cafe for a smashing lamington; lunch with a friend in the excellent Fromagerie in Lamb's Conduit St; a visit to St Pancras New Church; dinner at that perennial favourite Caio Bella; and finally the party and afterwards the pub (The Queens Larder, Queen Square).  I didn't get back to my hotel 'til nearly eleven.

     That morning, on the way to the National Gallery, I paid a return visit to The Comyn Ching Triangle.  The redevelopment of the site is an early and, I think, highly successful project by the English architect Sir Terry Farrell (1938-2025).  Before things went a bit wrong.  As an example of urbanism, and the burgeoning Post Modernist style it is fascinating.

     The triangle is bounded by Monmouth St to the nw, Mercer St to the e, and to the south by Shelton St.  (Does Shelton St follow the bed of a lost London river?)  It forms part of the area called 'Seven Dials'; a development of the 1690s of what was then known as 'Cock and Pie Fields'.  The developer was Thomas Neale.  Almost uniquely in Britain, it uses a Baroque urban form known in France as an 'Etoile' , or star, with streets radiating from a central point, or Rond Point.  The Point du Vue is in this particular etoile is a Doric column, an accurate replacement (of the 1980s) for the lost original.
     The subsequent history of the site is bound to Covent Garden, London's wholesale fruit and veg market, to the s.  As the market waxed in size and importance warehouses were erected in the streets to the north, slowly spreading up the slope from the market to Longacre and tumbling down the other side, spreading intermittently along Neal St almost as far as Shaftesbury Avenue. Shelton St to the east of the triangle towards Neal St. still gives a good example of how atmospheric and forbidding this area could be - the street like a deep ravine between tall and austere classical brick facades; a place of almost permanent shadow.  North of the market the demographic became increasingly working class; in some parts of Seven Dials north of the triangle there were slums.

      That said, I think that whole area of Covent Garden before the closing of the Market in 1974 must have been immensely fascinating and evocative - the chaos of the market; the theatres, and the Royal Opera House; the Gentlemen's clubs, such as the Garrick; the classy restaurants and the greasy spoons, the myriad of pubs; and the artisans in small workshops serving the market and the theatres.  All of this just rubbing along.  The BBC documentary of 1972 'How does your Garden Grow?' described it as 'the home of the most urbanised working class in the world - the Covent Garden Londoner'.

     But it couldn't carry on.  The market, sadly, had to go.  The first official official proposal to move the market was made in 1914.  In the 1940s, during WWII, two grandiose schemes were made for the area (and the rest of London); firstly there was the Royal Academy London plan of 1942; and then there was the Abercrombie plan of 1945, which sort of became official government policy. Both plans were high-handed, almost megalomaniac in their scope and ambition, requiring the wholesale demolition of much of the city.  The Abercrombie plan, for instance, required the total segregation of pedestrian and traffic (we have encountered this before at St Cuthbert's Village, Gateshead).  Vast swathes of the Covent Garden area were therefore to be sacrificed for an urban motorway and a housing scheme rather like the Barbican/London Wall.  Finally, when in the early seventies a new market was erected at Nine Elms in s London, the whole area became open to re-development.

     That wholescale re-development did not occur.  It is a long, and possibly complicated story, but it was defeated by a combination of closely related factors: increasing public dissatisfaction with the Post-War architectural settlement, strong local opposition and an increasingly focal, if not forceful, conservation movement.  The defeat of the then status quo at Covent Garden completely changed government policy.  The Abercrombie plan was suspended; with plans for the decking of Oxford St and the wholesale demotion of Whitehall scrapped.  The conservationists had won and the Modern Movement was in tatters. 

Further reading/viewing

Simon Jenkins: Concrete bungle: how public fury stopped the 1970s plan to turn London into a motorway | Planning policy | The Guardian

Though slightly tangential to this post there are some excellent colour photographs of the market in operation here

Terry Farrell, Academy Editions, 1993

Terry Farrell Selected and Curent Works, Images Publishing Group, 1994

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