Little St Mary, Cambridge

      I'm staying in Cambridge for a few days.  This morning I headed north to Ely on the train for my first visit to the city in some seven years, and this afternoon I headed into Cambridge city centre to Little St Mary and King's College Chapel.  A busy day, and I'm going to start with the parish church of St Mary, Fitzwilliam St. - almost opposite Pembroke College - known as Little St Mary to differentiate it from Great St Mary, the University Church.  It doesn't, as you might have expected, refer to its size.  Yes, it has no aisles or transepts, and no tower, and it is unicameral, having no architectural distinction between nave and chancel, but that single space is on a large and ample scale; with the exception of King's College Chapel and Great St Mary's, larger and grander in conception than any other medieval church in Cambridge.  Larger than some cathedral choirs in, say, Scotland or Wales.   I mention that because St Mary's is a fragment - like the chapel of Merton College Oxford, the chancel of an intended collegiate church. Built to serve Peterhouse next door (the buildings are actually connected) and it served as both parish church and college chapel until 1632, Matthew Wren (uncle of Sir Christopher Wren, if you were wondering) built the chapel at Peterhouse

     Built in the Dec style St Mary's has some very fine window tracery. The interior is vast, limewashed and light-filled, rather East Anglian in feel. It smells of stale incense, and it is a church I'm rather fond of (although these photos don't do it justice) and I've worshipped there on a couple of occasions in the past. The roof is a Victorian recreation of the original, (I think by Sir George Gilbert Scott - he restored the church 1856-7 so it seems likely.), and it works rather well, like being in an upturned boat.  Whatever was the original form there was, until that restoration, a rather fine Jacobean roof; perhaps it dated to the time of Robert Crayshaw, the priest, poet and mystic.  It is also possible to mourn the loss of the 18th century panelling, which covered the lower walls of the chancel. Half way along the length of the church is a door and recess on each side; these originally led to chantry chapels of the 'barnacle' variety.  The south one, unblocked, now leads to a Lady Chapel of the SSPP, 'Back to the Baroque', Anglo-Catholic Congress type.  The work of T H Lyon and dating from 1931. A period piece. 

     Following on from Scott senior, his son, the ill-stared George Gilbert Scott Jnr worked at St Mary's (see the reredos at the back of the church behind the font), as did Sir John Ninian Comper after him.

Own work: Trees

      A selection of sketches of trees and vegetation from my sketchbooks.  Various media.  Chronological order.

The Habitat Catalogue VII: 1985

      What to say about this 1985 edition of the Habitat Catalogue that I haven't said before? It's probably not the worse, I suppose.  From what I've seen of it the 1982/3 edition is maybe a contender for that award, although 1988 is a strong runner.  Like the 1981/2 catalogue, which I reviewed last year, there does seem to a general aesthetic falling off.  This 1985 edition, I should point out, is the edition I mentioned in my post on 'English Style' by Suzanne Slesin & Stafford Cliff.

     As usual there are several Habitats on display.  To begin with there are the six templates, or looks, to be found in the introduction of Terence Conran's 'The House Book' of 1972.  For the uninitiated these six templates are: 'Country House', 'Farm House', 'Town House', 'Mediterranean', 'International', and 'Eclectic'.  That final category is, I suspect, less easy to define, or find.  It could, I suppose, be what you couldn't buy in Habitat.  The sort of things that made it seem that bit more liveable and interesting, and are that bit less prominent in this edition than hitherto.  

     Secondly there is the matter of style, for instance in this catalogue there is High Tec and 'Chic Graphique', and 'Neo-Victorian', but Art Deco, once prominent in the 1970s catalogues, has gone completely.
    Finally there is a third (as it were) typology at work in this catalogue.  Let me explain.  The major change - a major conceptual change, I think - was the introduction of the 'Habitat Country' range; furniture, fabrics and kitchenware, etc.  Some of it good, some of it less so.  In many respects it was nothing new - it was, essentially, the 'Country House' and 'Farm House' templates combined and repackaged.  A victory, then, of style over substance?  Perhaps, yes. However, it is the first time in the Habitat catalogue when these categories have been made so explicitly distinct.  The contrast between 'Country' and the rest never so heightened.  It would be reductionist of me to present this as a simple choice between the bland and the rebarbative (see the Viby range below), simply because the aesthetics of the 1970s catalogues remain in places, but it wouldn't be wide of the mark.

     On to 'things', and the deeply covetable Habitat Chesterfield was then still available.  As always seems to be the case the fabrics are particularly hit-and-miss. The best all seem to be designed by Collier Campbell; of the others the best are Fleurs des Champs and Jardin.

     Crockery is also hit-and-miss.  There are some excellent designs: Bianca, Petit Fleur, Kristina, Blue Copenhagen (also then available in pink) and 'Asiatic Pheasant' by Burleigh of Stoke-on-Trent; and there are some terrible ones: Quadra, Ribbon, Cerise, and Sandie.  Interestingly Old Colonial, a design from the 1950s produced by Adams, also of Stoke-on-Trent, was still available.  As always, the glassware and kitchenware are pretty much spot on.

 

Sir Edwin Lutyens I: Spalding War Memorial

     Lincolnshire is perhaps not rich in the work of well-known architects, and what work there is tends to be on the small scale.  This small building, that might easily be mistaken for a mere garden pavilion, is a case in point.  It is, in fact, the War Memorial in the southern Lincolnshire market town of Spalding (I've mentioned it briefly before on this blog).  It is the work of the most important 20th century architect in Britain, Sir Edwin Lutyens.  It is his only work in the county.
     The memorial, which was unveiled in 1922, stands in the 18th century gardens of Ascoughfee Hall.  The billowing, cloud-like hedge on the right of first photograph is original, though grown to deformity with the years.  I think the pond too may be an original 'feature'.  Perhaps, then, a cramped place for the annual Remembrance Day commemoration.  It is an Italianate sort of design - Lutyens by this time had, to a great extent, abandoned the Arts and Crafts style for the Grand Manner of Classicism. However, the spirit of the Arts and Crafts lived on in a building such as this; the roof is shod in pantiles, and the cornice is constructed of stone and creasing tiles.  Inside, on the back wall are carved the names of the Fallen.  The floor of brick and stone recalls those he designed for his early country houses.  The Wiki article points out the similarity between the Spalding war memorial and the entrance pavilion Anneux British Cemetery at Cambrai
     In front stands the austere and enigmatic Stone of Remembrance which Lutyens had designed for the then Imperial War Graves Commission.

 

I'm ready for my close-up now Mr DeMille.

    

     The last time I visited Brighton I stayed the weekend with my friend Richard.  He lived in Brunswick Place in a top floor flat. Unhappily, the weekend did not go well.  However, on Sunday we walked into the centre of Brighton the back way, along Landsdowne Rd etc., avoiding the vile Western Avenue.  At the far end we paused for me to take some pictures of the somewhat eccentric Gothick Wykeham Terrace - all grey and white stucco and pinnacles - when a first floor window opened and voiced called out 'I'm ready for close-up now, Mr DeMille.'  He, Michael, then invited us in, at one point leaving us - two strangers - alone in his sitting room while he went downstairs to the kitchen.  The sitting-room was 'pure' Late Sixties/Early Seventies - white painted Gothic book shelves and a lime green carpet.  It was all rather stylish.  He returned some minutes later with some headed note paper and an invitation to tea sometime.  I remember him announcing that at one time he 'had Roy Strong on one side of me and Flora Robson and her sisters on the other.'  Or words to that effect.

     Sadly, I never returned for tea and never saw Michael or Richard again.  I wish I had, particularly Michael as he was a hoot and I was keen to record his house, but that weekend spelt the end of my friendship with Richard.  We last spoke at the beginning of lockdown, but alas, I think Richard must of died during those grim months.  

     This has turned out to be a less than cheerful introduction to a post about a couple of books by Sir Roy Strong, or as they used to call him in Private Eye, Dr Strange, than intended. However it is just about the only anecdote I have about the man, so it will have to do.

     Roy Strong is a bit of National Treasure.  Quite the Renaissance man: scholar, curator, writer (Author of some 43 (!) books, some in collaboration with his late wife, the designer Julia Trevelyan Oman), garden designer and maker, aesthete, dandy and habitue of the Beau Monde.  And I must say I'm a fan.  His first volume of published diaries 'The Roy Strong Diaries 1967-1987' is quite one of my favourite books and along with 'A Chequered Past' by Peter Schlesinger opens a window on the fascinating, now long vanished, interlocking worlds of Bohemia and the Beau Monde in Late Sixties/Early Seventies London.  A world essentially ended by the Oil Crisis of 1973.
    Therefore imagine my excitement when the bf announces he's found a cache of Strong's books for sale at Aberglasney.  After some toing and froing, I ended up with these five books.  The books that interest me most are the autobiographical 'Roy Strong: Self-portrait as a young man', 2013, and the 'The Renaissance Garden in England' 0f 1978 & 1998. (This is the paperback 1998 edition)

     'Roy Strong: Self Portrait as a Young Man' fleshes out part of that period covered in 'The Roy String Diaries'.  It is fascinating, partly because my own background shares some similarities with his - lower middle class and living in a 'semi', though I didn't actually live in suburbia, but (as I've said before) in a small market town in Lincolnshire.  I suspect that our tastes, and attitudes, are pretty much the same: 'a committed Royalist; an Oxford Movement Christian; a lover of Old England, its great houses, churches and landscape; in short, at this stage of my life, a prototype of the later Young Fogeys, conservative by instinct and not at all an Angry Young Man of the Colin Wilson/John Osbourne variety.'  (All that said, I suspect that Osbourne was probably more culturally conservative than assumed at the time.)
   At times this book reads like an Evelyn Waugh novel with our hero ascending the 'greasy pole' from Winchmore Hill in Enfield to Keeper of the National Portrait gallery at 32 and eventually Director of the V&A at 38.  If I remember rightly from the Diaries enjoying some very long lunches in the process and all the while encountering a whole flight personalities and eccentrics in the process, often immensely talented and but tragically flawed: the critic and exhibition maestro Dickie Buckle, and the artist Astrid Zydower spring to mind.  There is wonderful photograph - very 'Sixties' - of Buckle, Strong, and Buckle's assistant, Joe Predera.  They are standing amidst the chaos of the hang for the ground breaking Cecil Beaton exhibition of 1968.  Buckle looks like he's nicked his shirt from a production of Swan Lake, giving him the look a particularly robust and brassy barmaid. It seems to sum up a whole era.

    

     'The Renaissance Garden in England' is one of Strong's more academic works, a very 'Warburg Institute'* book, showing the influence of Strong's PhD tutor at the Warburg, Dame Frances Yates.  Yates (1899-1981) was another of those eccentric figures in Strong's life, a historian whose field of study was the Renaissance esoteric tradition; her published books such as 'Giordano Bruni and the Hermetic Tradition', and 'The Rosicrucian Enlightenment', reflect this.  Rather like the other books I have mentioned in this post it sheds light on a lost world, for very few of the gardens discussed in this book actually survive.  A world of great formal gardens full of symbolism and allegory, of grottos and mechanical wonders, places where the esoteric and the scientific were not yet estranged.
     Given that dearth of source materials ie gardens, Strong relies on written descriptions and contemporaneous paintings, drawings and prints.  Quite fascinating those prints in themselves.  Only one Hollar, but there are a small number taken from the wonderful 'Britannia Illustrata' of 1709.  In addition there is a liberal sprinkling of poetry of the period.  The result of all this is a rich, polymathic, satisfying bricolage of a book, the design of which appears to me, at least, to be heavily influenced by Mark Girouard's books such as 'Robert Smythson and the Elizabethan House' which were designed by Girouard's wife Dorothy.

*  The Warburg Institute is part of the University of London.  It was originally established in Hamburg in 1909.  In 1933, with the rise of the Nazi Party to power in Germany, the Institute was relocated to London. 

'Serotonin'

      Well, I've finally finished reading 'Serotonin' by the French novelist Michel Houellebecq - that's one I was reading concurrently with Joseph Conrad's 'Lord Jim'.  Not a thing I would recommend, reading two novels simultaneously, for like having two masters 'either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other'.  Indeed, 'Serotonin' seemed a bit vapid compared to Conrad. It just doesn't have the heft.  Vapid too, compared to Houellebecq's earlier work; as I wrote in an earlier post it just doesn't really stand up to say 'Atomised' of 'Platform'.  An opinion as you can see, that hasn't changed.  At only one point did the novel hold my attention and that was when its focus shifted from navel-gazing to a putative insurrection by a group of well-armed farmers.  It was both engaging and, finally, rather moving.  Alas, in a manner that echoed the half-hearted 'evenements' in 'Submission', neither the insurrection or Houellebecq's interest lasted that long, and the novel limped off to its conclusion.

BBC NOW: Back to the Brangwyn

      I feel I have to tread carefully here, and maybe it would be better if I just didn't bother, but I'm up for a challenge.  In any case I so loved the final piece in last night's concert at the Brangwyn Hall that I felt compelled to mark it in some way.  
     So, to the programme - it's a good place to start.  There were three pieces: Higgins's 'A Monstrous Little Suite', Weinberg's Concert for Trumpet & Orchestra, and Shostakovich's 6th Symphony.  The conductor was Ryan Bancroft, and the trumpet soloist, Håkan Hardenberger.  Gavin Higgins was also present and, if I may say so, sporting a rather fine beard.  I suppose what connect these three works is a sense that each is haunted (perhaps too strong a word) by the past.

      'A Monstrous Little Suite' Op is a five movement suite based on Higgins's opera 'The Monstrous Child' of 2019.  It was rather like the 'Curate's Egg'.  There was some wonderful orchestration.  I warmed to the slow movements - an interval canon (?) started the 2nd movement but was quickly dropped.  It was all rather like the score to a 50/60s Hollywood thriller, with all that unease that sadly one all too often associates with contemporary Classical Music, but without the images it was all rather inexplicable.

     So, to the Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra, Op 94, by Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919-1996).  I like the Violin Concerto (1959), (I'm actually listening to it now) but I think this must be the first time I have attended a concert and actively hated a piece.  The bf wasn't that keen either, but we both opted for the British thing and politely applauded.  Points for 'pushing' the audience, but the first half was pretty much indigestible.

     Things were a good deal more digestible in the second half with Shostakovich 6.  A bit overlooked, I should think, being sandwiched between two mighty works the 5th and 7th symphonies.  The symphony is both, paradoxically, a balanced and unbalanced work.  By which I mean each movement is perfectly balanced of itself, but the entire work is slightly out of kilter, consisting of a mere three movements - adagio, scherzo and presto - of which the first is larger than the other two combined.  In addition, the movements seem disconnected - Sibelius inflected Romanticism in the 1st movement to Neo-Classicism in the 3rd. The symphony's brevity, a mere half an hour or so, is not reflected in the music.  Nothing feels rushed; the opening adagio is expansive, solemn and at times mysterious; the other two movements lively, by turns capricious and, sometimes, bombastic.  The whole, for all its 'oddities' is quite compelling. It put a smile on my face.