But early on he was a travelling architect doing repair work for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings — vide his repairs to the ancient manor house in Tintagel, Cornwall, known as The Old Post Office. His mentors had been John Ruskin and William Morris. He had driven and decorated with vine leaves the funeral cart that took Morris to his last resting place at Kelmscott. Bernard Shaw remarked that ‘the funeral cart was driven by the young architect Detmar Blow, dressed in waggoner’s smock’. He was a romantic architect, holding to a Ruskinian socialism. He was a bohemian who went round England in a gypsy caravan long before hippies hit that trail. In his day he became what is currently called ‘a celebrity’.

An obituary notice stated that ‘he [Blow] created with difficulty and for this very reason his work is more profound than other brilliant architects who can draw you 40 projects in as many minutes’. In 1906 his projected design for the reredos and panelling for the celebrated chapel of King’s College Cambridge won a competition that had been going on for 60 years: what to do with the east end of the chapel. Any number of distinguished architects had submitted plans from the 1840s onwards but it was Blow’s design that was finally selected.

The reredos was done in the Queen Anne style with four columns of oak with an inset of scallop niches for three statues. It was intended as suitably in keeping to meet the panelling made by the 17th-century craftsman Cornelius Austin, which in turn meets the choir stalls. Blow’s reredos also had a touch of grandeur to encourage worshippers and visitors to look up at the great east window with its magnificent stained glass. The reredos stayed there until the 1960s when the then head of fine art at King’s, Michael Jaffé, persuaded a collector of Old Masters to present his Rubens of the ‘Adoration of the Magi’ to King’s and arranged for it to be placed in the chapel. There then followed a college dispute as to where in the chapel it should go.

Jaffé was a Rubens obsessive with a very dominating personality. He was married, and openly bisexual — although he did not always seduce those (including the present writer) he tried it on with as successfully as he won the battle of the Rubens versus Detmar Blow.

So the Blow panelling and reredos were removed with Jaffé’s single comment: ‘It was well made.’ The college put them into store where all these years later, they remain. And the argument has not died. When I spoke to the archivist at King’s recently she told me that there are now more people in favour of the Blow reredos and panelling being returned than in favour of the Rubens
staying where it is. An option at the time
had been to place the Rubens in a side chapel.

Detmar Blow’s painting in oils of the chapel with the reredos in place is over seven feet in height and more than four feet wide. It was done to show the college what his design would look like in situ and was presented to the college by my grandmother. The college returned the painting to me when the Blow design had been removed. The painting is majestic. ‘Edwardian mannerist’ is how Michael Jaffé described the style to me. Now the chapel’s east end stands naked of all panelling — blank stone walls stare at you — and few now look up at the stained glass of the east window. The Rubens dominates, and brings with it a severe clash of styles, as Sir Nicholas Pevsner noted.

Architects are vulnerable to changing tastes. And Detmar Blow has suffered: Fonthill House in Wiltshire, pulled down by Lord Margadale; the Duke of Westminster’s hunting lodge near Bordeaux, destroyed by fire in the late 1940s; his work at King’s removed and his own house Hilles ravaged by fire in the 1950s. So it is good to look at this painting of the chapel with its altar and reredos — one of his works of art not destroyed by the whims of owners or by fire.

The post Why Rubens should go appeared first on The Spectator.

A series of memorable publications including Mark Girouard’s Life in the English Country House and James Lees-Milne’s diaries heightened interest in the subject. Country houses were a hot topic, not least because of their association with the country-house look of faded grandeur in interior decoration, a style easily recognisable to Spectator readers.

Nowadays, they are not so hot. Relatively little is published about them, and there have been few crises to whip up excitement. A crisis is invaluable: when a big estate like Tyntesfield House is likely to be dispersed, the heritage brigade wheels into action and money is often found to preserve it for the nation. More usually now, hard-pressed owners (usually fiercely loyal to their house) react to financial pressures by exploiting the value of individual works of art from well-provenanced collections, rather than throwing up their hands and selling everything.

Even in difficult times, houses are surviving. In the privately owned sector, the largest estates such as Chatsworth and Castle Howard continue to attract crowds of visitors and only in the next layer of houses do visitor numbers show signs of decline, especially when it rains all summer. But house owners are resilient people and according to Nick Way, director of the Historic Houses Association, are looking at new ways to support their houses, either through weddings or, instead of worrying about boosting numbers, by considering how visitors can be offered a more special and memorable experience.

In fact, more is going on in the country-house world than might appear. When the Attingham Trust, which has organised an annual summer school on the country house for 60 years, celebrated the anniversary last weekend, its conference at the Royal Geographic Society brought together owners, curators, National Trust representatives, historians and enthusiasts from Britain, the Republic of Ireland, the United States and Australia. What emerged was how much thought is given not only to preserving houses and estates but also to researching their past and considering their future.

The National Trust for England, Wales and Northern Ireland has recently digitised all its collections through its Collections Management Scheme: over 750,000 objects will be available free of charge online, an astonishing initiative. Encouraged by the Heritage Education Trust, which administers the Sandford Awards, houses have also been active in providing fully fledged and imaginative educational services, as in the case of Burghley House with its Ancestors in the Attic. But none of this is perhaps big news compared with the fantasy world of Gosford Park and Downton Abbey, indications of how potent the idea of the country house (particularly when fully staffed) remains not only in the British national consciousness but internationally, too.

Almost as exciting as Downton Abbey is the volume of research that country houses are now attracting. Interest seems to be moving away from the traditional architectural approach to broader economic and social issues. In Britain, the Collaborative Doctoral Awards granted by the Arts and Humanities Research Council allow doctoral candidates to spend three years researching the archives and working in the property they are studying.

Successful recent dissertations have examined (at Harewood) colonialism and horticulture with reference to the Lascelles estates in Barbados; the 15th-century archbishop’s palace at Knole and the house’s 17th-century interiors; and the 18th-century interiors at the Royal Pavilion and their relationship to contemporary colour theory. At Essex University, a team is investigating the ‘Lost Mansions of England’, some traceable only through fragments of park, scattered archives, the memories of people in their eighties. In all these cases, archives and collections are recalling histories that otherwise would be forgotten. The results point to new and exciting ways of presenting these houses in the future.

Country houses have been regularly visited since at least the 17th century. They keep reinventing themselves and being reinvented, not least through the medium of television (visits to Highclere Castle aka Downton Abbey are booked up for years to come). We can be certain that if they survive in anything like a recognisable form, they will go on being visited for centuries more.

The post Fact and fantasy appeared first on The Spectator.

In the early 1970s, more than 1.1 million people in the capital — almost a third of the workforce — had manufacturing jobs. Now only 117,000 do — one in 40 workers.

Still, the old industrial architecture survives in pleasingly generous quantities. Rotting and ignored for decades, it has lingered into an age when, at last, we appreciate the beauty of these things; and appreciate how easily these handsome, solidly built, cavernous buildings can be converted.

Bankside Power Station is now Tate Modern, its oil tanks cleaned out to make a new exhibition space this summer. And, after 29 years of dereliction, Battersea Power Station, it’s just been announced, is to undergo an £8 billion transformation into a hotel, offices, flats and entertainment quarter.

The latest survivor to be unveiled is the 67-acre Great Northern Goods Yard, north of King’s Cross station, the biggest single-ownership site developed in central London for more than 150 years — since the yard was first built, in fact.

I grew up near King’s Cross in the bad old days — on the early-morning school run along Goods Way, I remember seeing a vast blonde prostitute in a red swimming costume and red high heels cheerily playing patience. These days, she’d have a much greater range of leisure activities to kill the time between clients. Opposite her patch, on the site of the old petrol station, where the prostitutes used to buy their condoms, she would now find the Filling Station, a frighteningly fashionable beer and pizza bar, popular with Hackney types.

Just over the other side of the Regent’s Canal — once a popular passeggiata spot for muggers and devil dogs, now much prettified — are the converted industrial buildings.

Cooped up in our tiny Victorian terraced houses, it’s easy to forget what a magnified scale the Victorians used for industry. The Goods Yard was a mammoth repository for coal, grain, potatoes and meat, brought in by train from across the country: 25,000 sheep a week arrived here.

The heart of the site was designed in 1852 by Lewis Cubitt — the man who built King’s Cross station and the Great Northern Hotel. His Granary, an enormous stock brick box with a stone cornice, has become a campus for University of the Arts London; you can see the hypertrendy students of Central St Martin’s College of Art at work in their studios. They now park their bicycles in the underground stables where 800 horses were once kept.

Throughout, the architecture is simple and robust but never bland, and always set off with engaging detail. The East Handyside Canopy — gently curving to align with the neighbouring passenger terminus building — was built in 1888 for the most prosaic of jobs: to cover the unloading area for potato traffic. And still, the pointed, slatted roof is supported by delicate cast-iron Doric columns, manufactured by the Handyside Company of Derby.

There is a perverse beauty that comes out of all this dirty, rough-and-ready industry. And you can’t get much dirtier than the Coal Drops — or a more wonderfully unromantic name — built in the 1850s and 60s by Samuel Plimsoll, the coalmine owner who invented the Plimsoll line on the side of ships to show safe loading levels. The Coal Drops were originally four high-level railway tracks, from which coal was poured into hoppers and then into coal merchants’ carts at ground level. Even these rugged, basic buildings, with the most unromantic tasks, have a simple beauty, with their three ranges of shallow-curved windows and engaged iron Doric columns — they will become a series of shops.

The best of the King’s Cross industrial architecture will start to return next year: the four classical gasometers that punctured the horizon of north London for over a century, alongside the bristling, Gothic spires of St Pancras. (King’s Cross is largely classical to St Pancras’s Gothic.)

When gasometers were introduced to the capital in 1812, with the founding of the London Gas Light and Coke Company, they were considered horrible eyesores. By the time they started dismantling them at King’s Cross, locals were broken-hearted to see them go. The last 1,600 gas lamps in London are much prized, too: the ones outside Buckingham Palace, with royal crowns on top, are now listed.

The gasometers were erected in the 1850s and 60s, and enlarged in the 1880s when the demand for coal-fired gas, or ‘town gas’, was on the rise. I never realised it for the five years of my school run, but three of the gasometers were elegantly interconnected, sharing three tiers of classical columns where they met. This ‘Siamese triplet’ will be resurrected, with flats inserted into their perimeter; a fourth gasometer will encompass a park and a flexible event space.

It’s not all uplifting industrial beauty at the new King’s Cross. There are some pretty grim residential tower blocks on the site’s northern edge. Their dreary, unadorned functionality looks particularly uninspirational compared with nearby Stanley Buildings, built in 1865 by Sir Sydney Waterlow’s Improved Industrial Dwellings Company. Among the oldest surviving working-class flats in London, they have pretty cast-iron balconies, and avant-garde flat roofs for clothes-drying and children’s play areas. Next door is the 1865 German Gymnasium, home to the first National Olympian Games of 1866. The first purpose-built gymnasium in Britain, it has a lot to answer for — this is where the first-ever exercise classes for women were held.

If only modern architects could learn a little more from their Victorian aesthete forebears but, still, enough grumbling. The whole site — along with St Pancras — could easily have been swept away if the Victoriana-haters had had their way. At least we’ve finally realised how good the Victorians were at creating attractive, functional architecture on a huge scale. The clock has turned back and, for that, much thanks.

The post Building on the past appeared first on The Spectator.

Leighton House, studio-home of Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830–96), is one of my favourite museums, and always a treat to visit. This small but informative exhibition about the architect George Aitchison (1825–1910) who built it is a well-timed adjunct to the V&A’s great survey of the Aesthetic Movement, in which he is also included. Leighton House is Aitchison’s monument, for there are few other buildings to his name, apart from imposing warehouses; certainly no churches or country houses.

He built warehouses because he needed to earn a living and was fortunate enough to inherit his father’s post of architect to St Katharine Dock near Tower Bridge (father and son co-designed Ivory House). But Aitchison was no mere cobbler-together of other men’s ideas, and was innovative in his use of an iron skeleton in another Wapping warehouse he built. His studies in Italy (where he met Leighton, who became a good friend) confirmed his love of classical architecture, but also a Renaissance-inspired passion for colour, texture and pattern. These were the qualities which were to distinguish his mature work.

Aitchison regarded himself as an ‘art-architect’, a classification which puts art rather than architecture at the apex of the crafts, and this can be seen in the exquisite watercolours of interior designs he made for exhibition at the Royal Academy. (He was an Academy stalwart, studying there as a student, showing regularly in the Summer Exhibition and returning as professor of architecture, 1887–1905.) The coloured drawings he exhibited were not preparatory or working studies but highly wrought works of art, made presumably for their own sake, and only incidentally as a potent advertisement for his interior-design skills. As Daniel Robbins, the curator responsible for Leighton House, writes in the useful catalogue (paperback, £12), Aitchison’s beautifully painted pictures are ‘widely regarded to be amongst the finest architectural drawings made during the 19th century’.

The exhibition focuses on these interiors, mostly commissions in Mayfair, Belgravia and Kensington which came about through the Leighton connection. The visitor is greeted in the upstairs gallery by Alma-Tadema’s portrait of the architect as genial old buffer. Hung high at each end of this small but nicely proportioned room are two friezes in oil on canvas by Leighton, originally painted for the drawing room Aitchison designed for 1 South Audley Street, Mayfair. Called ‘The Dance’ and ‘Music’, Matisse they ain’t, but rather statuesque figure groups as much about interval as performance. Around the warm brown walls at eye-level are hung more than 20 of Aitchison’s interiors, including one from his Italian travels describing the lower church of St Francis at Assisi.

This jewel-like show would glitter more if the lighting levels were raised a bit, but of course these works are extremely light-sensitive, and as they are so lovely it would be a disaster if they faded. So they glimmer instead. Look, for instance, at the beautiful piquant blues in ‘Design for interior decoration of Miss Lehmann’s boudoir’ (1873), or the deeper blues with flowering stylised reeds and storks of the staircase at 1 Grosvenor Crescent. There are alternative designs for the Audley Street drawing room — without Leighton’s paintings, featuring instead friezes by one of his protégés, W.E.F. Britten — and grand bedroom designs for Lythe Hill in Surrey. Finally come Aitchison’s richly ornamented design (almost quilted in effect) for a reconstruction of the Tepidarium in the Baths of Caracalla, and two sumptuous drawings for the interior of the Chapel of St Joseph, Brompton Oratory, very like Leighton’s celebrated Arab Hall. Which returns us to the house, and another chance to wander round its delightfully varied spaces, thinking anew of the brilliance of its architect. Wall panels in a vestibule to the exhibition guide the visitor through the building’s design and construction. Recommended.

The Goldsmiths’ Company Summer Exhibition is devoted to a dozen contemporary craftsmen working in silver. In a couple of rooms on the first floor of Goldsmiths’ Hall in the City, their varied work is succinctly laid out, with a flat cabinet and a tall display case allotted to each. The exhibition is as much about how applied artists get their ideas as about the vessels they produce. To this end, the flat cabinets are given over to the actual process of designing, and contain drawings, models and all kinds of reference material that has influenced or inspired these makers. The result is a fascinating and revealing examination of contemporary silver.

Michael Rowe’s display informs us that the British inch was defined by statute in 1324 as ‘three grains of barley, dry and round, placed end to end, lengthwise’. Although this country has allowed this brilliant unit of measuring to be superseded by some ghastly European metric system that nobody I know either likes or wants, the glorious inch is still in use in the shoe industry (as well as in the Lambirth household). This encourages Mr Rowe to place a hand-made leather shoe in his display and to make much play with barleycorn textural decoration in his journey towards making a silver Ryvita holder.

Lucian Taylor makes ‘skeuomorphic’ pieces, flexible membranes inflated to make spheres like fruit or seedpods. Hector Miller’s cabinet of models and preparatory drawings leads to rather over-elaborate jugs with handles like wizards’ hats. Grant McCaig has made two groups of vertically pleated and seamed carafes, with cups and beakers, which refer (among other things) to the way a human body looks under the ribbed shadows cast by Venetian blinds. His beautifully made vessels have all the impact of a still-life by Morandi.

Theresa Nguyen uses flower and leaf forms to symbolise the spirit, lightly but dramatically evoked in silver, curling and twining as an expression of longevity or the life force. David Clarke is determinedly jokey and subversive, offering us spoons with attitude, or rather volume. He has made a ladle that extends into a tea urn, a spoon like a bloated hanging disc, another that extends sideways more than a foot (that’s 12 inches) into a trough. I hate to think of his feeding habits.

In the second room, Vladimir Böhm does his best to disguise silver as lead or enamel, which makes a basic miserabilist point of denial but leaves one wanting more. Much more rewarding are Alistair McCallum’s wood grain metal techniques, which produce patterns like marbling through a combination of silver and gilding metal. I found Peter Musson’s computer-controlled milling a bit too regimented, but Sarah Denny’s bold and bulbous hammered bell shapes were a sensuous pleasure.

Rebecca de Quin claimed the inspiration of Morandi and Ben Nicholson but was striving too much after effect in comparison with the seemingly effortless Grant McCaig, while Toby Russell, a swimmer and surfer, sought to bring his enjoyment of waves to the prose of a jug. His twisting forms, which at best ripple and undulate prettily, don’t however achieve anything particularly inventive or satisfying. So out of 12 exhibitors, only three are to my eye outstanding: Sarah Denny, Grant McCaig and Alistair McCallum. But go along and make up your own mind.

The post The art of architecture appeared first on The Spectator.