London, GB | Formerly of New York, Buenos Aires, Fife, and the Western Cape. | Saoránach d’Éirinn.

2019 December

Articles of Note: 11.XII.2019

Articles of Note
Wednesday 11 December 2019
• As the general election campaign reaches its climax, Ed West points out that, even if we Conservatives emerge victorious tomorrow, problems inherent in British society will create difficulties for us in the future.

• The 1930s Oxford social anthropologist J.D. Unwin studied five thousand years of human existence and discovered you can either have a high level of cultural achievement or widespread sexual freedom but never both. Kirk Durston explores why sexual morality may be far more important than you ever thought.

• America’s secular liberalism isn’t secular at all: it is merely the latest stage in the adaptation of an inevitably deracinated Protestantism, Patrick Deneen argues.

• René Rémond’s model of France’s three right wings — Legitimist, Bonapartist, and Orleanist — is breaking down because, Luke Nicastro argues, Emmanuel Macron is co-opting both Orleanists and Gaullists into his electoral family.

• And finally, a historic note, it’s been more than a quarter-century since the late Anthony Lejeune went on A Tour of New York’s Clubland.

December 11, 2019 3:10 pm | Link | No Comments »

The Manor House

For devoted fanatics of Netherlandic architecture — I’m sure you’d count yourself as one as much as I do — a curious example of Dutch revival architecture can be found at No. 316 Green Lanes in the Borough of Hackney. Alighting from Manor House tube station the other day I was surprised to find myself confronted by a fine building which, it turns out, used to be the pub that gave its name to the Underground station.

The first ‘public house and tea-gardens’ of that name was built in the 1830s, and in 1843 Queen Victoria and Prince Albert stopped there for a change of horses. This tavern soldiered on until the arrival of the Piccadilly line which necessitated street widening and the demolition of the pub in 1930.

It was rebuilt in a very handsome brick Netherlandic revival in 1931 and continued on as a pub supplied by the London brewers Watneys.

A purist would object that the style of windows on the gables suggests a vulgar pakhuis (warehouse) on the Amstel while the stepped gable itself is more informed by domestic architecture. But is the privilege of architectural revivals to mix and match, so I don’t think we should complain.

Evidence suggests the pub shut in 2004 and the building was converted to its current retail use.

Alas, I can find no record of the architect, and the building remains un-listed, but I’m glad Hackney is home to this happy Hollandic interloper.

December 11, 2019 2:25 pm | Link | No Comments »

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