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

Patrick in Parliament

The Mosaic of Saint Patrick in the Palace of Westminster

This feast of St Patrick marks the hundredth anniversary of the mosaic of Saint Patrick in the Central Lobby of the Houses of Parliament. At the heart of the Palace of Westminster, four great arches include mosaic representations of the patron saints of the home nations: George, David, Andrew, and Patrick.

The joke offered about these saints and their positioning is that St George stands over the entrance to the House of Lords, because the English all think they’re lords. St David guards the route to the House of Commons because, according to the Welsh, that is the house of great oratory and the Welsh are great orators. (The English, snobbishly, claim St David is there because the Welsh are all common.) St Andrew wisely guards the way to the bar (a place where many Scots are found), while St Patrick stands atop the exit, since most of Ireland has left the Union.

The mosaic of Saint Patrick came about thanks to the munificence of Patrick Ford, the sometime Edinburgh MP, in honour of his name-saint. Saint George had been completed in 1870 with Saint David following in 1898.

Sir William Raeburn MP commissioned the artist Robert Anning Bell (depicted right) to design the mosaic of Saint Andrew in 1922, which so impressed Patrick Ford that he decided to commission the same artist to depict the patron saint of Ireland.

Anning Bell had earlier completed the mosaic on the tympanum of Westminster Cathedral from a sketch by the architect J.F. Bentley. Following his work in Central Lobby he also did a mosaic of Saint Stephen, King Stephen, and Saint Edward the Confessor in Saint Stephen’s Hall — the former House of Commons chamber.

In the mosaic, Saint Patrick is flanked by saints Columba and Brigid, with the Rock of Cashel behind him. As by this point Ireland had been partitioned, heraldic devices representing both Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State are present.

On St Patrick’s Day in 1924, the honour of the unveiling went to the Father of the House of Commons, who happened to be the great Irish nationalist politician T.P. O’Connor, then representing the English constituency of Liverpool Scotland (the only seat in Great Britain ever held by an Irish nationalist MP).

“That day,” The Times reported T.P.’s words at the unveiling, “in quite a thousand cities in the English-speaking world, Saint Patrick’s name and fame were being celebrated by gatherings of Irishmen and Irishwomen. Certainly he was the greatest unifying force in Ireland.”

“All questions of great rival nationalities were forgotten in that ceremony. From that sacred spot, the centre of the British Empire, there went forth a message of reconciliation and of peace between all parts of the great Commonwealth — none higher than the other, all coequal, and all, he hoped, to be joined in the bonds of common weal and common loyalty.”

T.P.’s remarks were greeting with cheers.

The Most Honourable the Marquess of Lincolnshire, Lord Great Chamberlain, accepted the ornamental addition to the royal palace of Westminster on behalf of His Majesty the King.

March 18, 2024 1:40 pm | Link | No Comments »

Articles of Note: 13 March 2024

Articles of Note
Wednesday 13 March 2024
■ I consider myself a reasonably aware person when it comes to church architecture, but I was blown away when I first visited the Church of Our Lady Queen of Martyrs and St Ignatius at Chideock in Dorset.

My then-flatmate was getting married the next day and much pottering-about sorting things was required but the idiosyncratic beauty of this building captured my imagination — part Norman, part Moorish. I was almost insulted that I hadn’t come across it in any of my bookish explorations.

The historian Edmund Harris covers Chideock in his lusciously illustrated post on Recusancy in Dorset and the ‘other tradition’ of Catholic church-building.

■ Generations ago it was said that the three institutions no British politician dared offend were the trade unions, the Catholic Church, and the Brigade of Guards. In 2020s Britain there is only one caste which must always be obeyed: the ageing, moneyed homeowners.

Not only do these “NIMBYs” (“Not In My Back Yard”) jealously guard their freeholds, they do whatever they can to prevent more houses being built to guard the value of their prize possessions, vastly inflated by a combination of lacklustre housebuilding and irresponsible leap in migration. As old people vote and young people don’t — and when they do, vote badly — few sensible people can find a way out of this quagmire.

It might be worth looking to the Mediterranean, where Tal Alster tells us How Israel turned urban homeowners into YIMBYs.

■ It’s disappointingly rare to see intelligent outsiders give a considered impression of the current state of play in the Netherlands — that’s Mother Holland for us New Yorkers. Too often commentators in English are either rash cheerleaders for the hard right or bien-pensant liberals eager to castigate and chastise. Both rush to judgement.

What a rare diversion then to read Christopher Caldwell — the only thinking neo-con? — attempt to explore and explain the success of Geert Wilders in the recent Dutch elections.

■ One in ten of Lusitania’s inhabitants are now immigrants, and this discounts those — many from Brazil and other former parts of the once-world-spanning Portuguese empire — who have managed to acquire citizenship through various routes.

Ukrainian number-plates are now frequently be seen on the roads of Lisbon, as far in Europe as you can get from Big Bad Uncle Vlad.

Vasco Queirós asks: Who is Portugal for?

■ Speaking of world-spanning empires, in true andrewcusackdotcom fashion, we haven’t had enough of the Dutch — but we have had enough of their wicked wayward heresies.

Historian Charles H. Parker explores the legacies of Calvinism in the Dutch empire.

■ The City of New York itself is the best journalism school there is. Jimmy Breslin dropped out of LIU after two years, eventually taking up his pen. Pete Hamill left school at fifteen, apprenticed as a sheet metal worker, and joined the navy.

William Deresiewicz argues that a dose of working-class realism can save journalism from groupthink.

■ The New Yorker tells us how a Manchester barkeep found and saved a lost (ostensible) masterpiece of interwar British literature.

■ Our inestimable friend Dr Harshan Kumarasingham explores David Torrance’s history of the first Labour government on its hundredth anniversary.

■ And finally, one for nous les normandes (ok, ok, celto-normandes): Canada’s National Treasure David Warren briefly muses that the Norman infusion greatly refined Anglo-Saxon to give us the superior English tongue we speak today.

March 13, 2024 9:55 pm | Link | 2 Comments »

Cambridge

There’s a Dutch vibe to Cambridge that I rather like — but also a lingering Protestant Cromwellianism that I don’t. These two factors are not unconnected, and the highway that once was the North Sea is not so far away.

It is not a bad town. It’s like they took Oxford apart, put it back together again in not quite the same way, and added a lot of Regency infill. Oxford is more mediaeval, Georgian, and neo-mediaeval, whereas Cambridge is mediaeval, Tudor, and Regency.

The Cam is slower, quieter, and more peaceful than the Isis, which again gives it the quality of a Hollandic canal. I suspect the punting is better — or at least easier — here than at Oxford.

And of course it is rather more spacious than Oxford, which is hemmed in by geography in a way that Cambridge isn’t.

But it is also eerily quieter. A smart restaurant on a Thursday night was dead by half ten, and the staff refused our plaintive request for a second round of Tokay. (Protestantism.)

March 9, 2024 3:00 pm | Link | 3 Comments »

Taken on Trust

There is much talk these days of the nature of “high trust” societies and the many benefits which they bring, or once brought in the case of countries like Great Britain that, until relatively recently, fell into this category.

The young Lee Kuan Yew (1923-2015) was astounded when he exited the Underground station at Piccadilly Circus and saw a pile of newspapers and a box of coins and notes, with passers-by being trusted to pay for their own newspaper and calculate their own change. He determined that Singapore must emulate the high trust society that Britons had inherited.

In his excellent book, Britain Against Napoleon: The Organization of Victory 1793-1815, about the logistics of Britain’s fight against Old Boney, Roger Knight writes of how much trade and agriculture across Great Britain relied upon this trust.

Drovers, for example, would take on thousands of pounds worth of animals — pigs, cattle, etc. — from farmers to drive down to London en masse, not returning for weeks, and usually with little or no paper record.

Citing Bonser’s The Drovers: Who They Were and How They Went, An Epic of the English Countryside, Knight relays the following story:

Perhaps the most impressive demonstration of trust was the tradition of dogs being sent home to Scotland or Wales from London on their own. One story involved a Welsh dog named Carlo who journeyed all the way back to Wales from Kent. His owner sold the pony that he had ridden on the outward journey, intending to go home by coach. He fastened the pony’s harness to the dog’s back and attached a note to it, addressed to each of the inns on the route they had followed, to request food and shelter for the dog, to be repaid on a subsequent journey. Carlo reached home in Wales alone in a week.

Even dogs benefited from a high-trust society.

March 4, 2024 11:52 am | Link | 3 Comments »

Immanuel on the Green

The prettiest situated church in the little state of Delaware

In the old Delaware hundred of New Castle on the town green sits the Immanuel Protestant Episcopal Church — the first Church of England parish in what is now the State of Delaware. This part of the world started out as New Sweden, but our Dutch forefathers of old, settled as they were in New Amsterdam, quickly took umbrage at the Scandinavian presence in what they viewed as a distinctly Netherlandic domain.

By the time Sweden and Poland went to war in 1755 — a conflict, confusingly, called the Second Northern War by some and the First Northern War by others — a Polish citizen of New Amsterdam had convinced the governor, Peter Stuyvesant, to let him take a team to go and establish a Dutch fort in the lands claimed by the Swedes. Stuyvesant named the settlement Fort Casimir after the many legendary Polish kings to bear that name, as well as the reigning King of Poland at the time, John II Casimir.

The dastardly Swedes captured Fort Casimir in 1654, led by an Östergötlander by the name of Johan Risingh. (As it happens, Rising had studied at Leiden in the Netherlands in addition to his native land’s university of Uppsala.) The Swedes had seized the fortress on Trinity Sunday, and so they rechristened it as Fort Trinity — or Fort Trefaldighet in their own tongue.

Stuyvesant was forced to lead an expedition himself to kick the Swedes out and, after a scrap that went down as “the Most Horrible Battle Ever Recorded in Poetry or Prose”, he returned to Dutch Manhattan in triumph.

“It was a pleasant and goodly sight to witness the joy of the people of New Amsterdam at beholding their warriors once more return from this war in the wilderness,” no less a source than Diedrich Knickerbocker recounts.

The schoolmasters throughout the town gave holiday to their little urchins who followed in droves after the drums, with paper caps on their heads and sticks in their breeches, thus taking the first lesson in the art of war. As to the sturdy rabble, they thronged at the heels of Peter Stuyvesant wherever he went, waving their greasy hats in the air, and shouting, ‘Hardkoppig Piet forever!’

It was indeed a day of roaring rout and jubilee. A huge dinner was prepared at the stadthouse in honor of the conquerors, where were assembled, in one glorious constellation, the great and little luminaries of New Amsterdam. … Loads of fish, flesh, and fowl were devoured, oceans of liquor drunk, thousands of pipes smoked, and many a dull joke honored with much obstreperous fat-sided laughter.

But the joyous dominion the Hollanders held over the former Swedish territory was to be short-lived. By fate and the divine hand, the Duke of York — later our much beloved and since departed majesty King James II — seized New Amsterdam without firing a shot in 1664 and New Netherland became the Province of New York overnight.

Down on the banks of the Delaware, the Dutch-founded Fort Casimir, re-consecrated as Fort Trinity by the Swedes, had returned to Dutch control under the name of Nieuw Amstel. The English now named it New Castle, a name which has stuck ever since.

By a livery of seisin, the Duke of York transferred this part of his fiefdom to William Penn in 1680, who went and founded Pennsylvania a year later. But the English, Dutch, and Swedish inhabitants of “the lower counties on the Delaware” bristled under the dominance of the culturally distinct Quakers. They petitioned the Crown to be governed by a separate legislature, which privilege was duly granted in 1702.

(more…)

March 2, 2024 3:20 pm | Link | No Comments »

La Bougie du sapeur

Lo, the Twenty-Ninth of February is upon us, which means another edition of the French newspaper La Bougie du sapeur. The printing of a newspaper is not often news itself, for most are dailies and some are weeklies. That rara avis, the fortnightly is — like the monthly — more common amongst magazines. But La Bougie du sapeur is unique in the world as it only comes out on this date, the once-every-four-years leap day. (Or, as the French foppishly put it, bissextile.)

This is the twelfth number of La Bougie, an amazingly indolent feat for a newspaper that began in 1980. Perhaps they take their inspiration from the venerable and beloved Académie française, which was given the task of drafting the dictionary of the French language back in the 1680s, and finally reached midway through the letter “E” in 1992.

The paper’s name translate as the Sapper’s Candle (for those outside of Angledom, “sapper” is another word for a soldier in the engineers). The soldier in question is Sapeur Camember, a stock character of French comic strips popularised by “Christophe” (Marie-Louis-Georges Colomb) in the pages of Le Petit Français illustré between 1890 and 1896.

Camember was born on 29 February and thus had only celebrated four birthdays by the time he enlisted in the army. Every leap year thus adds another candle on the sapeur’s birthday cake. The character seeped into the French mind, and there is even a statue of him in Lure.

The newspaper was born in 1980 as a bit of an in-joke between two friends, Jacques Debuisson and Christian Bailly, and Jean d’Indy (pictured above and below) is currently at the helm as editor and director. (His day job is working for the French body responsible for flat racing and steeplechases.)

Ever with an eye on expansion, La Bougie began to print a Sunday supplement in 2004, to appear even more rarely whenever 29 February falls on a Sunday. The next issue of the Dimanche supplement is expected in 2032. This year marks the advent of their sports supplement, La Bougie du sapeur – Sportif.

The tone of La Bougie is satirical, mocking, and politically incorrect — but not without a heart. For example, the profits from the 2008 edition were donated to a charity working amongst autistic adolescents.

Our French readers (we hope they are plural) will want to head out to the kiosk to purchase a copy today, lest they have to wait for the next edition. (more…)

February 29, 2024 11:45 am | Link | No Comments »

‘Knights of Massawa?’ Lecture

I will moderate the next lecture in the Order of Malta’s series of Chapter House Talks, to be given by Dr Maximilian Lau of Oxford University on the subject ‘Knights of Massawa? Coffee, Crusade, and How the Order of St John Almost Moved to Africa’.

This will take place in the Chapter Room of the Grand Priory of England at 7.00 pm on Tuesday 19 March 2024.

All are welcome, and a voluntary contribution of £10 will be collected.

February 26, 2024 11:15 am | Link | No Comments »

A Happy Home in Maida Vale

Mary Christianna Lewis was better known under the most prominent of her various pen names, Christianna Brand, the author of such mysteries as Green for Danger, Death in High Heels, and Heads You Lose.

Her ‘Nurse Matilda’ series of children’s books was illustrated by her cousin, Edward Ardizzone RA, and was later adapted for the silver screen as the Nanny McPhee films starring Emma Thompson.

Brand and her husband lived in this rather happy looking home in leafy Maida Vale which has now come up for sale.

Built in 1822 (and Grade II-listed), the house was also deployed as a setting by the author — sometime chair of the Crime Writers’ Association — in her book London Particular.

As Brand described the story:

It is set in a London house and everybody is either a member or close friend of the family – it is a doctor’s house, a Regency house in Maida Vale; in fact, it is my own house with all my own family and animals and things in it just for fun.

Maida Vale has also been the setting for mysteries written by PD James and Ruth Rendell — and of course the ‘M’ in Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Dial M for Murder’ stand for Maida Vale itself.

(more…)

February 25, 2024 3:00 pm | Link | 1 Comment »

Messing About in Old New York

In the collections of the New-York Historical Society there is a photograph deposited amidst the archives of the Seventh Regiment Gazette.

The scene is the Appleton Mess of the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue, where Company B of the “Silk-Stocking Regiment” was celebrating its one-hundred-and-thirty-fourth birthday.

It was May 1940. The other side of the Atlantic Ocean, British troops were evacuating from Norway, sparking the debate in the House of Commons that would lead to Winston Churchill being appointed Prime Minister.

But on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, all was still peaceful and calm.

With a packed calendar of events, the social life of B Company was as much of a whirl as any other in the Seventh Regiment.

“The members of the Second Company greeted the onrushing spring with a cocktail party and dance on the afternoon of February 11th,” the Gazette reported. “The time-stained rafters of the Veterans Room echoed back as melodious a medley of sweet, swing, and hot as these old ears have heard in many a year.”

“The spaghetti lovers are still meeting down at Tosca’s on Tuesdays,” the Gazette continued. “All members who drop in on this crowd are warned beforehand to eat fast and keep an eye on their plate. A darting fork awaits all unwatched portions and men have been known to sit down to a full dish of Italian cable only to arise half famished.”

Company B’s Entertainment Committee also found time for a Supper Dance at the end of March that year: “When Charley Botts heard ‘In The Mood’ he gathered up the jitterbugs and sent them scampering around in a breathless Big Apple, much to the delight of the wiser and unbruised amongst us who resisted his wiles.”

“Several of the more energetic members closed the evening by visiting that well-known late spot, the Kit-Kat Club, and are now offering mortgages on the family homestead to settle future bills.”

All the faces, the mode of dress — it’s a picture of a vanished New York, a year and a half before the attack on Pearl Harbor. (Incidentally, December 7, 1941 was also the day Col. Cusack — aka ‘Uncle Matt’ — was baptised.)

On another level, it looks just like the Seventh Regiment Mess I knew from my childhood, when it was in the firm but welcoming hands of Linda MacGregor.

The building has been restored physically but since the military was kicked out it is a beautiful but lifeless hulk, preserved as if in formaldehyde and reduced to being a mere “venue”.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

February 21, 2024 10:40 pm | Link | No Comments »

St Mary Overie in Lent

The days are getting longer and Lent is already upon us.

Here in Southwark I nipped in to Evensong in the late twilight of a winter’s day. They do it very beautifully with a full choir at the Protestant cathedral — old Southwark Priory or St Mary Overie to us Catholics, St Saviour’s to our separated brethren.

As it is the penitential season, the Lenten Array is up at Southwark Cathedral, theirs apparently designed by Sir Ninian Comper.

What is a Lenten Array? Sed Angli writes on the Lenten Array in general while Dr Allan Barton has written on Southwark Cathedral’s Lenten Array specifically.

And of course our friend the Rev Fr John Osman has one of the most beautiful Lenten Arrays at his extraordinary Catholic parish of St Birinus — a stunning church previously mentioned.

(The photograph of our local array is from Fr Lawrence Lew O.P.)

February 19, 2024 8:24 pm | Link | No Comments »

ICAA Videos on Architecture

The Institute of Classical Architecture and Art is one of the absolute gems of American civic society.

As part of their remit of promoting traditional architecture and its many associated arts they have a good many videos on their website covering numerous subjects and in a variety of depths and lengths of time.

Here are just a handful.

The Urbanism of Greenwich VillagePart I (1h09m) and Part II (1h06)
Rodrigo Bollat Montenegro gives a half-hour introduction to traditional urbanism, followed by an hour and a half exploring the development, design, and streetscapes of Greenwich Village. (We will excuse his inability to pronounce Gansevoort Street.)

Colonial American Architecture: A Design Resource for Contemporary Traditional ArchitecturePart I (46 min) and Part II (47 min)
Calder Loth survey’s America’s colonial-period buildings and their utility as a resource for domestic residential design today.

The Architecture of Place: Filling the ‘Missing Middle’ of the Housing MarketVideo (55min)
Alireza Sagharchi, Robbie Kerr, Dan Parolek, and Jason Syvixay on solving the housing crisis through traditional methods that can create better places to live without harming the urban environment.

Edith Wharton & Her New YorkVideo (1h13m)
Francis Morrone — my favourite columnist from the New York Sun in its printed days — explores the Wharton’s home town from the time of her birth at 14 West 23rd Street in 1862 to her departure for France at the turn of the century, and the world of The Age of Innocence.

In Your Neighborhood: Pasadena City HallVideo (5min)
There are also shorter videos like this one from the In Your Neighborhood series in which architect Christian Arndt explores the history and design of the almost preposterously — but gloriously — grandiose Pasadena City Hall.
February 17, 2024 2:20 pm | Link | No Comments »

Die kleine dorpie Betlehem

JA JA JA, ons onthou: die Amerikaanse Episcopaalse biskop Phillips Brooks was nie ’n bolwerk van ortodoksie nie. Hy het die ryk van gevoel bo die waarheid verhef, maar nie noodwendig teen die waarheid nie — hulle het in die negentiende eeu nog ’n bietjie politesse gehad.

Soos R.R. Reno geskryf het: Brooks “het geen moeilike teologiese kwessies gedink of enige nuwe intellektuele grond gebreek nie.” In Nieu-Engeland was hy “heeltemal afgeleide en uiters invloedryk”.

Reg genoeg… en vandag leef ons in Brooks se nawêreld. Maar hy het ’n klein geskenk aan die wêreld gegee, en sy klein geskenkie was ’n lofsang — ’n Kersfees liedtjie.

Die wysie wat in Amerika gebruik word, is sakkarien. Maar die Britse een — “Forest Green” — is melodieus en goed. (’n Video hieronder, en Engels, gesing deur die koor van St George’s in Windsor-kasteel.)

Die kleine dorpie Betlehem
lê rustig daardie nag,
terwyl dié wonderwerk gebeur
waarvoor die wêreld wag.

Want diep in daardie donker nag
verskyn ’n nuwe dag
vir almal wat in nood verkeer
en op sy redding wag.

Toe God se Seun gebore is,
was daar geen plek vir Hom;
so word ’n donker dierestal
’n helder heiligdom.

Want soos voorspel en lank verwag,
verskyn ’n Koningster,
wat ewig lig en vrede straal
na mense wyd en ver.

O Koningskind daar in die krip,
U kom hier by ons woon.
Net U versoen ons sondeskuld
en maak ons lewe skoon.

Die engele bring blye eer,
want U kom ons herstel.
O Vredekoning, God met ons,
U is Immanuel.

February 15, 2024 3:45 pm | Link | No Comments »

Kings, Horse Brands, and Town Seals

The Influence of James II on the Present-Day Municipal Sigillography of Suffolk County, L.I.

THE KEEN STUDENT of town and municipal seals, when perusing the emblems of some of the towns on Long Island, will be intrigued by the curious presence of seemingly inexplicable letters on those of Brookhaven and Huntingdon. Their origin is an intriguing and somewhat surprising one.

The great state of New York takes its name from our late and much-lamented monarch, James II (viz. here and here), who was given the province while still Duke of York during the reign of his brother Charles II. This was a little bit cheeky as the land wasn’t actually Charles’s and was happily occupied by our Dutch forefathers of old, who had every intention of keeping it within the merry garth of their seabound empire.

Nonetheless, a few English ships were sent over and the mercantile population persuaded old peg-legged Peter Stuyvesant not to lose his other leg as they generally thought the prospect of New Amsterdam being shelled and burnt to the ground was not an altogether welcome one and what difference does it make which side of the North Sea one is governed from.

The Province of New York was a proprietary colony of the Duke of York, who promulgated an initial set of regulations known as “the Duke’s Laws” to aid the good administration of the colony. Somewhat eccentrically, rather than proceeding by rank of importance, the Duke’s Laws were arranged alphabetically — e.g. under headings Absence, Actions, Administration, etc.

Under ‘H’ came ‘Horses and Mares’ which provided:

That every Town within this Government, shall have a marking Iron or flesh Brand for themselves in particular to distinguish the Horses of one Town from another, besides which, every Owner is to have, and Mark his Horse or Horses with his owne Particular flesh Brand having some distinguishing mark, that one mans Horses may be known from anothers.

An appendix to the Laws provided that these town horse brands would take letter form, starting on the far end of Long Island with ‘A’ for East Hampton and ‘B’ for Southampton and moving all the way along to ‘Q’ for ‘Utricht’ (New Utrecht) and ‘R’ for Gravesend in Brooklyn on the western end of the island.

Caroline Church, Setauket
1729, named after Queen Caroline, the wife of George II

‘Seatalcott’, or Setauket as we now call it, was assigned the letter ‘D’. Setauket and Brookhaven were basically interchangeable names for the same place, and Brookhaven eventually won out as the town’s official cognomen.

The town seal was authorised by Governor Thomas Dongan — later the 2nd Earl of Limerick — who in 1686 ordained that “the said trustees of the freeholders and commonality of the Town of Brookhaven do, and may have, and use a common Seale”.

It features the town’s horse brand letter alongside a lance and harpoons signifying the whaling trade which was so prominent in this and many English towns here and further up the Atlantic coast.

Huntington, meanwhile, was assigned the letter ‘E’ for its horse brand and as the fifth town also included five dots alongside the letters HVN representing, (with ‘V’ for ‘U’ in the Latin manner) the town’s name. The rope surrounding the town seal represents the shipping that moved the agricultural products grown in the interior to the shore and on towards their final markets.

The town must have been one in which unsound thinking was rife, as it is believed to be named after the genocidal king-murderer Oliver Cromwell’s home town. Worse, much later the town adopted a coat of arms that was modified from Cromwell’s.

Luckily, wiser counsels have prevailed in more recent times. For the town’s 350th anniversary in 2003 it was decided to stop using the Cromwellian arms and rely solely on the town’s seal.

Huntington’s motto — THE TOWN ENDURES — has an almost cryptic quality. The town church — “Old First” — was founded in 1658 and when its second building was finished in 1715 it acquired a bell from England. Sometime during the Revolution, it was carried away by loyal troops and ended up on HMS Swan, where Huntington native Zebulon Platt noticed it while being held prisoner.

If legend is to be believed, one Nathaniel Williams arranged the return of the bell and had it recast in 1793, including the phrase ‘THE TOWN ENDURES’. This may reflect the 1773 town resolution which provided money for the purchase of a parsonage for the church “to lye forever for that purpose as long as the town endures”.

February 6, 2024 9:35 pm | Link | No Comments »

Hawksmoor’s Dream

Andrew Ingamells, Hawksmoor’s Dream
crayon, pencil, and waterccolour,
27½ in. x 17¾ in.; 1987-1991

(and available as a silkscreen)

Andrew Ingamells is an excellent draughtsman who is probably the finest architectural artist in Britain today.

His depictions of Westminster Cathedral and the Brompton Oratory (amongst others) are in the Parliamentary Art Collection, and he has done Loggan-style portrayals of the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge as well as three of the four Inns of Court in London.

The above capriccio is a wonderful treat. I think someone should build it.

February 4, 2024 10:45 pm | Link | No Comments »

Canterbury Gate

JMW Turner, Canterbury Gate, Christ Church
graphite and watercolour on paper,
10 in. x 16¼ in., 1799; Tate Collection

Turner’s painting captures Christ Church’s Canterbury Gate from Oriel Square. (As it happens, this is Canterbury Gate at Christ Church in Oxford and, conversely, there is a Christ Church Gate at Canterbury in Kent.)

Given the greenery of the vegetation, this is almost certainly not the work that inspired Betjeman to write his winter poem ‘On an Old-Fashioned Water-Colour of Oxford’:

Shines, billowing cold and gold from Cumnor Hurst,
A winter sunset on wet cobbles, where
By Canterbury Gate the fishtails flare.
Someone in Corpus reading for a first
Pulls down red blinds and flounders on, immers’d
In Hegel, heedless of the yellow glare
On porch and pinnacle and window square,
The brown stone crumbling where the skin has burst.

A late, last luncheon staggers out of Peck
And hires a hansom: from half-flooded grass
Returning athletes bark at what they see.
But we will mount the horse-tram’s upper deck
And wave salute to Buols’, as we pass
Bound for the Banbury Road in time for tea.

February 4, 2024 4:30 pm | Link | No Comments »

Whitechapel Library

There are precious few suitable uses for former church buildings.

At the worst end of the spectrum is nightclub, though bar or restaurant often doesn’t fall terribly far behind either. To my mind, I can hardly think of a more suitable use for an elegant and beautiful former church than to be turned into a library.

An example: the former Anglican parish church of St Philip, Stepney, in Whitechapel. Designed by Arthur Cawston, of whom I know little, it reminds me of J.L. Pearson’s Little Venice church for the eccentric “Catholic Apostolic Church”.

St Philip’s was declared redundant in 1979, at which time the neighbouring London Hospital still had its own medical school. This has since merged with that of St Bartholomew’s into “Barts and the London” or “Barts” or “BL”, under the auspices of Queen Mary University of London.

As St Philip’s sat pretty much smack dab in the middle of the campus of the London Hospital (augmented to the Royal London Hospital from 1990) and the college was surviving in cramped accommodation, it was decided to restore the fabric of the church and convert it to a library and study centre. The crypt of the church was adapted to house computer, teaching, and storage rooms as well as the museum of the Royal London Hospital.

Rather than preserve it in aspic, the medical school decided to keep this as a living building by commissioning eight new stained-glass windows to replace plain glass. They are completed along rather forthright German modernist designs and are dedicated to such themes as Gastroenterology and Molecular Biology. They will not be to everyone’s taste, but it is admirable for a medical school to commission stained glass windows at the turn of the millennium.

The Survey of London’s Whitechapel Project has a typically thorough entry on QMUL’s Whitechapel Library / the former church, including these applaudable photographs the Survey commissioned from Derek Kendall.

January 31, 2024 11:40 am | Link | No Comments »

Articles of Note: 29 January 2024

Articles of Note
Monday 29 January 2024
■ It is always a joy to be in Scotland and my trip there a week ago was made all the more exciting by the very elements lashing forth to prevent me leaving on time. “Storm Isha” hurled trees upon tracks and downed electric wires on Sunday evening, meaning my train back to London was scrapped and I was forced to endure the joys of an unplanned stay in the spare bedroom of the G.’s delightful New Town flat.

A lively Doubleyoo-Ess once took me to lunch at the New Club and, in whispered tones, pointed out a gentleman sitting at another table.

“He is the world’s leading expert on the Scots tongue,” my friend explained.

“But he was excommunicated by all the other experts on Scots when he pointed out that eighty per cent of Scots words are interchangeable with Northumbrian English.”

Scots is fascinating for its closeness to English and its distinction. Those who’ve had the pleasure of tarrying awhile in the Netherlandic world (whether in Europe, the Cape of Good Hope, or elsewhere) can detect the odd affinities to Dutch and Afrikaans — reminding you that the North Sea was once a highway, not a barrier.

Luka Ivan Jukic has written an enlightening exploration of how and why Scotland lost its tongue.

Jukic contends there are no signs of revival, which I dispute. There is a much increased interest in the use of Scots, but it feels contrived and falls somewhat flat. If you take a look at the Scots column in The National newspaper, it comes across as the ravings of a kook something akin to Anglish.

■ Amongst the many of Scotland’s joys is the pleasure of just looking at its buildings.

Witold Rybczynski pleads “Give us something to look at!” in his account of why ornament matters in architecture.

■ The New York Post — founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1801 and thus the Empire State’s oldest and most venerable newspaper — reports that the world’s oldest and most venerable forest has been discovered right in the heart of the Catskill Mountains.

This is one of the most beautiful places in America, especially when the leaves begin to turn in autumn, and features widely in the old stories transcribed by Washington Irving and others.

The name of the Catskills is believed to be from the catamounts that used to roam the woods and bergs when our Dutch forefathers of old first arrived in the valley of the Hudson. Our earliest record of it is on a map by Nicolaes Visscher père from 1656 — and pleasingly the local magazine retains the old spelling in its name of Kaatskill Life.

This fossilised forest within the Catskills is believed to date from 385 million years ago (for those who doubt the Ussher chronology — and we remain open-minded ourselves) and was discovered at the bottom of an old quarry.

■ As a precocious teenager I remember a visit to the maritime museum in Rochefort on France’s Atlantic coast that included a fascinating display of the intricacies and accomplishments of global shipping, housed in the long old ropeworks that kept France’s navy afloat in the era of sail.

It’s all been kicking off in the Red Sea, which inspired Wessie du Toit to write that the shipping container is an uncanny symbol of modern life

■ Some people claim there is no life outside of NW3, but as much a fan of Hampstead as I am, my first loyalty in London neighbourhoods is firmly lodged in Southwark. (Pimlico is high on the list, too.)

Many will pine for those precious late summer afternoons idly dawdling on the Heath, but Hampstead in winter has its distinct pleasures. For me, it’s curdling up with a pile of books beside the coal fire in the Old White Bear.

In the Christmas issue of The Oldie, Peter York wrote about the rise and fall of arty Hampstead.

■ One of our Hampstead mates is originally a West Country man and now finds himself even further west, studying law in California.

For a New Yorker, California is The Great Other. If not quite a rival, then certainly something we are always being compared against.

Naturally, one looks down on California, but also with a certain envy. If ever America had a golden moment when imperial might was combined with the simple goodness of life, it must have been coastal California from the 1930s to 1960s — with a hint of survival into the 1980s.

California’s decline is evident to all, though its power and influence is still vast (as the iPhone in your pocket proves). The Manhattan Institute recently devoted an entire issue to the question of Can California Be Golden Again?

I haven’t had a chance to read much of it, but I did enjoy Jordan McGillis’s article on how San Diego retains many of the qualities that once made California the envy of the world.

■ Peter Viereck ranks amongst the names of slightly neglected thinkers in the agora of American conservatism. Reading him always brings some insight, but I never knew much about the man himself.

Samuel Rubinstein supplies a fascinating account of the man and his thinking in Peter Viereck: Psychoanalyst of Nazism.

■ National treasure Peter Hitchens has spent his life hating the ogre Ted Heath, destroyer of worlds. I will never forgive him for what he did to England’s ancient counties and boroughs.

But Hitchens the Heath Hater, with his typically thoughtful approach, offers a reconsideration of the man.

■ All politics is local: Fred de Fossard writes about how EU-obsessed Lib Dems are ruining Bath rather than guarding one of the most precious jewels of English cities.

■ We leave you with this six-colour lithograph from the Pretoria-based artist Nina Torr entitled ‘Here we go again’ (an edition of thirty, available from the Artists’ Press):

Oxfordshire is an interesting county, and Oxford an interest town, even apart from the university:
https://www.oxfordshirehistory.org.uk/public/blog/blog_005.htm

Mention Whitechapel Library, another church-to-library conversion:
Survey of London blog

And in local news, the old rectory of St-Mary-at-Lambeth is up for sale.
https://www.se1.news/lambeth-rectory-for-sale-2024/

January 29, 2024 12:50 pm | Link | No Comments »

Architectural Exhibitions

The Architecture Association is renowned as the most pedantic of training schools for the profession. Housed as it is in an immaculate set of Georgian townhouses in Bedford Square, its students are rigorously trained to avoid anything that might be beautiful, expressive of the inherited tradition of millennia, or pleasing to the human condition.

Nonetheless, I love architectural models, and the AA is having an exhibition of a handful of models of the various places in which the Warburg Institute has been housed across its peripatetic and tumultuous history until it found its thus-far permanent home in Woburn Square in Bloomsbury.

“Architecture and interiors were crucial for Aby Warburg’s interrogation of culture,” the AA opaquely tells us.

“Between 1923 and 1958, designs were commissioned for buildings, interiors, and exhibitions, as the Warburg Library and Institute moved through a series of homes, first in Hamburg and then in London,” they more helpfully inform.

“This exhibition, an itinerant archive of models and drawings that portray the seven different spaces the Warburg Institute has occupied, sheds new light on Warburg’s involvement with architecture.”

Warburg Models: The Architecture of the Itinerant Archive
19 January 2024 to 7 March 2024
Mon-Sat, 11h00-19h00
Gallery, Architectural Association (free)

Connectedly, the University of London is hosting an exhibition looking at Charles Holden’s masterplan for that institution’s Bloomsbury campus.

This show “celebrates the architect’s vision of what a modern university could be through displays of detailed architectural models, archival documents, photo albums, and other mixed media”.

Senate House is an amazing building but I think we can be glad the full scale of its original plan — stretching all the way up towards Gordon Square — was never completed.

Charles Holden’s Master Plan: Building the Bloomsbury Campus
17 Jan 2024 to 17 March 2024
Mon-Fri, 09h00-17h00
Senate House, University of London (free)
January 25, 2024 9:45 pm | Link | No Comments »

City Hall Post Office

New York’s Lost Second Empire Gem

The Second Empire as an architectural style in America has always bad rap. The most prominent example in the New World is the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House in Washington, D.C. — formerly known as the State, War, and Navy Building after the three government departments it housed in the days of a slimmer federal state.

The OEOB was designed by Alfred B. Mullett, a Somerset-born architect who had immigrated to the United States when he was eight years old. Mullett trained as an apprentice under Isaiah Rogers who was Supervising Architect of the U.S. Treasury Department. In practice, the Treasury’s architect designed all the American federal government’s office buildings across the Union, and Mullett inherited the job in 1866.

At that time, the ever-expanding city of New York was desperately in need of a new post office, having occupied the former Middle Dutch Church since 1844. Congress approved funds for a new building, and an architectural competition attracted fifty-two entries. Instead of choosing one of the entries, five leading contenders were selected to collaborate on producing a single design.

Mullett criticised the joint design as too expensive and called in the job to his own office so that he could design the building himself.

Mullett’s Second-Empire design provided for a post office open to the public on the ground floor, mail sorting rooms below it, and space for federal courtrooms as well as offices for federal agencies in the floors above the postal facilities.

The original design (above) called for only four storeys but during the design process the need for more space to serve the growing city moved Mullett to slip another floor in beneath the mansard roof. (more…)

January 17, 2024 10:20 pm | Link | 1 Comment »

A Cape Dutch Garden at Chelsea

Jonathan Snow at the 2018 Flower Show

I’m ashamed to say I’ve never been to the Chelsea Flower Show, the most florid event on London’s social calendar. It is a delight flâneur-ing around the neighbourhood the week of the Show as many of the pubs, restaurants, and businesses in the vicinity pull out the stops in terms of their own floral displays.

I used to live in Chelsea but escaped to Southwark and there are some delightful gardens in our vicinity. But I’ve never regretted avoiding the Chelsea Flower Show more than when I discovered Jonathan Snow’s delightful entry of a Cape Dutch garden in the 2018 exhibition.

Snow and his wife had been on holiday in the Cape a few years before and the beautiful fynbos captured the designer’s imagination. The architecture must have too, for Snow topped his garden off with a pocket Cape Dutch house that ties it all together.

I can well imagine taking a morning koppie koffie on that stoep — and perhaps either a stiff gin-and-tonic or some ice-cold vin de constance as the sun goes down.

An excellent effort that makes me pine for the Cape.

(more…)

January 10, 2024 11:50 am | Link | 1 Comment »
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