This little enclave is one of the best-kept secrets of London. I used to live just around the corner from Bonnington Square and walking into it was like entering a secret world.

Just steps from the gritty urban world of the Vauxhall gyratory there is a verdant realm where a good coffee can be had and where many neighbours actually know eachothers’ names.

Built to house railway workers, the whole square was compulsorily purchased by that archetype of grim 1970s misery, the Inner London Education Authority, to be demolished as a sports ground for the neighbouring school.

Within a decade, however, no demolition had been approved and the squatters had moved in — in this case organising a cooperative, building a community garden, and running a shop. They managed to negotiate the purchase of their homes from the Greater London Council and Bonnington Square was saved.

Gardeners have turned its streets into one of the most lushly verdant corners of central London, and now this five-bedroom house is up for grabs. If you have £1.9 mil going spare it would be a nice place to live.

For an ardent sun-lover like me the roof terrace — with barbecue artfully inserted into the old chimney breast — is the best feature, along with the proximity to the excellent Italo Deli.

The Fort de Brégançon: Riviera Retreat of France’s Presidents

When France’s head of state needs to let his hair down every summer, the Republic has a convenient presidential residence just for him to do so: the Fort de Brégançon on the Côte d’Azur.

There has been a fortress here since at least mediæval times, and Gen. Buonaparte (later emperor) ordered its ramparts renewed after the retaking of Toulon in 1793. It continued to serve military purposes until 1919, but in 1924 it was leased out to a local mercantile family, the Tagnards.

They passed their lease on to the former government minister Robert Bellanger, who improved the island greatly, connecting it to the water and electricity supply, building the causeway linking it to the mainland, and laying out the Mediterranean garden. Bellanger’s leased expired in 1963 and Brégançon returned to the property of the state.

President de Gaulle stayed a night on the island in 1964 but found the bed too small and the mosquitos too bothersome. Nonetheless, his wartime comrade René-Georges Laurin (mayor of Saint-Raphaël up the coast) convinced him it would make a suitable summer residence that befitted the dignity of France’s head of state.

The architect Pierre-Jean Guth was seconded over from the Navy to adapt and update the fort to this end. The rooms are a little small, but their cozy intimacy adds to the fort’s informality. The presidential bedroom features a Provençal bed facing the sea with a view towards the nearby island of Porquerolles.

Pompidou and Giscard enjoyed the island but Mitterand mostly neglected the island except when welcoming Chancellor Kohl and Taoiseach Garrett Fitzgerald. Chirac and his wife took up Brégançon and were often seen by the locals on their way to Mass.

Sarkozy liked to be photographed on his jogs from the island but after he abandoned his wife and took up with his mistress he preferred holidaying at Carla Bruni’s far grander and more comfortable summer residence.

Hollande opened the fort up to public visitors, hoping to recoup some of the costs of maintaining the property. Macron has taken to the island frequently for his summers, for meetings with foreign leaders, and for working weekends with his ministers.

With summer fires raging, a minority in parliament, and myriad other problems brewing, no doubt Macron has much on his agenda.

All the same, for France’s sake, we can’t help but hope Monsieur le Président has a happy holiday. (more…)

(In honour of his descendant coming to London for a coffee last month.)

My list of favourite things starts with sunshine, good architecture, and the beach — Florida’s Alys Beach has all three. This is the third of the communities on the Gulf Coast designed by Duany Plater-Zyberk.

Their first, Seaside — well known as where ‘The Truman Show’ was filmed — is iconic but now feels a little sterile and over-planned. It has earned its place in the history books of urbanism and architecture regardless.

Rosemary Beach, their second development, was a vast improvement and based its architecture on the actual Spanish colonial styles used when the Cross of Burgundy flew over Florida rather than the more Mediterranean-influenced Spanish Colonial Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Alys Beach is a splendid melange — a touch of the Cape Dutch, Bermuda here, the Maghreb there, and every now and then a hint of the French Caribbean. And it works: this is one of the most successful attempts at a beautiful and pleasing urban arrangement in twenty-first century America.

If any criticism can be issued it’s that Alys Beach is a holiday destination that will never be a “real” community where most people dwell all year round.

But if I was sitting en famille round a rooftop firepit watching the sun go down, I don’t think I’d complain.

Sir Basil Spence’s unbuilt Notting Hill theatre

Sir Basil Spence was just about the last (first? only?) British modernist who was any good. His British Embassy in Rome is hated by some but combines a baroque grandeur appropriate to the Eternal City with the crisp brutalism of modernity that makes it true to its time.

In 1963, Spence accepted the commission from the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Ballet Rambert for a London venue to host the performances of both bodies.

The poet, playwright, and theatre manager Ashley Dukes had died in 1959, leaving a site across Ladbroke Road from his tiny Mercury Theatre (in which his wife Marie Rambert’s ballet company performed) for the building of a new hall.

The design moves from the sweeping curve of the street frontage up to a series of angular concoctions and finally the large fly-space above the stage itself.

It made the most of a highly constricted site and would have housed 1,100-1,600 patrons (historical sources vary on this figure). This was a big step up from the old Mercury Theatre which housed 150 at a push.

Ultimately, the plan failed. London County Council was worried there wasn’t enough parking in the area, and the Royal Shakespeare Company was tempted away by the City of London Corporation which was building the Barbican Centre.

The soi-disant “Catholic Apostolic Church” was one of the strangest but most fascinating Protestant sects the Victorian world brought forth. It was entirely novel — perhaps outright bizarre is a better description — in its combination of millenarian theology, evangelical preaching, and inventive ceremonialism. They were often referred to as Irvingites as a shorthand, owing to their origins amongst the followers of the Rev. Edward Irving, a Church of Scotland minister who led a congregation in Regent Square, London.

The Irvingites — after the death of Irving, it must be said — invented an elaborate hierarchy of twelve “apostles”, under whom served “angels”, “priests”, “elders”, “prophets”, “evangelists”, “pastors”, “deacons”, “sub-deacons”, “acolytes”, “singers”, and “door-keepers”. Coming from a very Protestant, low-church background, they curiously concocted elaborate liturgies influenced by Catholic, Greek, and Anglican forms of worship.

Another unique aspect of this group was its lack of denominational thinking: the Catholic Apostolic Church did not demand any strict or exclusive communion but was happy for its members and supporters to continue to be members of other churches or denominations.

One of the founding “apostles” of the Irvingite Church, Henry Drummond, married his daughter off to Algernon Percy, later the 6th Duke of Northumberland. That duke and his two immediate successors were known to be supporters of the Catholic Apostolic Church without disowning their established Anglican affiliation.

Despite this aristocratic land-owning connection, socially the Irvingite church spread most rapidly amongst the well-to-do mercantile classes, which meant they had congregations in places like Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Edinburgh, and even Hamburg. They were also very strict about tithing, which — combined with their mercantile status — meant they had a fair amount of money to spend on church building.

In Liverpool their church was built on the corner of Canning Street and Catherine Street in 1855-56. The design by architect Enoch Trevor Owen was influenced by Cologne Cathedral, with a nave more than 70 feet high.

Owen later moved to Dublin where he was employed as architect to the Board of Works, though he also designed the Catholic Apostolic Church in that city as well. (Today that building serves as Dublin’s Lutheran Church.) There’s some indication he designed the Catholic Apostolic Church in Manchester, so he might very well have been a member of the sect himself.

Another centrally important fact about the Irvingites: they didn’t believe that their original “apostles” could appoint further apostles. So when the last living “apostle” ordained his last “angel”, no further angels and so forth could be created. It endowed the clergy of this unique branch of Protestantism with an effective end date, but you have to give them credit for sticking with it. The last “apostle” died in 1901, the last “angel” in 1960, and their last “priest” in 1971.

Gone are all their elaborate inventive liturgies, and unsurprisingly the congregations have tended to fade away as well. The last clergy often recommended the lay people in their charge attend Church of England services when their own services stopped. The body continues to exist, and beside paying for the maintenance of its properties also makes annual grants to mostly Anglican but also Catholic and Eastern Orthodox bodies. In some very rare places, like Little Venice, prayer services are still held.

Indeed they still own their great central church in Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, though its chief use in the past decades has been being rented out first to an Anglican university chaplaincy, and now to the use of High-Church Anglicans as well as an Anglican evangelical mission.

In Liverpool their church was given Grade II listing protection in 1978, possibly when prayers services were still being held. By 1982 the church was up for sale, but without a buyer it succumbed to a fire in 1986.

The church lingered in ruins until the late 1990s when it was demolished and a nondescript block of flats erected on the site.

Elsewhere: Liverpool: Then and Now | Velvet Hummingbee

The ‘House or College of Scholars of Merton in the University of Oxford’ — more commonly called Merton College — is one of the smaller colleges in Oxford, located right next door to lovely little Corpus.

Aside from rendering the architecture well, townscapes from the eighteenth century often give delightful little hints of city life. Michael Rooker (1746–1801) painted this scene of Merton College from its eponymous street in 1771, and the view today is hardly changed at all.

One of my favourite cityscapes is Canaletto’s view of the back end of Downing Street looking towards the old Horse Guards which you can pop into the Tate and see thanks to the generosity of Lord Lloyd-Webber. Incidentally, both scenes depict carpets being hung out for beating.

If you love the capital of the Netherlandosphere I recommended adding to your library Kijk Amsterdam 1700-1800: De mooiste stadsgezichten (‘See Amsterdam 1700-1800: The Most Beautiful Cityscapes’), the well-produced catalogue of the 2017 exhibition of the same name at the Amsterdam City Archives which includes 300 illustrations in full colour.

It’s high time the Museum of Oxford or the Ashmolean — or anyone really — put together a similar exhibition of Oxford cityscapes from the same century.

Incidentally, it was in Merton Field as a teenager that I played my first game of cricket. Who would have guessed then that eighteen years later your humble and obedient scribe would be facing the Vatican on the field of battle in the same sport? (We lost.)

IS THIS the most beautiful door in England? The Watts Chapel in the village cemetery of Compton in Surrey is certainly one of the most remarkable buildings in the land.

I have to admit it completely escaped my notice until a friend of mine founded a distillery a few years ago and based the logo on the seraphs depicted within the chapel. While the interior is indescribable it is also curiously incapable of being captured by photography to any satisfactory degree.

Being a Celt with a Norman surname who loves the Romanesque, it’s the entry portal that captures my imagination. It beams at the very same frequency as my heart.

What a wonderful melange of elements — Celtic, Saxon, Romanesque, and Nordic — are combined here with blithe ease.

Incessant stylistic purity is the realm of the boorishly tiresome, as Ninian Comper knew well, and here the eclectic blend works well.

As architects are incapable of learning the proportion required by Georgian and neo-classical styles, I’ve long believed the Romanesque (or ‘Norman’ as the English often call it) must be the starting point for the recovery of good solid modern architecture.

I, for one, welcome our Norman-Romanesque future with open arms — while prizing this late Victorian gem.

John Russell Pope’s Unexecuted ‘Museum Walk’

While John Russell Pope won the competition to design the New York State Theodore Roosevelt Memorial currently under attack, not every aspect of his design was executed.

The architect planned for an avenue to be built in Central Park to provide a suitable approach to the American Museum of Natural History and his memorial to the twenty-sixth president.

160 feet wide and 500 feet long, it would feature a broad central lawn flanked by drives and forming an allée of trees. Other versions of the plan have a roadway heading down the middle of the approach.

The idea of this ‘museum walk’ was originally that of Henry Fairfield Osborn, for a quarter-century president of the American Museum of Natural History.

Osborn was also president of the New York Zoological Society — they who run the Bronx Zoo — while his brother was president of the Metropolitan Museum across Central Park.

His son Fairfield also led the NYZS (renamed the Wildlife Conservation Society in 1993) and both père et fils held dodgy pseudoscientific Malthusian views about race and eugenics.

Their family house, Castle Rock, has one of the finest views of West Point across the Hudson and is still in private hands.

For whatever reason — possibly not wanting to redirect the 79th Street Transverse Road through the park that was in the way — Obsborn/Pope’s approach was never built.

It’s a shame as, aside from augmenting the impact of Theodore Roosevelt Memorial, it also would have provided a better vista from the steps of Museum itself.

The ancient heresy of iconoclasm claimed a new victim this week: The statue of Theodore Roosevelt which graced the Manhattan memorial dedicated to him at the American Museum of Natural History has been removed at a cost of two million dollars.

The sculpture had attracted the ire of protestors who objected to the inclusion of a Native American and an African by the side of twenty-sixth President of the United States and sometime Governor of New York, which they claimed glorified colonialism and racism.

While the American Museum of Natural History is a private institution, it sits on land owned by the City, and the statue was paid for by the State.

The statue was doomed in June of last year when the New York City Public Design Commission voted unanimously to rip Teddy down.

As the New York Post put it, “He’s going on a rough ride!”

The statue was severed in two this week, with the top half removed and the bottom half following shortly after.

It will be shipped to the Badlands of North Dakota to be displayed as an object in a museum under construction there. (more…)

With 231 million Muslims, Indonesia today has the largest Islamic population of any country. The obligation of all Muslims who are capable to perform the Hajj — the annual pilgrimage to Mecca — at least once in their life meant that there was a continual flow of travel and traffic between the Arabian peninsula and the Dutch East Indies (as they once were).

The writer, photographer, and explorer Daniël van der Meulen was appointed the Dutch consul in Jeddah in 1923. Then followed three full years of intensive study of Arabic and Islam under the tutelage of the great Hollandic arabist Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje before van der Meulen arrived in Arabia in 1926, just as the Sultan of Nejd, Ibn Saud, was securing his hold over the Hejaz.

The primary role of the Dutch consul at Jeddah was to look after the interests of the Netherlands-Indies pilgrims on the Hajj but, as that only took place once a year for several days, van der Meulen took full advantage of the down time to explore the Arabian peninsula.

Hadhramaut in Yemen was of particular interest to him and he completed several expeditions there between 1931 and 1944, forming strong friendships with many Hadhrami people along the way.

In 2003, the Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen (KIT, or Royal Tropical Institute) in Amsterdam published Daniel van der Meulen in Arabia Felix: Travels and Photographs of a Dutch Diplomat in Yemen, 1931–1944 by Steven Vink, the photographic curator of the Tropical Museum.

It was published in cooperation with the Yemeni Embassy in the Hague and the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Sana’a. William Facey of the British-Yemeni Society gives it a strong review here, but hard copies are tricky to get hold of.

Not all European journeys to South Arabia have proved as fruitful as van der Meulen’s. Thorkild Hansen wrote a book about the Danish expedition of 1761 to 1767, a ‘spellbinding true story of a scientific expedition gone disastrously awry’.

This 1962 book has happily been brought back to life in a recent printing from the ever-estimable New York Review Books.

Photo: Source

Placenames can be tricky things in Transylvania. The city of Sighișoara in Romania is known as Segesvár to its Hungarian residents and Schäßburg in German — or even Schäsbrich in the dialect of the local Saxons.

Vlad Țepeș ‘the Impaler’ — who later entered legend as ‘Dracula’ — was probably born here in 1428 and the town survived the urbanistic depredations wreaked elsewhere by the tyrant Ceaușescu, perhaps more out of neglect than anything else.

The fortified middle of the town is still a real place inhabited by real people, centred around its clock tower begun in the thirteenth century and rebuilt in the seventeenth.

Photo: Johannes Hulsch

AS THE MOST ANCIENT of boroughs — and right across the bridge from the City of London itself — Southwark is presumed to have had at least a small Jewish community before the Edict of Expulsion in 1290. Records show the existence of a merchant and moneylender named ‘Isaac of Southwark’ who defended fellow Jews before the Exchequer of the Jews, the special court that dealt with Jewish taxes, fines, and legal cases.

Before 1290, it seems likely any Jews in the Borough would have crossed London Bridge to worship in the Great Synagogue in Old Jewry. After the Edict was rescinded in the seventeenth century, Jewish communities sprang up slowly. Pepys in his diary records a visit to the small Sephardic synagogue in Creechurch Lane in 1663, and by 1690 a new Great Synagogue had opened in the City for Ashkenazi Jews.

Jews in the Borough had their first known place of worship thanks to Mr Nathan Henry (born c. 1764). As a boy, Henry heard the mad Lord George Gordon speak in St George’s Fields (where your humble and obedient scribe is currently situated typing this) which provoked the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots. By a strange twist of fate, that Scottish nobleman ended up converting to Judaism and died in Newgate Prison styling himself Yisrael bar Avraham.

Around 1799, Nathan Henry fitted out a room as a synagogue in his house at No. 2, Market Street near the junction with Newington Causeway. (Market Street was later renamed Dantzic Street after the Baltic city, and is now Keyworth Street after a First World War winner of the Victoria Cross.) Later he roofed over the whole of the yard behind the house with entry gained through the shop at the front, and two rows of gallery seating above for ladies (entered through a bedroom).

Henry’s house-synagogue was small and crowded: it could fit a hundred people in uncomfortable circumstances, but those hundred were not always happy. The proprietor, having built the synagogue, considered himself the sole authority with the right to appoint wardens and office-holders. In 1823 a group of worshippers seceded and found new premises in which to worship in Prospect Place, the south side of what is now St George’s Road. The two synagogues continued in friendly relations and Nathan Henry was largely considered the head of the Jews of the Borough until his death in 1853, after which his house-synagogue shut up shop.

But by the 1860s the need for a new place of worship was apparent. For one thing, the lease on Prospect Place was coming up, and as Rabbi Rosenbaum put it the building was “incommodious, dilapidated, and unsightly, and was not even protection against inclement weather, for the roof admitted the rain and the raising of umbrellas during divine worship was no unusual occurrence”.

A building committee was put together, funds raised (more slowly than anticipated), and a site found in Albion Place, Walworth — soon to become Heygate Street. On 7 April 1867, the Borough New Synagogue was consecrated in a ceremony attended by almost all the Jewish clergy of London. In the evening, many of the congregation repaired to Radley’s Hotel in Bridge Street for a great big hooley to celebrate. The synagogue was accompanied by a boys’ school and a girls’ school both located next door. (more…)

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