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.

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…)

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…)

The church in die Paarl is the third-oldest NGK congregation in South Africa, after the Groote Kerk in Cape Town and the Moederkerk in Stellenbosch. It is often known as the Strooidakkerk (straw-roof church) for obvious reasons.

This part of the Drakenstein was first settled by Huguenots, where the dominee Pierre Simond preached in French from the foundation of the church in 1691 until he returned to Europe in 1702.

The threefold division of the world

[…]

One of the little tragedies of New York urbanism is that when Archer Milton Huntington was transforming a block of upper Manhattan into an acropolis of culture he failed to buy the entire block.

Huntington named his complex Audubon Terrace in honour of the artist and ornithologist John James Audubon whose home, Minniesland, overlooked the Hudson at the western end of the block. His failure to obtain Minniesland meant that the remainder of the block was snapped up by developers instead of incorporated into his campus.

In the 1910s, the speculators built apartment buildings that turned their rather rude and unadorned backs to Audubon Terrace, terminating the vista from Broadway. When you imagine the potential prospect all the way to the river, it is all the more tragic.

The crass posterior of these apartment blocks naturally dissatisfied the members of the American Academy of Arts & Letters, whose building sits on either side — and indeed beneath — the part of the terrace immediately adjacent to them.

McKim Mead & White had designed the first phase of the Academy’s handsome building facing on to West 155th Street, which opened in 1923, and Cass Gilbert was chosen to design the auditorium and pavilion which would complete the body’s portion of the site.

The Academy used the pavilion for art exhibitions and other events, with the terrace in between serving as a useful spot for springtime drinks parties for the academicians and their many guests.

The infelicitous nature of their neighbours clearly irritated the Academy, and in 1929 they had a conversation with Cass Gilbert about designing some sort of screen to satisfyingly terminate the vista down Audubon Terrace and block the view of the apartment buildings.

Gilbert sketched out a plan to build an arched screen connecting the pavilion to the main building across the terrace, topped off by a sculptural flourish.

There is a danger its scale may have overwhelmed the space, but that seems a preferable struggle to face when compared to the problem of the rude neighbours.

Events, as they so often do, intervened. The Wall Street Crash badly affected the American Academy’s finances, and Archer Huntington was forced to increase his already generous subsidy to the body even more just to make ends meet.

Gilbert’s final completion of Audubon Terrace was not to be.

The Academy was founded as a bastion of the old guard against the avante-garde, but in recent decades it has let its hair down a little, and leans more towards the modern than the traditional.

All the same, its current president is an English-public-school-and-Cambridge-educated philosopher from one of the most aristocratic families in Ghana, so it’s reassuring they’re keeping a bit of the old with the new.

The terrace is often used as a filming location for cinema and television, given the high quality of its architecture and the fact that it is visually not well-known even among New Yorkers, so can be deployed as a foreign setting.

The HBO programme ‘Boardwalk Empire’ used the American Academy’s terrace as an Italian port, using green screens (instead of a Cass Gilbert monumental arch) to transform the piazza.

Audubon Terrace and its surviving institutions — the expanding and renovating Hispanic Society, the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and the Church of Our Lady of Esperanza — are an intriguing hidden gem of upper Manhattan, well worth a visit.

I don’t imagine anything like Cass Gilbert’s screen will ever be built, but every time I drop in to this neck of the woods I can’t help but thinking there’s some unfinished business.

The rather garish and invasive plans to renovate the parvis of Chartres cathedral, turn it upside down, and install a museum underneath — previously reported on here in 2019 — have been radically revised in an infinitely less offensive direction.

The City of Chartres has released the final approved designs which show the esplanade of the cathedral renovated but left largely in place.

Instead of the original plan up reversing the grade of the parvis upwards away from the cathedral, the entire museum will be kept underground and out of sight. (more…)

Refit will change seating plan in Quebec’s parliament chamber

An upcoming renovation to the Hôtel du parlement in Quebec City will also bring a change in the seating plan of the Assembly’s parliamentary chamber. Deputés agreed a moderate alteration to the current Westminster-style seating plan: a horseshoe shape will replace the crowded back two rows of desks with a curved arrangement.

The original clerks’ table designed by the building’s architect, Eugène-Étienne Taché, in 1886 will also be returned to centre-stage in the Salon bleu (formerly the Salon vert) of Quebec’s National Assembly. The room is also, I believe, the only parliamentary chamber to feature in a film by Alfred Hitchcock.

Renovations are scheduled to begin in January of next year, when deputés will start convening in the Salon rouge that formerly housed Quebec’s Legislative Council, abolished in 1968. (Quebec was the last Canadian province to abolish the upper house of its parliament.)

“The Salon bleu has a strong symbolic value for the Quebec nation,” claims Éric Montigny, professor of political science at Laval University (founded 1663).

“We must respect this tradition and evolve in a very, very gradual manner,” Professor Montigny told the Journal de Québec. “A parliament is not trivial.”

The Assembly numbered only sixty-five members when Taché’s edifice was completed in 1886, while today 125 deputés have to fit into the parliamentary chamber.

The new arrangement would make room for as many as 130 legislators, plus the Président in the speaker’s chair. It will also allow for a good number of the historic desks in the chamber to be retained.

Other potential arrangements were considered and rejected, including introducing a half-moon hemicycle akin to Paris, Washington, and other republican legislatures.

Prof Montigny dismissed claims that semicircular arrangements lead to more collaborative dialogue and constructive work between government and opposition parties:

“It’s an argument that is raised regularly, but I don’t know of any studies that will support this theory.”

The most significant change to the chamber in recent years was the removal of the crucifix from above the président’s chair, first installed in 1936 by the giant of Quebec politics, premier Maurice Duplessis.

That crucifix, and its 1982 replacement, were removed in 2019 and are now displayed as historical artefacts in an ancillary part of the parliament building.

[NDLR: I wrote about the crucifix back in 2008.]

The horseshoe seating plan seems a happy compromise: Westminster-style parliaments — even those that are unicameral like Quebec’s — are honest about the antagonism between government and opposition, and the horseshoe preserves the antiphonal arrangement conducive to this, while rounding it off with a curve at the end.

For my part, I will be happy to see the removal of the arbitrary trapezoid of the modern clerks’ table (below) and its replacement by its historic predecessor.

[…]

What could be more mundane than the Country Bus Services Map? Not when you put the design in the hands of Max Gill. Younger brother to the more famous (but controversial) Eric Gill, Lesilei Macdonald “Max” Gill was a polymathic artist: cartographer, designer, sculptor, painter, and letterer.

In 1914, Frank Pick, inventor of the London Underground brand, hired Max Gill to create the Wonderground Map. Each Underground station had a copy of this map with its inventive and amusing illustrations, such as the two figures hurling hams at Hurlingham. As one newspaper said when it was introduced, ‘People spend so long looking at this map – they miss their trains yet go on smiling.’

The Country Bus Services Map dates from 1928 and depicts London as a great crammed and crowded fortress city from which bus services flow forth to allow the citizens to escape its walls and experience the rustic beauty of the surrounding countryside.

St Paul’s Cathedral looms large between shields depicting the arms of the City and County of London, with the Monument, the Port of London Authority, and the Tower cuddling up to it.

Lambeth Palace and the Oval at Kennington are the only features south of the river that make it into Gill’s walled metropolis.

In more recent years, the designer and typographer Adam Hayes decided to issue a cheeky update entitled ‘London (After Max Gill)’ (available as a print as well).

Choked by smoggy traffic, the Shard now looms large, while a cheese grater represents the Cheesegrater. Tree stumps are joined by fussy signs instructing NO THIS and NO THAT and CCTV cameras are omnipresent.

‘Wonderground’ and the Country Bus Services Map were not the limits of Max Gill’s work for London Underground. The London Transport Museum holds many examples of his work within there collection, some of which have been digitised and are viewable online — though irritatingly not in any sufficiently zoomable detail.

Wren’s post-Fire St Paul’s Cathedral was an icon of resistance to German aggression and an emblem of survival during the Blitz, but while the dome survived the church did suffer damage: A bomb fell threw the roof of the east end on the evening of 10 October 1940, tumbling masonry and destroying the high altar.

Despite the reredos remaining largely intact, as can be seen in the photograph above, it was decided to remove it and rebuild the High Altar under a baldacchino as Sir Christopher Wren had intended.

In 1958 the new High Altar, designed by W Godfrey Allen and Steven Dykes Bower, was dedicated with an American Memorial Chapel behind it.

This was proposed by the Dean of St Paul’s and General Eisenhower volunteered to raise money for it in the United States.

The Dean turned down the Supreme Commander’s offer, saying that this would be paid for by Britons as an appreciation of the American sacrifice during our common struggle.

A roll of honour lists the names of the 28,000 Americans who gave their lives while stationed from Great Britain.

Perhaps more intriguing than either view is the one below of the interior of St Paul’s before the Victorian scheme for the High Altar was executed.

From the Westchester Herald (as reprinted in the Times of London, 24 April 1835):

(more…)

RELATIONS BETWEEN THE Court of St James’s and the Holy See have evolved in the many centuries since the Henrician usurpation. At times, such as during the Napoleonic unpleasantness, the interests of London and the Vatican were very closely aligned — despite the lack of full formal diplomatic relations. Later in the nineteenth century Lord Odo Russell was assigned to the British legation in Florence but resided at Rome as an unofficial envoy to the Pope.

It wasn’t until 1914 that the United Kingdom sent a formal mission to the Vatican, but this was a unique and un-reciprocated diplomatic endeavour — a full exchange of ambassadors would have to wait until 1982. (Until then, the Pope was represented in London only by an apostolic delegate to the country’s Catholic hierarchy rather than any representative to the Crown and its Government.)

Within a year of the Special Mission to Rome being established, John Duncan Gregory (later appointed CB and CMG) was assigned to it. A diplomat since 1902 who had previously worked in Vienna and Bucharest, he was one of the central figures in the curious ‘Francs Affair’ of 1928, when two British diplomats were believed to have unduly abused their positions to speculate in currency. Despite being cleared of illegality, J.D. Gregory was dismissed from his diplomatic posting — though he was later rehabilitated.

If there are any enthusiasts of the curious subcategory of accoutrement known as the despatch box, J.D. Gregory’s one dating from his time in Rome is currently up for sale from the antiques dealer Gerald Mathias.

It was manufactured by John Peck & Son of Nelson Square, Blackfriars, Southwark — not very far at all from me as it happens. (more…)

ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-FIVE years ago, at a time of great uncertainty in Europe, St George’s in Southwark was opened solemnly by Bishop Wiseman — writes the Cathedral Archivist Melanie Bunch. The ceremony was attended by thirteen other bishops in all their finery, of whom four were foreign. Hundreds of clergy of all ranks were in the procession and many of the Catholic aristocracy of England were present. The music was magnificent, the choir including professional singers.

Pugin’s neo-Gothic church was impressive but not finished, and it was not to be a cathedral for another four years. Dr Wiseman, who was both the chief celebrant and the preacher, was bishop of a titular see, as the Catholic dioceses of England and Wales did not yet exist. Nonetheless the opening marked a significant stage in the revival of the Catholic Church in this region. The spur had been the spiritual needs of the poor Irish who had long formed settled communities in parts of London and other cities. The plans for the church had been drawn up in 1839 – before the severity of the famine in Ireland, which began in 1845, could have been foreseen. Some had considered the size of the new church unnecessary, but it turned out to be providential, as immigration from Ireland to this locality and elsewhere was reaching a peak at this time.

The extraordinary turmoil in Europe that had started early in the year in Sicily could not be ignored. In February Louis-Philippe was dethroned in France. There was anxiety that revolution might cross the Channel. Pugin decided that he should obtain muskets to defend his church of St Augustine under construction in Ramsgate. Revolution spread to German and Italian states and countries under Austrian rule. For four days in late June, there was a brief and bloody civil uprising in Paris.

While Europe was ablaze, London was calm, and the opening went ahead. In his homily, Wiseman praised God for all his mercies to this country. From our perspective, we might have expected that he would have spoken about the dark days of persecution, or at least the struggles of the recent past to get such a large church built, constantly hampered by lack of funds. Rev. Dr Thomas Doyle, whom we honour as the founder of the Cathedral, was present and assisting at the Mass, but his courage, faith, and dogged persistence over many years were not acknowledged on this occasion.

We might remember that a Catholic event like this had not been witnessed in England since the Reformation, seemingly prompting Wiseman to take the opportunity to explain to the non-Catholics present that the ceremony and display of the Catholic Church came from a desire to show greater respect for God. To the foreign bishops he said that their presence proved the unity and diversity of the Church. At the end of his homily, Wiseman caused a sensation by reading out a letter from the Archbishop of Paris, Mgr Affre, regretting that he could not attend the opening. By then it was known that he had already died from wounds received on the barricades while he was trying to mediate with the rebels. Wiseman called him a martyr.

Among others who never saw the opening are some who served St George’s mission with Thomas Doyle at the earlier chapel in London Road. Three of them had died before their time, only a few years before, from diseases endemic among their flock. We remember them and all who have served the Cathedral with gratitude. At the time of the opening, St George’s was the largest Catholic church in London, and for the next fifty years was to be the centre of Catholic life in the metropolis. Much has changed since, including the rebuilding of the Cathedral, but we give thanks to Almighty God who continues to sustain it. (more…)

The United Kingdom of the Rio de la Plata, Chile, and Peru

If we give in to temptation and attempt to see things without the benefit of hindsight, Brazil’s path to independence as a monarchy is less surprising than the fact that Argentina didn’t pursue a similar trajectory. After all: Argentina’s ‘Liberator’, José de San Martín, was himself a monarchist, as was Manuel Belgrano.

Belgrano’s project was to unite the Provinces of the River Plate with Chile and the old viceroyalty of Peru in one united kingdom under a Borbón king. This was to be the Infante Don Francisco de Paula, the youngest son of Charles IV of Spain, but the Spanish king ardently refused to yield his throne’s sovereignty over the new world, nor to allow any of his offspring to take part in the various projects for local monarchies.

When that failed, Belgrano proposed to the Congress of Tucumán that they crown an Incan as king. San Martín, Güemes, and others supported this, but Buenos Aires resisted the plan. They proposed instead to crown Don Sebastián, a Spanish prince living in Rio de Janeiro with his maternal grandfather, King João VI of Portugal.

João thought the scheme would end up injurious to Portugal’s interests and so put the kibosh on it.

And don’t get us started on Carlotism, which was a whole ’nother pile of tricks.

Belgrano’s monarchic project in its 1815 iteration was to unite the provinces of the River Plate with Chile and the old viceroyalty of Peru to create a single realm out of these Spanish-speaking territories.

He even drafted a constitution for the United Kingdom of the Rio de la Plata, Chile, and Peru, which is rudimentarily translated into English below. This even went so far as to specify the coat of arms and flag of the kingdom.

The best history covering these unconsummated plans remains Bernado Lozier Almazán’s 2011 book Proyectos monárquicos en el Río de la Plata 1808-1825: Los reyes que no fueron which sadly has not yet been translated into English.

“FORTUNATE IS SOUTHWARK in her possessions,” Sir Albert Richardson wrote, “for she holds in this fragment a key to the aspect of her many vanished inns…”

The George Inn features largely in the deep psychogeography of Southwark, ours the most ancient of boroughs. Here is the greatest living remnant of the coaching inns of old, even if much reduced in form. The current structure dates from the 1670s but we know an inn on this site was well established by the 1580s. It is now in the possession of the National Trust, but is a functioning Greene King pub where you can find a good pint.

Up and down our High Street, for centuries merchants, travellers, traders, and revellers would slake their thirst in a procession of pubs, inns, and taverns. English pilgrims heading to Canterbury would start off here, and recent arrivals to London from the Continent would make their first acquaintance with England’s capital by arriving at “The” Borough after journeying from the Channel ports.

“One enters the inn yard with pleasurable anticipation,” Sir Albert continues in his 1925 volume, The English Inn, Past and Present; A Review of Its History and Social Life.

“There is fortunately sufficient of the old building remaining to carry the mind back to the days of its former prosperity. There are the sagging galleries, the heavily-sashed windows and the old glass in the squares. The rooms are panelled. In the dining-room are the pews, and the bar is typical.”

In Richardson’s time, just a century ago, these rooms would have often been full of hop growers from Kent and the hop merchants who traded with them, though they are all gone now.

And yet, some things have not changed:

“Here we can obtain old English fare, and, heedless of the beat of London, commune with ghostly frequenters to whom the place was at one time a reality.” (more…)

Wanderers in central London who find themselves in the whereabouts of Piccadilly Circus or Soho of a Tuesday evening can avail themselves of the devotions offered by the Guild of Our Lady of Warwick Street.

Every week, the Rosary is said along with other prayers at this statue in Warwick Street Church. They conclude with the rather beautiful and moving ‘Night Litany for London’ imploring God’s mercy upon the many inhabitants of our capital city.

Its original form is believed to have been composed by the Rev’d H.A. Wilson, vicar of the Protestant parish of St Augustine in Haggerston. Msgr Graham Leonard — in the days when he was Anglican Bishop of London — also published a version through the Church Literature Association (a High Church body) with an introduction he wrote himself.

The version used at Warwick Street is included here:

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The Budapest of Demeter Balla

Soviet socialism imposed many grim miseries upon the Hungarian people once the German occupation under the National Socialists was replaced by a Russian one under the Red Army. In 1945, Hungarians were allowed one free election in which the Communists were resoundingly defeated.

Two years later, the Russian occupiers allowed another election yet — despite violent intimidation and manufacturing as many as 200,000 false ballots — the Communists still only improved their vote share to 22%. But through various mechanisms it was enough to seize control of the government, take over the other parties, and merge them all into a pro-Soviet front.

A decade later, the 1956 uprising sparked a Soviet invasion to prevent Hungary leaving the Warsaw Pact turning off the road to full communism. It did, however, convince Hungary’s communist hardliners that while total control over all political, social, and economic institutions needed to be maintained, they also needed to lighten the mood. A little more carrot, a little less stick (but keep the stick).

Human beings have a way of sorting themselves out as best they can and persisting despite a multiplicity of hardships. These photographs of Budapest in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s by Hungarian photographer Demeter Balla (1931-2017) bear witness to the quiet dignity of the inhabitants of a capital city still stuck behind the Iron Curtain. (more…)

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