Shandy Hall, Coxwold, and Jonathan Meades

I visited Shandy Hall in Coxwold, North Yorkshire for the first time this weekend. I was particularly privileged to do so. My brother had bought me tickets for Jonathan Meades’ Laurence Sterne lecture, which turned out to comprise a walking tour of Coxwold, ending at Shandy Hall.

 Meades was celebrating the publication of his new book, Museum without Walls. Fraternal kindness enabled me to acquire a copy, signed by the man himself. It is a collection of Meades’ essays, mainly on place and architecture. It starts:

We are surrounded by the greatest of free shows. Places. Most of them made by man, remade by man. Deserted streets, seething boulevards, reeming beaches, empty steppes, black reservoirs, fields of agricultural scrap, cute villages and disappearing points which have an unparalleled capacity to promote hope (I am thinking of the aspect north up rue Paradis in Marseilles).

And so it continues: deep intellectual theorising about place, expressed often in seemingly random lists, and paragraphs that alight suddenly on specific vantage points that trigger particular memories in the author’s mind.

 

Meades’s talk was a suitably Sternian digressive ramble, seemingly taken from an as yet unpublished memoir. Starting at the church we heard of a childhood love for a girl from the Indian subcontinent; moving to the garden in the village we heard of radical French politics of the 1970s; moving back to Sterne’s gravestone we heard of the manufacture and use of LSD in the 1950s.

Finally at Shandy Hall itself we heard Meades reflect once again on his lost childhood love. I’m not sure what any of it meant, except that there were certainly glancing references to Sterne at various points.

Shandy Hall itself was a delight – we stepped into Sterne’s study, soaked in the atmosphere of a Georgian vicar’s home, and perused the collection of experimental novels. The garden featured an installation about self-publishing, fittingly given the way that Museum without Walls has been published.  I am looking forward to watching more Meades (a good selection is on YouTube), and trying to read Tristram Shandy in time for the tercentenary of Sterne's birth next year

A walking tour of Octavia Hill's Southwark

The Octavia Hill conference ended with a walking tour of Southwark, to visit the houses associated with Hill and others. We were led by William Whyte of the University of Oxford. Here are some images from the tour.

Plaque to Octavia Hill at Red Cross Cottages

William Whyte outside Cromwell Buildings (1864). Designed by Sydney Waterlow for the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company.

Red Cross Cottages (1887).

The Hall at Red Cross Cottages. Walter Crane was commissioned to do nine mural paintings inside.

Red Cross Cottages are  now overlooked by the Shard.

White Cross Cottages, next to Red Cross, also built by Elijah Hoole for Octavia Hill.

Ilfracombe Buildings (1888) for the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company

Gable Cottages (1889) by Elijah Hoole for Revd. T. Bastow.

Morrow and Ripley - LCC housing by RM Taylor. Hill's influence can still be seen - just - in these early council houses (note the flowers)

Blackfriars' Estate (1871) - Henry Darbishire for the Peabody Trust.

Conference delegates on the tour

Sutton House, Hackney and Octavia Hill

I’m having a very enjoyable two days at Sutton House in Hackney, which is hosting a conference dedicated to exploring the life and times of Octavia Hill. Hill died one hundred years ago this year, and the conference is a chance to reflect on her many achievements, which include being one of the founders of the National Trust.

Sutton House, Hackney

Sutton House is an excellent venue for it too. This 16^th-century house was built by RalphSadleir, an associate of Thomas Cromwell who is well known to us today thanks to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. The House is one of the oldest buildings still standing in this corner of Hackney, and one of the few National Trust places in East London.

Dame Fiona Reynolds, Director General of the National Trust gave us a hugely entertaining account of her own involvement at Sutton House. She had been a member of the Trust’s regional committee back in the mid-1980s, long before she took up her role at the helm of the organisation (which was 12 years ago).

In the 80s, a battle raged over Sutton House when the sitting tenants (Clive Jenkins’ trade union the ASTMS) suddenly moved out. Left with an empty building, the Trust proposed to develop it as private apartments. Meanwhile a local activist group set about to ensure that the place was preserved as a museum and community resource.

The conflict made the pages of the Guardian (thanks to Patrick Wright, who writes about it in A Journey Through Ruins), and was resolved in favour of re-opening the house as a educational and community resource. It became a venue for music, drama, art exhibitions, dance and much else once it opened in 1994.

Breakers Yard: site of a new community garden space adjacent to Sutton House

This would surely have been Octavia Hill’s preference too. Although she devoted a large part of her life to housing, her world view, as we have been hearing, was much more holistic. Shelter and food alone were not enough, as people also needed the life-enhancing experiences derived from access to art and nature. Not for nothing did she write about the need to bring ‘colour, space and music’ to the people.

The papers from the conference have been varied – addressing topics as diverse as Octavia Hill’s work for her sister’s Kyrle Society, her portraiture, her involvement at RedCross Garden, her writings on open spaces and landscape, and her relationship with Ruskin and art. 

But some clear themes are emerging too: her determination to act, and with urgency, rather than simply analyse or theorise; her embracing of such a wide range of issues and concerns, all linked by a unifying world view; her deep spiritual feeling and Christian Socialism; her energy and skill at building networks and achieving political influence.

By the end of her life, though, her views were increasingly outmoded. She was not a socialist as such, despite her associations with Morris and also with figures like GeorgeLansbury, future leader of the Labour Party. Lansbury served with her on the Royal Commission on the Poor Law 1905-1909, although the two of them were on different sides when the commission concluded by publishing two different reports, one calling for reform of the poor law system, the other its complete replacement with a new system of state welfare. 

Lansbury went on to become first commissioner of works in Ramsay Macdonald’s Government of 1929-31, where he surprised many civil servants by revealing a great personal passion for the historic buildings, monuments and parks in his care. (Lansburys Lido, for example, was his radical reinterpretation of how the Serpentine in Hyde Park should be re-used.) In 1936 Lansbury, by then a vice-president of the National Trust was one of the supporters of the acquisition of Sutton House by the Trust.

To have had such a radical figure as Lansbury so closely involved in the work of the National Trust in the 1920s and 30s still comes as a surprise to some. The Octavia Hill conference is reminding us, however, of the Trust’s quite radical roots. 

Chris Cleeve from Sutton House leads a tour, watched over by Robert Whelan from Civitas and Gillian Darley, Octavia Hill's biographer

Morrissey’s alternative Olympic vision

Danny Boyle’s Olympic opening ceremony was a wonderful celebration of British popular culture from the last five decades, from the Stones, Kinks and Beatles through to the Arctic Monkeys and Dizzee Rascal. Appropriately enough, there was a good showing for London-based music, with the Jam, the Sex Pistols, David Bowie, Underworld and Prodigy all getting their spot in the limelight.

While Miranda Sawyer in the Observer today picks up on the surprising omissions of Oasis and the Stone Roses, the other Mancunian band that was missing for me was…. The Smiths. I’m fairly certain that Morrissey would have cringed to have been anywhere near the setlist, but arguably his contribution to British popular music has been at least as significant as any of the above.

There was a certain piquancy therefore to hear that Morrissey played his home city of Manchester last night, the day after the Olympic ceremony, the only UK date on a world tour that stretches from Tel Aviv to Los Angeles. (According to one review, he told the audience last night that he “hadn’t been invited to the Olympic opening ceremony because my smile is too sincere”.) I’ve recently written an essay for a book on music, health and geography, exploring the different geographies at stake in Morrissey’s music. Specific places often feature in his songs, even as his emotional landscapes transcend territorial and ethnic boundaries (he has a significant following among Latino populations, for example). There are even tours of Morrissey’s Manchester, where fans can explore for themselves the settings for the early Smiths songs.

Morrissey in a humdrum town

The depressed landscapes that feature in Morrissey’s oeuvre – iron bridges, disused railway lines, out-of-season seaside towns, rented rooms in Whalley Range – might have fitted well into Danny Boyle’s choreographed social history of the British experience. Far from being health-inducing, however, I argue that these places are deployed as a form of anti-pastoral, with a depressing effect on mind and body. The early song, ‘Jeane’, for example, is a kitchen-sink drama worthy of A Taste of Honey or any other 1950s and 60s bedsitter tableau:

‘Jeane/The lowlife has lost its appeal/ And I'm tired of walking these streets/To a room with its cupboard bare…’

‘There's ice on the sink where we bathe/ So how can you call this home/ When you know it's a grave?’

Morrissey is not known for being an Olympic-style picture of health and efficiency. More often he is associated with misery and depression – being ‘The Pope of Mope’ or ‘Prince of Wails’. Not for nothing did he encore his show last night with Still Ill (‘Under the iron bridge we kissed, and although I ended up with sore lips, it just wasn’t like the old days any more’).  So much so that it came as a surprise to me when I first read in Johnny Rogan’s biography of the Smiths, The Severed Alliance – recently reissued - that Morrissey was in fact highly athletic in his youth – a fact that he alludes to on his first solo album (‘Captain of games, solid framed, I stood on the touch line….’)

Who put the M in Manchester?

For Morrissey, music was the great salvation from the industrial grime and murkiness of the landscape of his youth. As he was once quoted as saying:

‘In the history of my life the high points were always buying particular records and hearing records and being immersed in them, and really believing that these people understood how I felt about certain situations. So that’s the richness of records.’

This might well have been the overwhelming message of the Olympic ceremony too. We might have blighted our green and pleasant land with the chimneys of industrialisation, but at least we have produced some of the greatest popular music of the last five decades. Sadly, though, the Olympic Torch did not stop at Salford Lad’s Club when it passed through Greater Manchester in June – a venue that even David Cameron, before he became Prime Minister, found time to visit. 

PM, with Morrissey in background

PS  Fascinating to see Morrissey making a public statement about the Olympics the other day.  Somewhat predictably he adopts a stance that flies in the face of the public mood...

Rainham, London, the World

Rainham Hall in Havering is located not far from the legendary A13 (eulogised by Billy Bragg as the ‘trunk road to the sea’). It is a marvellous survival.

Rainham Hall, with flags

Standing next to a fine Norman church (reputed to have the second oldest door in the whole of London), it sits just off The Broadway, opposite the public library. Set back behind railings, it is too easy to disregard or pass by unnoticed, not least since it is open to the public for just three hours a week.

Rainham's Norman church

The house has been owned by the National Trust since 1949, a Georgian jewel in the midst of the industrialisation and transport infrastructure that surround the Rainham Marshes. And in many ways, the history of the Hall is the history of London itself, its economic power, its circulations and distributions, its comings and goings.

The Hall was built in 1729 by Captain John Harle, who dredged an inlet off the Thames nearby and built a wharf for his trading activities. The marble, wood and tiles that he traded are still evident throughout the house, which is a fine three-storey box in the Queen Anne style.

The painted staircase, Rainham Hall

The back door, Rainham Hall

 

Behind the house was originally a courtyard of buildings, probably used as stables and a brewhouse, and as part of his trading endeavour. It is now an attractive, well tended garden. The brewhouse features on the English Heritage buildings at risk register, but plans are afoot to convert it to a visitor reception area, café and community education space. Currently the house has none of these facilities, and so its potential as a community hub and tourism venture is under-exploited.

Rainham Hall gardens

I visited in order to attend a meeting with National Trust colleagues and others, to consider options for the development of the house. One issue was the absence of furniture, fittings and any indigenous collections. Another was the additional layer of significance left by 20^th century residents – a spate of restoration work, and then the use of the house during the war (as a banana depot) and afterwards (as a distribution point for health and welfare provision).

The team have devised some exciting options for bringing the house to life and telling the story of the Harles and their successors. One interesting story is that of the role of religion. A gate from the house to the Church is said to now be bricked up, because of the conversion of Harle’s son to Methodism.

The ghost of a gate at Rainham Hall?

For me, the house was a tangible reminder of the power of money and trade. As a ghost of a former era of London’s development as a world city, Rainham Hall is a residue of a time when Britain ruled the waves and drew vast stores of wealth from transatlantic exchange. It stands as a symbol of why the UK occupies the place it does in today’s world economy, an echo of an earlier wave of economic growth and development, no less than the nearby docks at Tilbury, City airport, and the Dartford Crossing, which all perform a similar function for more recent times.

Patrick Keiller’s three films ‘London’ (1994), ‘Robinson in Space’ (1997) and more recently ‘Robinson in Ruins’ (2010) explore similar territory, using architecture and landscape to essay politico-economic critiques of late-capitalist Britain. ‘Robinson in Space’ even briefly features Rainham Hall – it is mistaken by the eponymous Robinson for ‘Dracula’s House Carfax in Purfleet’ (until the narrator points out that in fact ‘we were still in Rainham’). Carfax was the house to which Count Dracula was transported from his Transylvanian Castle in 50 boxes of earth. Rainham wharf was where the nightsoil of Londoners was brought to be spread on the fields of Essex.

The Robinson Institute, Tate Britain installation to 14 October 2012

Transportation – of wood and marble, of earth, of bananas – seems central to understanding the role of Rainham Hall and the context in which it sits. Which is why I was delighted to hear of plans to recreate, for visitors, the sights and sounds of the River Thames – the A13 of the 18^th century.

Those National Trust/Beatles connections

I was not at all surprised to see Sir Paul McCartney appear as the finale to the concert at last weekend’s Jubilee celebrations. McCartney is one of only two surviving Beatles, and the only one who still records and performs on a regular basis. The Beatles were by far the most important group of the last 60 years, so it was entirely appropriate for McCartney, who turns 70 next week, to take top billing.

This conflation of the Beatles with our national story is nothing new. It confirms the findings of a Demos report published late last year, which explored the question of national pride. In a survey carried out for the report, members of the public were asked to judge how far different institutions or cultural icons made them proud to be British.

Top of the list was Shakespeare with 75% agreeing that they are proud of his role as a symbol of Britain, with the army (72%), the Union Jack (71%), the pound (70%) and the NHS (69%) following.

Interestingly the monarchy came seventh on the list, with 68% agreeing that they were proud of it as a symbol of Britain. I wonder if the results would be different if the survey had been repeated last week?

What was also striking about the research findings was that the National Trust came joint second, with 72% of people agreeing that it made them proud to be British. Meanwhile the Beatles scored a respectable 55%, more than Parliament (47%) and the legal system (51%).

The research begs the question, what is it about the National Trust and the Beatles that inspires such pride in the nation? Perhaps it is because both are in some way uniquely British achievements, cultural phenomenon that are forever associated with these shores. This is not to say that they are insular or parochial inventions. The creation of the National Trust in 1895 was directly inspired by the formation of the Massachusetts Trustees of Public Reservations in 1891, while the Beatles took rock and roll sounds from across the Atlantic and transformed them into a native beat sound.  

Both the National Trust and the Beatles share the distinction of being much loved cultural assets, private creations that have been of enormous and long-lasting public significance.

This also led me to think about the connections between the two over the years. Here are just a few I was able to come up with:

• Most obviously, the Trust now owns and looks after the childhood homes of Paul McCartney and John Lennon (As recently reported, one of the childhood homes of Ringo Starr does not look set to follow into this fold)

Mendips, John Lennon's childhood home

• The Beatles namechecked the National Trust in ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’

• The video for Strawberry Fields Forever was filmed at Knole in Kent (one of the Trust’s most important houses, though the park remains in family hands). The story goes that while the Beatles were in Kent that day, John Lennon went into a local Antique Shop and bought an old Circus Poster which featured the title ‘being for the benefit of Mr.Kite’…

Beatles at Knole Park for the filming of Strawberry Fields Forever

• When the future of Abbey Road studios was in question a few years ago, there was speculation about the National Trust taking it over (see also today’s Observer for an article by Jon Savage on the heritage significance of Abbey Road)

Abbey Road Studios

• Croome was the UK centre for the Hare Krishna movement, until they were donated a new home at Bhakti Vedanta Manor in Hertfordshire by George Harrison
• Sir George Martin, the 'fifth Beatle', lives in Coleshill near Swindon, a village largely owned by the National Trust

• Not strictly Beatles, but the famous front cover of Wings’ Band on the Run was shot at Osterley Park.

Osterley was the location for this McCartney sleeve

  

 Anyone know of any other connections between these two uniquely British institutions?

Picturesque Planning

  Harriet Atkinson’s new book The Festival of Britain: A Land and its People (IB Taurus) revisits the celebrations of 1951, exploring the various ways in which the Festival served as a reimagination of Britain’s geography and landscape.

The book’s front cover reproduces Eric Fraser’s Verdant Isle, in which Abram Games’s Festival emblem hovers, Skylon-like, over the nation, pinpointing somewhere in the heart of the midlands.  While the precise coordinates of the emblem’s landing point are unspecified, the image carries connotations of that other famous artistic elision of geography and patriotism, the Ditchley portrait of Elizabeth I, where the monarch’s toe points to Oxfordshire. 

   

  

By recalibrating the national centre of gravity away from London, the image also reminds us that the Festival of Britain was always intended to be much more than its main showroom at the South Bank. As well as the architecture and events of the capital, there were exhibitions in Glasgow and Belfast, a travelling show carried on lorries to Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham and Nottingham, and cultural programming across a great many other regional cities.

The Festival, as the current exhibition on ‘British Design 1948 to 2012’ at the V&A also observes, was therefore much more than merely a metropolitan affair. It was nothing less than a bold and optimistic vision of the future of the entire country and its landscape, built on a sensitive appreciation of the past.

Those involved in planning and building the Festival, among them Patrick Abercrombie, Hugh Casson and Gordon Cullen, chose not to import an alien modernism but explicitly harked back to earlier ideas of the Picturesque to ensure that their designs respected the genius loci or ‘spirit of place’.

The picturesque in 1951

 Atkinson reminds us that this ‘new Picturesque’ was a deliberate evocation of 18^th-century principles laid out by, among others, Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight. While Price and Knight had essayed their aversion to the sweeping vistas and identikit forms of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown’s parklands, their own vision of the picturesque demanded attention to the local and the particular, as well as the painterly qualities of natural landscapes. (These ideas are explored in a new biography of Uvedale Price, written by Charles Watkins and me, to be published next month.)

Uvedale Price

Richard Payne Knight

 By the 1920s and 30s, influential writers on architecture and landscape, among them Christopher Hussey and Nikolaus Pevsner, were consciously revisiting such Georgian visionaries in an attempt to reassert the value of sensitive design in the process of laying out landscapes. Snubbing their immediate Victorian and Edwardian forebears, these writers looked to the 18^th-century as the golden age of British design, and hence reinterpreted the Picturesque for post-war British urban renewal.  

Above all, the emphasis was on sensitive appreciation of landscape in all its deeply layered complexity. The landscaping and design of the South Bank Centre was carried out with attention to geology, topology, archaeology and natural history. The construction process was itself regarded as an archaeological exercise, and Jacquetta Hawkes was employed to curate the displays in the People of Britain Pavilion. (Her classic, A Land, the subject of a recent article by Robert Macfarlane, was written while she worked on the 1951 Festival. It is shortly to be republished.)

Meanwhile, the Exhibition of Live Architecture was located at Poplar in east London, as a demonstration of how Picturesque principles of planning were being put into effect on the Lansbury estate. Celebrations of the new towns that were being constructed after the 1946 Act drew attention to the way old buildings were being incorporated into new designs. As Atkinson notes, ‘All emphasized continuity between the historic past and new developments’ (p.179), just as the new Picturesque proponents on the Architectural Review had called in the 1940s for bombed-out ruins to be reincorporated as public monuments.

The optimists of 1951 hoped that the Picturesque eye would help to reconcile modernity with the landscape, teaching us (as Barbara Colvin suggested) to see beauty in ‘windmills and certain transmission towers’.  

Some of these visions of the future may now seem hopelessly old fashioned. It is somewhat surprising to us these days to find Pevsner identifying Harlow Town Centre as the epitome of ‘Picturesque Principles applied to urban conditions’. Clearly, sixty years of planning disasters have taken their toll. All too often, the past has been razed without proper consideration. The utopian dreams that informed the layout of so many new housing estates and indeed wholesale urban settlements have been shown to be just that – dreams, little taking account of the realities of people’s emotional response to place.

Picturesque Harlow

 But might we yet reincorporate a sense of the Picturesque into our modern-day planning? The National Planning Policy Framework remains a resolutely unPicturesque statement, drawing as it does on so many abstract concepts and assertions (starting from that most anti-Picturesque of notions, sustainable development). Yet the emphasis on the primacy of the local is a fundamentally Picturesque idea.

Local plans that start from the genius loci or ‘spirit of place’, and which assert the importance of retaining local colour and character even while providing for new homes and businesses, may yet manage to retain the Picturesque delight in place, character, and the infinitive nuances of landscape.