Saturday 4 January 2014

architectural essays

I still don't feel brilliantly well, though looking on the bright side, the weather is so foul I wouldn't be gardening anyway even if I were as fit as a fiddle, or a flea.  It's a good thing that I don't have any strong views on the symbolic role of the New Year in fashioning a fresh start, since 2014 seems to be starting largely without me.

I have been consoling myself with my stack of unread books, and am now on Gavin Stamp's Anti-Ugly.  Gavin Stamp is an architectural historian, who I must admit I had never heard of until this Christmas.  Anti-Ugly is a collection of essays originally published in the Apollo magazine, which I'm afraid I'd never heard of either.  Apparently it's been around since 1925 and is internationally well regarded, so that shows what a hopeless philistine middlebrow I am.  From the website it looks quite good, rather as does the London Review of Books, though I'm not sure I'm going to subscribe to either of them.  I scarcely manage to get through all of my gardening magazines as it is, and the Art Fund one, plus those from the National Trust and the RSPB, and I already hear about more up and coming art shows than I manage to visit.

Anti-Ugly is published by Aurum Press, whose existence I'd also failed to register until last autumn, when I started getting given books published by them.  Turns out they are from the same stable as Frances Lincoln, who do good illustrated gardening books.  Their website page for Gavin Stamp doesn't actually include Anti-Ugly, but it only came out in 2013, so maybe they'll get round to adding it soon.

The essays started off as two page spreads, or a trifle longer, as we get them in the book without the magazine editor's cutting down to length.  They are about British, mostly English, buildings and architects, about what is, or was, or might have been.  Stamp is a lively and opinionated author, heaping praise and abuse on his subject matter in generous measures, and his writing does what any good criticism should, and makes me want to go and look at the original subjects.  Where they still exist, that is.  Much opprobrium is piled on the twentieth century developers who bulldozed so much of London in the name of progress, but Brunel's 1845 Hungerford Suspension Bridge was destroyed in 1862.

However, I could still go and see Sedding's Arts and Craft Holy Trinity Church in Sloane Street, and reading the book made me realise that though I have walked many times past Hawksmoor's last church, Saint George's Church, Bloomsbury, I have never stopped to go in.  Now that most churches have websites it's easy enough to find out what the visiting arrangements are, if any, and it seems that St George's should be open most afternoons, subject to a volunteer warden being available.  I haven't been into Christ Church, Spitalfields for over twenty-five years, either, not since dragging the Systems Administrator off to some after-work Monteverdi.

The illustrations are limited to small, matt photographs, but that isn't a problem.  The book repeats itself a little, for which Stamp apologises in the foreword.  Since the work originally appeared in a monthly magazine, spread over the years 2004 to 2013, some repetition of the author's views on some subjects is inevitable.  In 2011 the reader might not be expected to remember that back in 2005 the author said he admired Hawksmoor, or Vanbrugh, whereas reading the essays all stacked together most people will know what they were told the previous day.  My only criticism is that there is no index.

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