Category Archives: History

Why I hate the Champions League

Posted on May 14, 2012 | 10 comments

Who came third the year Arsenal won the league at Anfield in 1989? Does anybody remember? Does anybody care? Indeed, who came fourth in 2007? Third when Manchester United won the treble in 1999?

Unless you’re a fan of Nottingham Forest (1989), Liverpool (2007) or Chelsea (1999), it’s doubtful you’ll be able to answer any of those questions. And rightly so. Because finishing third or fourth is, in the greater scheme of the history of football, nothing to get excited about, it’s not interesting, important or impressive. But thanks to European football’s ridiculous obsession with the Champions League, Arsenal fans are celebrating limping home a distant third as if it is their club’s greatest achievement since the Invincibles, just one that doesn’t come with a trophy or will be remembered by anybody in a year’s time. It’s been a successful season insist fans of the biggest club in London, now seven years now without a cup, because it means they have earned the right to play in the Champions League again (until March, usually).  And they seem to believe it.

Ah, the Champions League, the bloated, vile, venal parasite of European football, with its hideous anthem and putrid stench of self-importance. How I hate this wretched competition. Yet qualifying for it is now deemed to be the greatest achievement of any club, more desired than mere trophies and finals. Clubs with trophy cabinets that used to gleam with silverware are now more interested in securing next year’s income stream, terrified about what might happen to the bank balance if they fail. Henry Norris and Arsene Wenger have more in common than we could have ever imagined when Wenger brought swashbuckling trophy-winning teary-eyed romantic football to the Emirates in 1998. Fuck success, fuck beauty, fuck romance, fuck football: give me the cash.

I don’t get it. I never have. I understand why money is important in football, but that doesn’t mean I want to have my nose rubbed in it. In 2003, Chelsea played Liverpool; the winner would finish third and qualify for the Champions League. This was, in financial terms, the biggest game in the club’s history, I was told by friends. It was more important than a cup final, they said. Well, I’ve been to a few cup finals, and that sir was no cup final. It was a squalid mudfight for cold hard cash, a stripping down of modern football to its ugliest essentials. And yet it was presented as if it was a thing to admire, and people bought into it. Why?

I hated it then and I hated it now, especially as the Champions League’s weight and wealth has expanded, rewarding failure in the rich leagues to the point where it has pretty much destroyed all European domestic football outside of England, Spain, Italy and Germany, and turning the FA Cup and League Cup into heavily sponsored footnotes. 

It’s even turned the Europa League into a joke, in England at least.  Patrice Evra said it was ’embarrassing’ that Manchester United were playing in the Europa this season, something you’d hope would make Uefa take a long, hard look at what they have done, although of course they didn’t. The Europa has its fans, but in reality it’s a sad and unlovable replacement for the splendid streamlined charms of the old Uefa and Cup Winners’ cups.

But nothing can be allowed to compete with the CL’s budget, which throws millions of pounds at so-so teams, encouraging billionaires to buy into the game in a bid to join the bunfight – something Uefa are now trying to ban without acknowledging the root cause, the disproportionate rewards offered by their beloved keynote trophy. Meanwhile, leagues, cups and the dignity and priorities of supporters all disappear beneath the whirling blades of Uefa’s deranged zombie lawnmower.

And now we have come to the extreme logic of the position, where we’re told that the main reason Chelsea should want to win the Champions League final on Saturday is so they can qualify for next year’s Champions League, as if the trophy itself is just something that comes free in a packet of corn flakes, and nobody bats an eyelid. How can this be right? What have Uefa been allowed to do to 57 years of history? And why does nobody appear to care?

10 Comments

Posted in Football, History, Politics, Rant, Sleaze

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

Cockney Visions: Writing Britain at the British Library

Posted on May 11, 2012 | Leave a comment

The British Library’s new exhibition Writing Britain, which runs until 25 September 2012, has big ambitions. It aims to study place and landscape in British literature, looking at how writers and poets have been informed by the land around them, and how their writing has transformed the way we view these spaces.

Phew!

The exhibition is divided into different thematic sections, and includes one on Cockney Visions about London writing, and another on the suburbs, which also has considerable London content.

It’s a remarkably bold concept, but the BL does not shy from a challenge – its exhibition on Liberty a few years ago was one of the most intellectually intense I have ever seen, while the one on Language was similarly involved.

This time, it doesn’t quite pull it off. The problem is the same that blighted last year’s science fiction exhibition – too many books. Entering a BL exhibition is like visiting a first rate antiquarian bookshop, but one were you can’t touch the books and none of them are for sale. It’s great to see these rare and beautiful books, but it’s also incredibly frustrating that you can’t pick them up, feel the pages, smell the history.

Paradoxically perhaps, books are also an insufficient way of examining landscape in the way the exhibition intends. If we can’t actually sit there and read Wuthering Heights, immersing ourself in this extraordinary place the writer has created, we need other ways to make the journey. The most evocative part of the exhibition is the one on the Lake District and Highlands, purely because there are some wonderful paintings on display, which help crystallise our vision of what Wordsworth, Keats and Scott were describing. Conversely, the London section takes in the usual suspects on that well-trod wander from Blake and De Quincey to Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Will Self and Iain Sinclair  (and includes a wonderful copy of the London Psychogeographic Society newsletter from the early 90s), but fails to really plunge us into the city of our imagination.

Where the exhibition – and the BL itself – really does excel is when it can produce original manuscripts, diaries and photographs. These messy, scrappy, lovingly flawed items show the writing process in a way a beautifully bound finished book never can. And some of the best of these are to be found in the sections of the exhibition related to London. There’s a sketch by John Betjeman of Dalston Station; an unpublished poem by Evelyn Waugh about the Crystal Palace (complete with Waugh’s drawing of the building); a couple of pages from JG Ballard’s collection, including the heavily amended opening pages to Kingdom Come and Crash; and a lovely drawing by GK Chesterton to accompany his notes for The Napoleon of Notting Hill.

Dalston Station by John Betjeman.

Kingdom Come manuscript

Notes for The Napoleon of Notting Hill by GK Chesterton

I loved also a letter by Conan Doyle sent to his mother from South Norwood, in which he carefully sketched the floorplan of a suburban house he was thinking of buying, and a copy of Pygmalion, which Shaw had phonetically annotated to show how he felt the cockney phrases should be pronounced.

a personal favourite was a draft of Albert Angelo by BS Johnson, showing how Johnson wished a section of one page to be cut out so it would reveal a sentence from later in the book, a brilliant way to create a  flash-forward or pre-cognition.

Best of all, though, was this photograph, which shows JM Barrie, GK Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw dressed as cowboys in 1914. For the full story, read this excellent blog post. It has very little to do with Writing Britain, but it’s bloody marvellous all the same.

Leave a comment

Posted in Art, Books, Cockney, Exhibitions, Film, History, London, Mumbo jumbo, My London Library, Photography

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Played In London: sport in the city

Posted on April 30, 2012 | Leave a comment

A series of lectures called Played In London  will take place every Thursday in May on the theme of the history of sport and play in the capital. These will be at The Gallery on Cowcross Street, Smithfield, and promise to take in everything from Tudor tennis to pub darts. They are hosted by the great Simon Inglis, author of the legendary Football Grounds of Great Britain, a candidate for the title of best book ever written.

In November, English Heritage will publish a book (Played In London – Charting The Heritage Of A City At Play) on the topic, including lots of brilliant pictures like the one above, featuring the Furnivall Sculling Club, the first rowing club for women on the Thames, or these ones featuring the British swimming team in 1908 and the diving board at White City from that same year.

 

 

Leave a comment

Posted in Architecture, Books, History, London, Sport, Talks

Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Secret London: inside Savile Row

Posted on April 24, 2012 | 2 comments

I had never gone anywhere near Savile Row until a couple of years ago, when I was asked to write about the Mayfair street’s long history of tailoring for an upmarket style magazine. Given that my greatest fashion claim-to-fame is that Manolo Blahnik’s niece once laughed at my trainers, this was a bit out of my comfort zone and I didn’t feel much better when I walked into Henry Poole and the immaculately dressed owner, Simon Cundey, informed me that ‘any good man should own five to seven suits’. I nodded and smiled nervously – I own one suit and it rarely leaves the closet.

Cundey then gave me a tour of the shop, and I was immediately struck by the contrast between the elegant ground floor where customers are measured up for their new clobber and the basement where most of the work gets done. This long subterranean room was filled with tailors of all ages and nationalities, some making waistcoats, others making pockets or trousers. They were sitting at battered wooden benches, cutting cloth delicately with solid scissors the size of scythes. The sound of sewing machines and portable radios were the only sign that we weren’t in the 19th century. It was a thrill to see an old industry being kept alive in such charismatic fashion, and the fact that most of the tailors were as badly dressed as me, didn’t hurt either. I made a mental note that I’d return, which I did earlier this year for a series of interview with the pocket-makers and trouser-tailors of Savile Row, during the course of which I asked my worst ever question as a journalist: ‘What is your favourite kind of pocket?’.

You can read it all here.

2 Comments

Posted in Celebrity, Fashion, History, Journalism, London

Tagged , , , , ,

Secret London: the mystery of London’s World War II railings

Posted on April 17, 2012 | 25 comments

I recently received this email:

‘Stumbled across your blog recently and wondered if you’d be interested in doing a bit of digging to find out what happened to London’s railings.

During WWII there was a national scrap drive especially active in London where a lot of railings were grubbed up and sent off to be scrapped. I have never been able to find out what really happened with this pre-emptive move to destroy London before the Luftwaffe but it seems that program was more of a public relations exercise rather than of any practical use and the railings were dumped.
I have heard tell of them being dumped in the Thames and being used as ballast for ships leaving the Port of London. It is said that seaport buildings in Guyana and Nigeria still sport rather nice Georgian railings.’
And that was it. In truth, I know little about London railings (image below from Knowledge Of London). I’d also heard the story that were used for scrap metal in the war, and was also aware that in Harleyford Street, SE11, some ARP stretchers used during the war to ferry casualties away from bombsites had been turned into railings (you can see a glimpse of them in Patrick Keiller’s London and they also feature in Peter Ashley’s excellent More London Peculiars).
So I turned to my dog-eared copy of London Street Furniture, which wasn’t much help. ‘Doubtless, railings have their devotees,’ I read. ‘The authors may be nerds, but this is one items of street furniture that even they cannot get excited about.’
Oh.
The section continues: ‘When we were children we heard all about the drive to uproot railings to produce scrap iron to assist the war effort in the early 1940s. We suspect that railings were seized and removed more keenly from working-class districts than from the fronts of the houses of people who had wealth and social and political clout.
Removing railings in WW2 (Imperial War Museum)
I’m not sure this is true, as I have read that railings were removed from many garden squares, making them suddenly accessible to the public (indeed, that is what is happening in the image above).
That the railings were removed is beyond doubt. Here is a typical quote from somebody who had their railings removed during the war, taken from the BBC’s People’s War site.
They took away our railings. Men came and cut the ornamental railing from the copings on the little walls outside of the houses, along the whole length of the road, they were taken away to be melted down to make weapons.
But did they really get melted down? A quick scour of the internet produces this interesting nugget from a WWII forum. It is a letter from 1984 to the Evening Standard and says in full:
I was interested in your item about the railings which are to be replaced in Ennismore Gardens. The tragedy is that so many of London’s railings were pulled down in order to support Britain’s war effort, bearing in mind that they never became the guns and tanks they were intended for.
In fact I believe that many hundreds of tons of scrap iron and ornamental railings were sent to the bottom in the Thames Estuary because Britain was unable to process this ironwork into weapons of war.
Christopher Long Earl’s Court Square, Earl’s Court,
London SW5.
The forum correspondent goes on to add: ‘This information came from dockers in Canning Town in 1978 who had worked during the war on ‘lighters’ that were towed down the Thames estuary to dump vast quantities of scrap metal and decorative ironwork. They claimed that so much was dumped at certain spots in the estuary that ships passing the area needed pilots to guide them because their compasses were so strongly affected by the quantity of iron on the sea-bed.’
A great story, but is it true? If anybody can say for sure, please do let us know.
UPDATE: The fine Johnny L, a noted nerd and jazz lover, points us towards this documentary by Jonathan Meades about Victorian houses.

Meades begins talking about railings after 4min 40secs. At 5min 30 secs he reports:

There aren’t many railings left now in London. This is because in 1940 there were ripped up as part of the war effort. It may have been a morale booster, but it was impractical – the stuff was never melted down and was thrown into the Thames rather unceremoniously off Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey. The stuff’s still there.’

25 Comments

Posted in Archaeology, Architecture, Books, History, London, Secret London, Street furniture, War

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Forgotten Londoners: Frank Harris, editor, prisoner and pornographer

Posted on March 21, 2012 | 8 comments

Frank Harris was an objectionable little man. He was sallow as a gypsy. He had bat ears, dark hair with a crinkle in it that grew low on the forehead, and a truculent mustache. People remarked on the richness of his bass voice. His charm was great, particularly for the opposite sex. He had the gift of gab to a sublime degree and a streak of deep scoundrelism that was the ruin of him.

John Dos Passos, 1963

Frank Harris wrote My Life And Loves in 1922 when he was 68. It was partly about his career as an editor of the Evening News and Saturday Review in London, where he had championed critics like Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, but it was mainly about sex.

Harris was a rumbustious character with a voice so deep that one of his many mistresses claimed ‘it made her sex open and shut’ when she heard it. His memoir was scandalously candid, and featured several photographs of naked women, to emphasise the point.

It was these – ‘too much for the English’, Harris later observed – as much as Harris’s candid discussion of sex (he was particularly keen on cunnilingus) that saw the New York Supreme Court rule the book ‘unquestionably obscure, lewd,
lascivious and indecent’ and it was banned in several countries and pretty much did for Harris as a serious writer and journalist thereafter.

It had been a turbulent career. Harris was born in Ireland, educated in Wales and after a series of adventures in America, settled in London in 1882, where he talked his way into newspapers. His greatest triumphs were at the Saturday Review, the London paper he edited in the 1890s, publishing criticism by HG Wells, Shaw and Wilde and gaining a reputation for being unreliably unspoken and outrageously opinionated for a man of his position. He later wrote a biography of Wilde, who surely would have agreed with Harris’s insistence that ‘Modesty is a figleaf for mediocrity’.

As George Bernard Shaw said, ‘He blazed through London like a comet, leaving a trail of deeply annoyed persons behind him.’ Harris was briefly adopted as a Conservative candidate for South Hackney, resigning after he defended Charles Parnell during an adultery scandal. He also defended Wilde during his trial, and suggested he flee the country while out on bail, and took the side of the Boers during the Boer War. 

Years later, Harris looked back on his time as editor with satisfaction. He believed in positive criticism, not handing out brickbats and instructed his critics to celebrate, rather than denigrate. “When I was editor of the Saturday Review,’ he said ‘with the greatest assembly of literary men in history, I had a policy and I believed in sticking to it. There was Shaw and Wells and Rowe and oh, everybody else. I called a dinner and I said: “Gentlemen, it has come to my attention that people have started to call it the Saturday Reviler. Well, this sort of thing doesn’t get us any place. Hereafter the Saturday Review is going to try to find stars, and if it can’t find stars, it won’t merely hurl bricks. What good does it do? Insults, raps, knocks! Mainly lies. Nobody’ll remember them in fifty years. If we can’t do something constructive,” I said, “we won’t do anything.” Well, it worked.’

By 1913, Harris was editing a magazine called Modern Society and was charged with prejudicing a trial after publishing an ongoing divorce case.  ‘It seems to me you have a certain disdain for this court,’ noted the judge during his trial. ‘Oh, if I could only express all the disdain I have,’ replied Harris.

That did it. Harris refused to apologise publicly and was sent to Brixton Prison for contempt. The cartoonist Max Beerbohm visited Harris in Brixton and drew a cartoon, ‘To the best talker in London – from one of his best listeners’. Prints were made and posted all over London in a bid to raise public awareness with the message: ‘This is the man that was sent to prison.’

Harris was released after three months, complaining afterwards that ‘what I suffered most from in prison was lack of books’. Shortly after his release he left London and never lived there again. He died in Nice in 1931.

Max Beerbohm's cartoon of Frank Harris

For more on Harris, visit this excellent Odd Books website.

8 Comments

Posted in Art, Books, Brixton, Celebrity, Gossip, History, Journalism, London, Politics, Sex

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

London’s football gangs: 1972

Posted on February 24, 2012 | 3 comments

 I’ve mentioned Chris Lightbown’s article on London football gangs a couple of times before, but the piece itself hasn’t been available since it was first published in Time Out in 1972. The section on West Ham was reprinted in the excellent 2008 anthology London Calling, but the full article has been confined to libraries and private collections. Until now.

It is a fascinating read. This is the first time football fan culture had ever been seriously discussed by the press, and it offers a remarkable view of life on the terraces from the terraces, free of any moralism or finger-wagging. It is a thorough and very funny piece of writing, and is probably the first time terrace legends such as Mick Greenaway and Johnny Hoy (although he is called ‘High’ here) ever saw their names in print. It’s analysis of where the different clubs draw on their support is particularly great. 

The writing is very much of its time and place – complete with mention of ‘heads’ and ‘coons’ – and also paints the picture of a time when London terrace culture was very different: the Shed was as loud as the Kop, Arsenal had the most aggressive fans in London and Spurs were just a joke, on and off the pitch. Only West Ham’s identity appears to have remained more or less the same, although older Hammers would doubtless question that.

It is a cracking piece of work. Enjoy.

3 Comments

Posted in Books, Celebrity, Cockney, Counterculture, Crime, Football, History, Journalism, London, Maps, Nostalgia, Politics, Secret London

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Lying about London

Posted on February 21, 2012 | 2 comments

This appeared as part of an article that was published in the January 2012 edition of The Sunday Times Travel Magazine about London walks. Chris Roberts also runs the  wonderful One Eye Grey magazine and he will shortly issue a volume of stories from the magazine on Kindle.  In March 2012, Chris will be hosting some special related one-off walking tours. 

Deep in Chelsea’s prim back streets on a drizzly winter evening, half-a-dozen people wearing blindfolds are groping their way down a quiet Georgian square past James Bond’s house, leaning on each other for guidance, and giggling like schoolchildren. This is what happens when you go on Chris Roberts’s Liars London tour, a walk that offers fact, fiction and forfeits in the fancy surroundings of Sloane Square.

Roberts, a librarian, London historian and author, came up with the Liars London idea four years ago when he was asked to curate a tour for the local council. It’s a simple idea. Roberts and Silvana Maimone lead the walk and at each stop they both tell a story about the area: one story will be true and the other false. The audience are asked to guess who is lying and the person who is right most often receives a small prize at the end. Get it wrong, and you may have to pay a location-related forfeit, such as walk around in a blindfold, write a poem, or have a duel with waterpistols. Roberts and Maimone are a great double act, garrulous and witty, happily interrupting each other’s story-telling with exaggerated scoffing. Under their spell the 20-or-so walkers soon start to relax.

We are strangers when we meet among the evening commuters and blinking fairy lights at Sloane Square, but have already bonded by the time we reach the Saatchi Gallery at the affluent end of the King’s Road, where London’s wealthy still promenade in ostentatious fashion. Roberts is spinning an improbable yarn about British fascist Oswald Mosley, when an eavesdropping passer-by indignantly mutters in plumy tones, quite correctly as it happens, ‘What a load of rubbish!’ much to our amusement.

Because the walks require two hosts and require around 20 people attendees – people are happier to participate as part of a larger group, Roberts believes – they must be booked in advance. The Chelsea tour goes from busy Sloane Square down through quiet residential back streets, where every house is impeccably maintained and fragrantly festooned with hanging baskets, before finishing at Cheyne Walk, an 18th-century parade of grand houses nestling on the banks of the Thames, whose surface gleams inkily in the moonlight.

Over 90 fascinating minutes, we take in unusual landmarks such as James Bond’s fictional house on Royal Avenue and the riverside home of wombat-obsessed Romantic poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. When it comes to the stories, the truth is often just as entertaining and unlikely-sounding as the fiction. Outside the rich brick walls of Chelsea Physic Garden, a seventeenth-century botanical garden, we are asked to choose between Maimone’s story about how a strange plant here became the inspiration for the fiendish foliage in John Wyndham’s sci-fi classic Day Of The Triffids, and Roberts’s (correct) claim that cotton seeds taken from Chelsea ended up being picked by slaves in the southern state of the United States, ultimately leading to the American Civil War.

Tall tales or otherwise, this sort of London knowledge is a personal obsession for Roberts, who has written a book, ‘Cross River Traffic’, about London’s bridges, and edits One Eye Grey, a magazine devoted to capital folklore. As such, he can’t help himself but pepper each conversation with a few extra facts and arcane titbits, making the walk a treasure trove for those who like trivia, albeit trivia that’s sometimes indistinguishable from entertaining falsehood.

2 Comments

Posted in History, Journalism, London, Secret London

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Harry Redknapp lends a hand

Posted on February 14, 2012 | 2 comments

Possibly the only interesting sentence that has ever been written about Harry Redknapp appeared 40 years ago, when Redknapp was playing West Ham. It goes:

‘It is said that when West Ham were fighting Coventry at Coventry station last year, Billy Bonds and the inevitable Harry Redknapp came along to lend a hand.’

This appears almost as an aside in Chris Lightbown’s seminal article Football Gangs in Time Out in April 1972, which looked at the mobs that followed the four big London clubs: Arsenal, Chelsea, Tottenham and West Ham.

Did Redknapp really join in a ruck in 1971? This should surely be the first question put to him if he ends up getting the England job.

2 Comments

Posted in Celebrity, Cockney, Counterculture, Crime, Football, History, Journalism, London, Secret London

Tagged , , , , ,

Hawksmoor at the Royal Academy: bunkum and brilliance

Posted on February 8, 2012 | 5 comments

As the adverts all over the tube let us know, there’s currently a big David Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy. Less well advertised, but far more compelling from a London point of view, is the same gallery’s fine show on the fascinating architecture of Nicholas Hawskmoor.

This takes place in the Architecture Space – a nice name for a small corridor near the restaurant – and features a short introduction to the architect, alongside photographs and paintings (photographed, not originals) of key works that feature or reference Hawksmoor’s work.

Hawksmoor, who specialised in hefty Baroque churches, is not an architect to everybody’s taste. In 1734, James Ralph argued that Christchurch was ‘beyond question, one of the most absurd piles in Europe’.  His reputation was resuscitated by Kerry Downes in 1959, who insisted of his churches that ‘they will repel us or fascinate us, but we cannot escape from their strange, haunting power’. This has been a mantra repeated by writers in the following years.

I actually find it quite easy to escape their powers, strange, haunting or otherwise, but this supposed mysterious attraction of Hawksmoor churches is now almost impossible to ignore or deny. It has been repeated so many times, it’s become fact, as Hawksmoor became the anointed architect for a certain type of London writer, the Peter Cook to Sir Christopher Wren’s Dudley Moore. I admire Hawksmoor’s churches, but don’t see them as particularly profound or unsettling.

Among the first to take up this theme was Iain Sinclair who wrote about Hawksmoor in King Lud (1975). A quote from the book is reproduced on the wall, and it offers a perfect illustration of what I dislike about the psychogeographic way of seeing London: ‘From what is known of Hawksmoor it is possible to imagine he did work a code into the buildings, knowingly or unknowingly, templates of meaning, bands of continuous ritual.’

‘From what is known’; ‘possible to imagine’; ‘knowing or unknowing’. Make it up as you go along, in other words. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course, but I do resent the way it is elevated above all other forms of London writing.

Sinclair has made a career out it, and he does it so well you could almost believe he takes it seriously. A fascinating map drawn by him features in the exhibition, showing his hand-drawn connections between London buildings, and there’s also a great film in which he talks eloquently about his relationship with Hawksmoor, which began when he was a gardener employed by Tower Hamlets to mow the churchyard grass at St Anne, Limehouse. Sinclair is a wonderful speaker, and spins a fine yarn here.

Sinclair’s map for King Lud

After Sinclair came Ackroyd and Alan Moore, both of whom woves tales of occultish imagination around this indefinable mystery of Hawksmoor churches. Nonsense clearly, but at least it gave us the majestic From Hell, which features prominently in the exhibition.

From Hell featuring Christchurch, Spitalfields

All this bunkum gets space in the exhibition, but I found much else to entertain besides. There are wonderful photographs and prints of Hawksmoor buildings in many different styles and from varied eras, and also a passionate film by Ptolmy Dean, explaining – quite successfully – the attractions of the easily overlooked St Mary Woolnoth near the Bank of England.

The most interesting element, however, were the photos that drew attention to the parallels between Hawksmoor’s work and more recent buildings. We see a comparison of St Mary Woolnoth and Poultry in the City, and another between St Anne, Limehouse and the National Theatre. It might not be as sexy as psychogeography, but there’s nothing wrong with a bit of straightforward architectural history every now and then.

5 Comments

Posted in Architecture, Counterculture, Exhibitions, History, London, Mumbo jumbo, Photography

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,