Talking Tamara

Among the crowd at Cathi Unsworth's reading in Camden a few weeks ago was, I only realised afterwards, Lisa, the artist of a painting I bought at a small exhibition in Walton-on-Thames years ago. She's on the board of the Arts Society in Kingston-upon-Thames and had just achieved her ambition to get a talk about Tamara de Lempicka on the schedule, so last night I went along. 

Lecturer Pamela Campbell-Johnston, who was involved in the Lempicka exhibition at the Royal Academy in 2004-5 (which I think I saw) challenged us to consider which side of the divide we fell on: was she a genius who pioneered female artistry with a unique style, or (as Waldemar Januszczak claimed) a maker of 'creepy daubs'? 'Daubs' I couldn't agree with - that's a deeply unfair description for Lempicka's amazing technical proficiency, and her sketches show even better than the paintings what a brilliant draughtsman she was - but 'creepy' and 'genius' both seem equally just as epithets. Ms Campbell-Johnston illustrated the latter with images of the queasily erotic paintings of the artist's daughter Kizette, but it's there throughout the whole project: the transformation of humans into aloof, godlike beings composed of razor-sharp angles and metallic curls of hair falling like swarf off a lathe. Given the right-wing, aristocratic circles Lempicka moved in, this is art born of the 1920s lust for liberty which edges uneasily towards fascism. The glamour is often the glamour of cruelty.

What strikes me most is that Lempicka's most dramatic and memorable work was done in such a short period. By about 1927 she'd hit on a style which enabled her to make money, and work quickly with tremendous productivity, but it clearly excited her as well. Whether the pictures are gentle or whether they're cruel, there's a passion in them which energises and powers them. After about 1933 when she married Baron Kuffner and no longer had to work for a living, the steam goes out of the art, and all her ultramodern accoutrements of skyscrapers and telephones no longer seem as radical. For the next forty-odd years, she paints as someone who doesn't have to but thinks they should. The moment had passed. 

London Revelations

Following on the recent theme of not doing work, some time ago I was invited to pop out to London with Lady Wildwood and Ms MaisyMaid as they both liked the idea of visiting the Transport Museum in Covent Garden. The stuff I immediately needed to do could be compressed into the morning, so yesterday I went. My first discovery was Adelphi House in John Adam Street off The Strand, an amazing 1930s Art Deco block I had no idea existed.  

The Transport Museum had a long queue outside. We had anticipated neither the effect of the start of half-term nor a go-slow by the ticketing system, not helped by the TM's insistence that all its tickets are annual passes so they have to take your email address and details so you can come back in should you want to. I doubt I will unless I find myself at a very loose end: it was fun (though not cheap), but I think you have to be very interested in the topics covered to want to find out more. Now, as a former museum worker I like to go in to a museum, and be welcomed with a big sign saying 'Hello, this is X Museum, this is what it's about, and this is where you go next', as I can then choose to disobey if I wish. Yesterday we went round the whole place the wrong way, as we missed the small sign telling us to start on the second floor and work downwards. That added an extra chaotic element to the visual and aural chaos, as small children ran heedlessly around us until we felt like targets in a pinball machine. But there was a lot to enjoy. I especially liked the Brunel Thames Tunnel Peepshow, a paper concertina you can look through to see the three-dimensional scene, like a tiny toy theatre. 'You can see it more easily just by looking at it from the side', pointed out Lady Wildwood, and of course she is right but what's the fun of that?

We were exhausted after a couple of hours and set off on a slow amble along The Strand and Fleet Street to the Cheshire Cheese where we were dining with two more friends. As we drew closer to St Mary-le-Strand we could hear bells ringing, before realising that the strange glowing pentagonal structures on posts lining the road were a sound installation. But then we worked out that they were producing ambient ringing noises and not the bells: those were coming from St Clement Danes along the way. Was it a practice or being done for a particular event? Lady Wildwood was delighted to be hearing The Bells of St Clements - though that lyric may refer to a church in the City instead.

Cumbria 1: Landscapes and Townscapes

The name of Byre Cottage – at Dodbury, at Garrigill, near Alston in northeast Cumbria – suggests it used to be essentially a cowshed, but the owners have turned it into a holiday cottage and it’s where I’ve just spent a week. Unlike some of the more basic places I’ve stayed, it’s modern and bright, and gazes over the valley of the South Tyne. A footpath runs right through the little garden, but I never saw evidence of anyone using it. These photos were all taken the morning I left, when the best weather of the week arrived!

There’s a lot of water about in this part of the world, some of it cascading in rocky falls. Beldy Fall was just yards from Byre Cottage; and Ashgill Force is a dizzying experience. The fall is at the top of a gorge: the bridge you can see in the photo carries a road across the top. You can, if you want to take the risk, stand behind the water and look outward as it crashes from fifty feet above. It’s not that likely that the whole thing is going to collapse, is it? There are gentler manifestations of water, too, at wide Kielder and rainy Ullswater.

You see the odd field of cows, but farming here means mainly sheep. It can’t ever have made for an easy living, but derelict farms like this one at Low Craig somehow express how hard it really could be. Imagine the last years of Low Craig.

That’s a different sort of economic scarring from the kind evident in the towns. Alston, a little market town a couple of miles from Garrigill, clambers over a steep hill with its market square halfway down. It’s clearly kept going by catering to tourists, walkers and bikers, but those are fewer than they once were. One of the cafés is closed, and what you might describe as a knickknack shop is heading that way too. I had a look round on Monday when everything was shut anyway, apart from the Cumberland Inn where I had lunch. So did everyone else: Monday’s always a busy day at the Cumberland, apparently, because there's nowhere else to go.

Picturesque Durham is a student city as much as anything else (I saw a queue of at least twenty outside Greggs at lunchtime) but the presence of lots of young people can’t disguise the closed shops there either. As for Newcastle, the streets around the city centre witness to the pride of a provincial capital, confident in its identity and prosperity: and thus in contrast to the hard times it now finds itself in. In handsome, red-sandstone Carlisle, even the Covered Market is half-empty, which is a bad sign when market stalls require so little investment, comparatively, to set up.

Towns like Penrith and Hexham, small but on the next step up from Alston, seem to be doing a bit better: they have their blank frontages and rubbish-strewn corners, but also their mobile coffee stands and side streets of little shops.

I’ll finish this section with a couple of bits of Art Deco, a bijou former cinema in Hexham and a building in Carlisle which uses the red sandstone in a proper 1930s idiom. 

An Unexpected Find

At some point I will post about something significant, and even describe a few churches, but I haven't the energy for that today. Instead - so it is preserved - here is an image of a battered but still standing Art Deco building in the backstreets of Farnborough which I spotted while on the way to one of those churches. It's a garage now, and inside is utilitarian indeed (though I wonder what the upstairs flat is like - are there any original features left?), and it's lost most of its old glazing bars; but it holds on, and the company using it has chosen a nice jazzy font for its signage. 

Dorset Deco - Survivals and Perils

A trip to Dorset yesterday gave me the chance to revisit some of the Poole-and-Bournemouth area's Art Deco buildings which I last paid any serious attention to some two decades ago. In fact I had never paid any attention at all to the Ice Cream Kiosk in Poole Park, but this quite splendidly survives, even if at the moment it is selling not ice cream but dog portraits:

I reviewed some of the houses on Sandbanks Road, and got improved photos of the Harbour Heights development at Sandbanks, designed by the area's premier Art Deco architect at the time, AJ Seal. This is the house he would have known as The Conning Tower, redeveloped as a block of apartments called Conning Towers in the early 2000s:

Now, I haven't visited the town centre of Bournemouth for some years. My sister's report was that the pandemic and the accelerated economic dislocations that have come with it have resulted in an environment so depressing that on her last visit she ended up going to the Library as it was the only place that seemed to offer any cheer. I didn't find it that bad, though a couple of the main commercial streets have been battered by the closure of the big department stores; I will say more about that another time, but as far as the Art Deco buildings are concerned they are mostly intact, from the humbler stores you can see here to the grander ones such as Seal's Palace Court Hotel and the Echo building on Richmond Hill.

The grand Brights Building on Old Christchurch Road is suffering a bit from the closure of House of Fraser which used to occupy most of it, notwithstanding being one of only three Listed Art Deco buildings in the Dorset conurbation.

Saddest of all, though, is Hinton Road, whose south side is a scene of devastation from the YMCA building onwards. The very first building AJ Seal designed in Art Deco style, the old Palace Court Theatre, has apparently been bought from the church that used to occupy it by Bournemouth Arts University who intend to restore it, so hopefully its future is secure, but Seal's own offices at Palace Court Chambers next door are a wreck. There's even an upstairs window which is entirely knocked out: heaven knows what's going to happen to it.

The Majestic Garage building, long used for offices and an NCP car park, is derelict too, and I had never noticed before the sprawling redbrick building that occupies the long plot to its west. Its days must be numbered. Curiously Google Maps lists it as the home of a private detective agency called 'Fallen Angel Investigations', which given the state of the building sounds like an idea for a TV series.

Escape to Dorset

Like everyone else I haven't been very far lately so sitting with my mum in her garden (well, she sat inside the conservatory) and then a walk with my sister and her family around Sandbanks today was a profound and much-missed pleasure. I was tempted by an ice-cream which I thought would be a bit like a Cornetto, as it appeared to operate on the same principle, but proved to be a deadlier concoction of sugars than I was expecting. The lifeguards were out despite the chilly sunlight and there were indeed some hardy souls braving the water.

I've mentioned before the swift turnover of buildings in this part of Dorset, and how many of them seem to want to ape what the builders think Art Deco architecture looks like. This apartment building, though, nos.72-74 Banks Road, is one of the more successful: I couldn't believe it was genuine to the Art Deco period - how would I have missed it? - and it proves to date only from 2008, but it doesn't look at all unreasonable compared to some of the concoctions you sometimes see around the Poole basin. I wonder what it's like inside.

House of Deco

We are not in the mood for lengthy or deep analysis of the state of the world, or even the parish, here at the moment, so we fall back on some nice pictures to show you. A trip to London on Thursday found me sat on a stone bench on Oxford Street waiting for my friend to arrive, and wondering whether I'd really never been there before. Otherwise, how could I have failed to notice the grandiose frontage of the House of Fraser store, built in 1937 when it was DH Evans? More details about the architecture and some wonderful images from the store's opening brochure can be found here. 

I sometimes complain that modern buildings don't have the style of their confident 1930s counterparts, but just round the corner we find 50 Bond Street, now a Mulberry store but apparently built in 2012 for Scottish Widows. Those angular pilasters (if that's an accurate term in this case) are very striking, as is the decision to front the building in green stone. No wonder it won a RIBA award.

Farnham and About

My week off between New Year and Epiphany came to a conclusion yesterday in a walk around Farnham. It was a bright, chilly late morning and early afternoon, and the fairly short walk - only an hour and a half or so - took me around the hills northwest of that small Surrey town, past timber-framed farmhouses glimpsed across the fields, and more modern structures such as the 1930s - perhaps - Cedar House.

I took in visits to a couple of churches. Although St Francis's, Byworth, was shut, it's a perfect example of the sort of small estate churches being built during Anglicanism's boom-time of the 1950s, when a moderate sort of Catholicism was the natural environment for the Church of England. It has a bell, a statue of the Saint by the door, and an altar hung with a brocade frontal. 

Its mother-church, the medieval St Andrew's in town, is intriguing because it seems to suggest successive waves of Catholicisation, beginning with a restoration of the chancel in 1848, whose tide is now ebbing. A Lady Chapel was created in 1909 and the altar brought forward in 1959, a very early date for a change like that. In the early 2000s an internal suite of meeting rooms was created by clearing out the pews and creating a wood and glass box at the west end of the nave.  I couldn't find any date for this splendid sort-of sub-Comper reredos, which now sits behind the old high altar at the far end of the church. I'm guessing it can't be earlier than 1910 (and perhaps not much later).

Finally I called in at Farnham Museum, set in a Georgian town house on the main street. Its staircase is apparently very highly regarded:

The collection isn't vast, but every local museum furnishes some surprises and Farnham's is no exception. I will spare you the taxidermy diorama of red squirrels playing cards, but thought I would share John Verney's The Three Graces Playing Croquet in the Garden of Farnham Castle which was definitely a surprise to me, at any rate. Splendidly the Museum has it available in postcard form. Mr Verney is on record as saying that 'the addition of a clergyman raises the tone of any painting.'

Reflections in Water and Glass

My sister-in-the-Spirit Cylene has recently moved to a particularly benighted part of South Wales ('used to be junkiesville', she says cheerily in her Stateside manner) but her partner is having some expensive medical treatment, paid for by her parents, done in London so they were around yesterday. I took Cylene to Little Venice where we nursed coffee in a canalboat café for quite some time and I watched moorhens trying to nibble algae off bits of floating plastic bag. Despite all the pressures inherent in her new circumstances, geographic and emotional, Cylene seems to have acquired a fundamental sense of rest which she's never had before and I am pleased about that. It would have been hard to be too discontented on such a beautiful day.

Just around the corner is Tournament House: I can't imagine how it can have evaded my notice before now. Built between 1932 and 1935, it has that monolithic corporatist Art Deco swagger that could not have envisaged a building being used for anything but the purpose for which it was erected. The blue sky reflected in its windows adds a sumptuousness. 

Follies and Other Buildings

My long walk a week ago last Monday brought me to Twizel Castle, just over the Tweed into Northumberland. This was not long before the strain of walking against a 45-mph wind began to cause problems to the ligaments of my left knee, but at that stage I was still agile enough to hop over the fence (which you are NOT SUPPOSED TO DO) and look around the ruin. As I sat with a cup of tea I discovered from the detritus around that I had not been the only one to risk it. Twizel looks like a medieval castle, but isn't. It owes its ruinous state to the fact that it was never finished: built over the course of fifty years in the mid-1700s, nobody ever lived in it.

It was a far nicer day when I saw Hume Castle. This is a genuine relic of the Middle Ages, but not much is left from that time: the shell you see now is a modern restoration of an 18th-century reconstruction of a medieval castle, so it's really as much a folly as Twizel. 

Twizel and Hume are hard to miss, but I was surprised that so many other follisome structures I came across have not found their way into the tome to which all of us who are interested in such things turn, Headley & Meulenkamp's Follies. The Temple of the Muses at Dryburgh was erected in 1814 in honour of the Roxburghshire poet James Thomson, but although Headley & Meulenkamp mention the statue of William Wallace not far away, the Temple they never found:

On the way to the Temple from Dryburgh Abbey I also spotted the castellated Stirling Towers with their date-stone of 1818 (those are miniature cannons poking around the top), and a wonderfully OTT gateway which leads into an empty field: 

When I parked up by a little picnic site next to the A697 to look at the Mermaid's Well there in front of me was another folly gateway which doesn't appear to lead anywhere, if it ever did. There's no big house locally that it would have led to: its presence is as unexplained as the Mermaid's Well itself.

How this ordinary row of 19th-century houses beside the main road in Wooler came to have a castellated gable-end is anyone's guess, too.

I also achieved a long ambition of visiting Yester Castle. Some years ago I tried to reach it in the company of Lady Arlen but we were defeated by horribly boggy ground: this time I approached via the footpath from Gifford village. My theory had been that the walks along the steep-sided valley of the Gifford Water had been laid out to provide a walk to the Castle ruins and an appropriately Gothic experience for visitors to Yester House, in the manner of 'Gothic Gardens' further to the south (it's the only Scottish site of this kind I know of yet). My suspicions were confirmed by the artificial way the paths wind around the stream, and the two beautiful rustic bridges which have been built, entirely superfluously, to provide an additional thrill.

Finally, after a lot of winding to and fro through the woods, you reach the Castle. This medieval ruin was abandoned in the 16th century (though the falconer of the Hays of Gifford continued to live in it until the mid-1700s), and it's hard to see clearly, but it has a unique feature that sends an intentional shiver down the spine of the Gothic visitor. This is the semi-subterranean Goblin Ha', constructed in the time of Sir Hugo de Gifford allegedly - because, so the story goes, nobody could work out how such a marvel was built otherwise - with the aid of supernatural beings he summoned from the Underworld. You can't go in, but you can look through a grille at it, and even from that distance it has a genuinely nasty feel to it, as though something disagreeable has happened there. 

Opposite that row of houses in Wooler is a folly of a different sort. The Ryecroft Hotel was definitely there by 1954 but I don't know whether its brand of brick-and-concrete stripped Art Deco comes from the late 1930s or the early 1950s. The ten-bed hotel closed in 2012 and the building has been mouldering since then; in 2016 the purchasers were complaining that their planning applications were being repeatedly turned down, and that their insurers would insist on the hotel being boarded up, as it now is. It looks dreadful, and I suspect - though one local estate agent has a plan on their website for its redevelopment that incorporates the entrance and facade - its fate will be gradual decay until demolition becomes the only option.