Devotionally Challenged

On my great trip north I called in on my friend Clare (no point disguising her name) who is Chaplain to the University of Cumbria in Lancaster. It's a peculiar kind of arrangement: the University grew out of St Martin's College, a Church of England teacher-training college occupying the site of the old barracks in Lancaster. It gradually acquired other scattered sites and when it was finally instituted as a university in 2007, it couldn't call itself Lancaster University or the University of Lancashire as those titles were taken, so it became the University of Cumbria even though its biggest campus is in Lancaster. Clare describes it as 'very, very secular' but part of the foundation arrangements was that there should be a number of Anglican appointments on the staff, of which the Chaplain in Lancaster is one. So Clare finds herself something of what we would in other circumstances call a 'pioneer minister', sent to a group of people who don't have any longstanding interaction with Christianity (the previous chaplain had, let's say, not been particularly active and the Chapel, built in the 1960s to be a sort of parish church of the College, hasn't had much of a congregation for a long while). 

One of Clare's challenges in restoring the Chapel of St Martin to something like a devotional space can be found behind the altar. Here she is, then, displaying one of the Church of England's greatest artistic treasures, John Bratby's Me as Christ, Crucified by My Ex-Wives and Art Critics. 

I'm teasing you, of course. The mural doesn't have that title (if it has one, it's the tedious Golgotha), but it would be an accurate description. John Bratby's name has virtually disappeared from the story of twentieth-century British art but he was flavour of the day at one point in the 1960s. He was, by all accounts, a dreadful, dreadful man, but his portraiture in particular has a psychedelic verve to it even if, as Clare points out, he seems consistently to lose interest in his figures by the time he gets to their feet. 

The mural was acquired by the College's first Principal, Hugh Pollard, after a theological college in Manchester got queasy about buying it. It does present some challenges as a devotional image, in that it isn't intended as one but rather an unpleasant joke. I'm reminded a bit, in another mode, of Jean Fouquet's portrait of French royal mistress Agnes Sorel as a bare-breasted Virgin Mary, an icon of something else quite a long way from religious feeling. The story goes that when the late Queen Mother opened the College in 1967 and was shown the painting she remarked of the artist 'Do you think he has the slightest idea of what Christianity is about?' Taking a broad view of the doctrine of the Incarnation, you might reply Yes, but only just enough to get it wrong.

So, what is a chaplain to do with it? Clare's predecessor had it covered with a curtain which, she thinks, 'was worse - it means it's lurking unseen like a monster'. Given that hardly anyone comes to worship in St Martin's anymore Clare plans to reorganise the space so that there's a smaller liturgical area with its altar to one side while, for the considerable number of Cumbria students who are studying medicine and allied subjects, she will offer some sessions reflecting spiritually on pain, physicality and selfhood. Take the horror and work with it. It's a bit like the Parable of the Talents. 

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. 

'The Rossettis' at The Tate

To London to visit the Tate's exhibition on the Rossettis with Dr RedMedea and Ms Mauritia. It seemed on the pricey side and when the first room was full of Christina Rossetti's poetry and one painting I thought we'd been diddled, but in fact as we followed the route it was clear there was enough to justify the cost - even if art is always a bit exhausting, and art in one style more tiring than that, and when finally an artist is producing multiple versions of the same picture weary is not the word. The furniture made for a nice palate-cleanser. We liked Gabriel Rossetti's prints and drawings more than his lush and famous paintings which are technically stunning and emotionally empty: 'It's all about the hair!' said Dr RedMedea. Discovering that Ken Russell had made a BBC film in 1967 about the Rossettis full of Gothic nonsense means I will have to try to find it.

An Art Evening

It's ironic that I went to the Brick Lane Gallery Annexe - not in Brick Lane at all, but Sclater Street - in order to support my friend Monsieur HaslandGraphica and didn't photograph any of his art at all. He was contributing to this multi-artist show based around abstract art, and as Lady Wildwood couldn't make it down from north of the capital due to strikes on her line I wanted to make the effort, especially as it would also balance out working on the night of Candlemas Day. Msr HaslandGraphica developed this particular sequence of works while in lockdown in France, filtering the cliffs and rivers of the immediate surroundings into digital paintings. 

My favourite bit of the whole show was a large black canvas decorated with patterns of black, scarlet, and rust-red, but I wasn't going to reach down the back of the sofa to pay for it. I was also intrigued by Hannah Robinett, who reads Psalms and decides which colour they make her think of, before blocking the words out with gold. I wondered which translation she uses, and also whether there was anything I could justify buying. There wasn't, I fear.

Watts Gallery Excursion

The last time I went to the Watts Gallery at Compton was some years ago, before the artist's former home of Limnerslease was open to the public: I was part of a group being given a preview while it was all being set up. So I was grateful when Dr RedMedea suggested we go to see the gallery's current temporary exhibition (she had also been before, with Archangel Janet and Lady Wildwood). This was examining the generation of artists at the end of the 1800s and start of the 1900s who looked back to the original Pre-Raphaelites and used their idioms and styles to explore fantasies, dreams and symbolism. As always I was as much taken by fragments and details as overall pictures. In Limnerslease I shouldn't have been taking photos at all, but this was only pointed out to me when it was too late: 'the signage isn't very clear', the attendant admitted, and in the temporary exhibition you're positively encouraged to snap away, exactly the opposite way round from the practice of most museums and galleries. Mary Watts's amazing reredos for the Military Chapel at Aldershot reminds me, at least compositionally, of the one that still graces St Paul's church in Dorking, which I thought I had illustrated on this blog but now can't find!

Even the gallery shop brought surprises. They are selling a gin that apparently uses water from the holy well at Walsingham, and on picking up a copy of a book I knew had been planned about local buildings made of Bargate stone I found a picture of my own house in it, so just had to buy a copy to be supportive.

Fuseli at the Courtauld

Although getting to London yesterday was more problematic than usual, requiring catching the train at Woking rather than anywhere further down the line, I made the journey so I could visit the Fuseli show at the Courtauld along with Ms Mauritia. Henry Fuseli has a relationship with the Gothic tradition especially via the various versions he painted of The Nightmare, but also his treatments of scenes from Shakespeare, and other fantasies - including his fantasy women, who are on display in this exhibition. In fact, they are not complete fantasies, but I'll come to that.

I was already familiar with most of the images, but hadn't seen them in the flesh before, and gathering them together creates a slight sense of oppression as Fuseli obsessively repeats poses and ideas, using swirly dress to experiment with form and movement. He hardly ever drew from life: the story went that he would mark a paper with four random dots and use them to dispose the limbs of his figures. Many of his subjects are (imagined) sex workers, but far more erotic and striking than the exposed breast or six is what seems to be the main object of the artist's obsessive interest, hair. During the earlier part of Fuseli's life, wealthy women did indeed have towering hairstyles, but he creates weird, geometric and elaborate shapes for his figures to wear, curls, fringes, sculptured structures, decorated with beads and papers, which must often, surely, be completely unreal. Ms Mauritia remembered the 20th-century fetish artist John Willie who drew women in impossible high heels - another way of simultaneously depicting women as powerful while defusing that power with disabling dress, shoes you can't walk in, or hairstyles you can't move without disarraying. 

But the ladies in this show aren't entirely unreal. Gazing from many drawings, the dramatic features of Fuseli's wife Sophia are unmistakable even when she's not acknowledged as the model. Her hair is the most fantastic of all, but she, the young English model who became the artist's spouse, is real enough, and there's something very odd going on psychologically in the way her husband depicts her: he adores her and fears the fact he does. He shows her next to a head of the Medusa; he draws her making the corna gesture that signals cuckoldry. What kind of a person was she? Of course you get no clues from this art: Fuseli wasn't interested in showing real people, just moments from his own imagination. She's supposed to have had quite a temper, but perhaps that was just from being married to him. 

Horror!

A week last Saturday I went with Lady Wildwood and MaisyMaid to see The Horror Show! at Somerset House, a bit nervously as it was my suggestion we should. We all quite liked it though my friends preferred the first bit with its nostalgic glimpses of punk, New Romantic and early Goth ('My memory isn't wrong, people really did dress like that', MaisyMaid mused at the blownup footage of early-80s club nights, being a few years senior to her Ladyship and myself), but I thought all of it was good fun even though a couple of bits were a little queasy: the artist who'd sculpted himself as a hyperrealistic drowned corpse under an archway admitted in the captions that even he'd found it thoroughly unsettling to make. I was almost overcome being brought face-to-face with Sue Webster's Banshees jacket: 

The premise of the show is that the mode of horror has been used to analyse society since the breakdown of the hopes of the 1960s in three broad phases, that the curators categorise as 'Monster' - figures and institutions of power are made monstrous, and to oppose them nonconformists construct spectacular selves that are also monstrous; 'Ghost' - the sense of reality collapses into nostalgia and pastiche, paranoia and hysteria, fragmentation and the uncanny; and 'Witch' - narratives of power and authority are deconstructed and reconstructed into new expressions of self-determination and connection. There are multiple ways of arranging even the specific art of rebellion across five decades, of course, but this is as interesting as any.

Notwithstanding all the horror, the artwork that caught me up most was Susan Hiller's Homage to Joseph Beuys, which is 86 bottles of holy well water collected from a variety of sacred springs and sites between 1969 and 2016. I couldn't quite see what was uncanny about that. Lady Wildwood suggested that the healing capacities of the water were there to counteract the fractured and baleful material around it: nice try, I thought.

That's Full of Holes

Talking of money, it’s easy enough to be outraged by a report that ‘Rishi Sunak bought a £1.5M sculpture for his garden with public money’ which is what friends of mine were sharing the other day. As this relates to the museum/art world I was especially interested, and thought it would be very unlikely that any such purchase for the PM’s own garden would get through. What seems to have happened is that someone from The Sun saw Henry Moore’s Model for Seated Woman being carried into the front door of 10 Downing Street a few days ago. It’s quite impressive that a tabloid journalist might recognise a sculpture by Henry Moore, but if it’s for the Downing Street garden rather than Mr Sunak’s own personal home it will be the responsibility of the Government Art Collection, an organisation most people know nothing about: I knew it existed but had given it no special thought. The Moore was, as reported, definitely sold at Christie’s in October and the quoted price is roughly what it was expected to sell for. But did the GAC buy it?

The GAC is run by an advisory board consisting of leading art gallery directors who sit on it ex officio, curators and academics, and is chaired at the moment by Sir David Verey, a banker by trade with a long record of involvement in the arts world. It’s the curatorial staff of the GAC who draw up lists of items for acquisition, which the board then approve. The board members aren’t paid and no politicians sit on it, so there’s no obvious political influence on what the GAC does.

It's slightly unsatisfactory that up-to-date information on the GAC’s budget isn’t easily available, as the latest report on its website is only from 2018-19. But then, and in the year before (I have looked back no further than that) it spent some hundreds of thousands of pounds on a wide variety of artworks, the great majority by contemporary, living artists; the cheapest cost a couple of hundred pounds, the most expensive about £70K, and the average in the few thousands. Model for Seated Woman would have cost about four times the GAC’s usual annual spend on acquisitions, and it would be exceedingly unusual for it to buy a piece by one of the world’s most acclaimed and expensive (and dead) artists, rather than the relatively humble purchases it seems usually to make. It already owns a Henry Moore, albeit not a very spectacular one, which sits in the garden of the British Ambassador in Seoul and which it bought in 1965; and it therefore seems very unlikely that it’s added another, far pricier example, of its own choice or at the insistence of someone in Downing Street, even maybe the Prime Minister.

The official line is that the sculpture was not bought by the GAC, but has appeared in the no.10 garden as a result of ‘a longstanding charitable arrangement’. If accurate, that would suggest that the actual purchaser was a private individual who has then loaned the figure to the GAC for display as part of some tax scheme or something like that, meaning that neither public money nor political influence was involved. But of course Christie’s doesn’t reveal who the buyer was, and if the loan was made to set against tax, no official body can comment on it either: it could be Mr Sunak himself, though it's unlikely. That outrage-provoking headline clearly isn't true, but it hides a far more complex process which mingles public and private interest that few people pay any attention to.

Cumbria 4: Wells and Follies

Bellingham is the last town along its road before the Scottish border, and here you find one of England’s better-known holy springs, St Cuthbert’s Well, gushing out of a fountain of rough stone in a lane down from the church: for some reason I pictured it as being in the middle of a field, but that was because I wasn’t paying attention. It’s also no more than three feet high! 

Many people make it to ‘Cuddy Well’, but fewer pick their way along the lane beside the road at Brisco just south of Carlisle to find St Ninian’s Well beneath its Norman-style arch. This is the work of the idiosyncratic architect Sarah Losh: there is no record of it before she constructed what we see today, probably in the 1840s, so we’re not sure whether she invented it.

Meanwhile, next to the church Sarah Losh built in her estate village of Wreay, there seems to be another well, now dry. There are rails around it, steps down to it, and a gargoyle’s head at the bottom which must have been a water-spout. Jenny Uglow points out in her book about Losh’s work, The Pinecone, that the well seems to act as a drain for several sources of water in the vicinity of the church. Is this a holy well Miss Losh wanted, next to her own church with its strange and not-all-that-Christian symbolism? Nobody is sure what she meant by the image of the downward-pointing arrow.

While on my way to Bellingham I spotted another well on the map, with what looked like a fairly easy path to it, so I went to check. Lady Well at Nunwick, which is probably referred to (under Simonburn) in RC Hope’s Holy Wells of England, turned out to be a tiny moss-covered stone arch over a very active spring. I can’t recall ever seeing any images of this site though one neopagan artist seems to have been there!

Finally in the grounds of Lowther Castle we find Peg Hook Well. At least we do if we look hard, even with the aid of a map! It’s a stone structure covering a brick tunnel a few feet long, full of water. The current head gardener of Lowther writes that it’s really an ice house, but the old OS map – which names it as Peg Huck Well rather than Hook – shows an ice house some distance away, and it sits at the head of a pond, so I think it may be the real article.

Headley & Meulenkamp include Sarah Losh’s Brisco well as a folly, and I came across some others too. One of them is The Count’s House in Durham, a tiny classical temple down by the River Wear and which was built by the Dean & Chapter of the Cathedral in the grounds of a cottage where ‘Count’ Joseph Boruwlaski, the ‘Polish dwarf’, lived in the late 17- and early 1800s. H & M include the Count’s House, but not a classical seat decorated on its rear with grotesque stone faces, close by; this is ‘Cathedra’, an artwork created by sculptor Colin Whitbourn during a residency at the Cathedral in the late 1980s.

Now, coming across a folly which isn’t in Headley & Meulenkamp is the greatest thrill a folly enthusiast can enjoy; coming across four – well, I was almost overwhelmed. The great authors can be forgiven for not listing Durham’s Cathedra, given its recent origin, and the same applies to the castellated garden building I spotted by the path leading to Lady Well at Nunwick, as that bears the date 1987 on a stone. But Greenholme Lodge sits right by the A69 on the way into Carlisle. It seems to have been a gateway to Edmond Castle; because Robert Smirke designed that building, Historic England assumes he was responsible for the lodge too, but if so he must have had an off-day. It’s just a red stone Gothic façade whacked onto the front of an ordinary cottage. 

A more serious omission is Lacy’s Caves, although admittedly I only discovered it while trying to find directions to Long Meg & Her Daughters. A sequence of five chambers with arched doorways and windows sits above the River Eden, hollowed out of the sandstone, like a rough hermitage for a rough hermit. The nutcase responsible is supposed to be Colonel Samuel Lacy of Salkeld Hall (owner 1790-1836), who entertained his guests there, although it would have been a bit of a jaunt if so. Nowadays there is a path to the Caves along the line of the tramway that once serviced the Long Meg Gypsum Mine: you can still see sleepers and couplings, chutes and steps, and, up a steep bank in the woods, graffiti-adorned mine buildings.

I’m not the only person to have noticed another feature of that path, but nearly: it’s a brick artwork laid into the ground, showing features of the River Eden between Langwathby and Culgaith, made by local schoolchildren. You are lucky if you can find it: a few more years and it may have disappeared entirely. Can you spot the 'Hermit' - looking a bit like a spaceman, to me?

Pretty Pictures

Over late months I've acquired a couple of pictures which I have just now got around to putting on the walls of the Rectory. While I was at Petworth House at the start of the year, the National Trust shop had a little selection of art including some watercolours by a lady called Georgina Ling. One of these, to my great surprise, showed narrowboats on the canal at Swanvale Halt, caught in a snowy winter. Thanks to Dr Bones I do have a fascination for canals and so I had to buy that. 

Then, when I went with Sir Binarycode and Lady Arlen to Greenwich in the summer, we dropped in on a small antiques shop, and in a sheaf of prints I found a little one of Oystermouth Castle, which of course I visited last autumn, so I was tempted to get that. It came with a larger image of Harlech Castle, which I haven't visited, but both were worth the extra cash. The picture of Oystermouth Castle is fairly accurate though Harlech is not quite as dramatic as it appears here!

Intimations of Mortality in a Leading London Gallery

The idea was that I would meet S.D. at Tate Britain, but at first we managed to miss one another – I had, inexplicably, the wrong time and the wrong entrance, and at one stage we were both waiting for one another in different places. Neither of us had a mobile number for the other! But we did coincide eventually, and began our lunch in the Tate café rather hungrier than we intended to be. S.D. had a triple-bypass operation earlier in the year and two cataract removals, so feels a bit fragile and is having to get used to pacing himself rather more than usual. ‘I’ve reached the point where getting through each day, and then waking up in the morning, counts as a success’. I admitted I already felt like that, and that it would be better to leave something to look forward to in the future.

S.D. is covering for one of the Canons at Westminster Abbey as Canon in Residence (‘I only have to  read the first lesson at Mattins and Evensong, and be on hand in case the place burns down’), so as he left I looked round the shop. On the way we passed the Tate’s monumental current installation, ‘Procession’ by Hew Locke, a witty and thoroughly scary investigation of politics and social identity through something that looks like a religious event (‘Just like St Mary’s Bourne Street’ – that’s S.D., not Hew Locke) but with no liturgical content.

Usually I can be relied on to leave a gallery or museum shop with a handful of postcards but I thought 85p was a bit cheeky. I looked at the books. At the moment, as far as books are concerned, I am battling my way through three: Andrew Hickey’s The Mind Robber (one of Obverse Books’ ‘Black Archive’ volumes about individual Dr Who stories), Brian Bailey’s Great British Ruins from 1984 (a nice easy come-down bedtime read), and Airhead by Emily Maitlis, recounting the real experience of being a leading BBC news interviewer. I only got hold of that because there was a pile of copies in one of the churches I visited recently, with the instruction to take one away for free, but it has nice, short chapters and is physically light, making it an ideal train read – and very revealing of Maitlis and her interviewees. In the Tate shop there were hundreds of fascinating titles I would like to read, but I know I never would (I congratulated myself for owning a couple already). Analyses of colonialism and feminist art, of cultural trends and social phenomena: some of these are important, and in fact they might change the way you look at the world. Most of them will have been laboured over with commitment and dedication. But who will read them? Will they happen to find their way into the mind of someone who might have their worldview shifted by them, might as a result go on to do something which would affect their own life and others’?

It is no surprise that at my time of life I might think about what I have done with it. I know I’ve wasted a lot of time, but am I wasting it now? I’m not necessarily haunted by the thought that I might not have gone to the right places, had the most worthwhile experiences, or read the most enjoyable books from the Tate shop: that’s a consumerist approach to life I don’t endorse. But have I produced the most worthwhile things? Who will have listened to all my sermons, or read all the things I have written? I know what Father Somerset Ward would say, which is that our main concern should be to pray, so that our minds can be shaped after the mind of Christ: that there is no other way of pouring our own contribution into the life of the world that goes with the flow of the heavenly will. One can hope!

Contested Landscape at The Devil's Punchbowl

The Portal sculpture at The Devil’s Punchbowl has been there, apparently, since 2013, so I must surely have seen it before giving my repeated visits – but can’t remember doing so before going there yesterday. The change in the landscape here is hard to exaggerate. Before its diversion, the London-to-Portsmouth A3 road skimmed the lip of the Punchbowl: it regularly snarled up with traffic due to its constricted site. In 2011 it was rerouted to run through a mighty tunnel, avoiding the nature reserve completely. The site of the old road is now a broad path, a pebbly strip between the trees; and in the middle of it sits Portal, a great block of what else but Portland Stone all the way from Dorset, carved into enigmatic and sometimes indistinct shapes. Among those shapes a Celtic cross and a great crouching Devil can be discerned most easily. The organisation behind the sculpture was A3D, an arts initiative set up by a Hindhead resident to provide a legacy of the vast engineering project that was the A3 diversion. A team of twenty students from local schools worked with sculptor Jon Edgar to produce the sculpture, although I’m not completely clear how the various ideas were arrived at. Over the winter of 2012-13 Mr Edgar spent a lot of time outside in the snow and ice and was occasionally joined by the schoolchildren who gave the stone a thwack or two with a mallet. There was always going to be a Devil and a Cross, though the latter moved about a bit and, if I understand rightly, the whole stone was upturned at some point. It wasn’t until 2014, nearly a year after the sculpture was unveiled during a snow shower, that it was named Portal: although the artwork isn’t obviously a literal portal of any sort, the name alludes to the tunnel to which it owes its existence, and also suggests it might be the starting-point of an imaginary journey.

I am wary of representations of the Adversary, especially if they are formed in a massive block of limestone that will last for centuries. In Portal, he is trapped within the stone, but also pushes away the Cross on the stone’s other side, and I can’t put lightly aside the reason why the real Cross was put on the top of Gibbet Hill a few hundred yards away – to defuse the malign energies of the place, generated out of fear and superstition. These are not positive things. And yet the sculpture admits that the landscape is a contested place, not a site of one meaning. Its ambiguity refuses to tell a single story, and that’s an admirable decision for a memorial to make. And a memorial to a road at that!

And It's Free!

The day will come when I have something related to the fair parish of Swanvale Halt to talk about, but that day is not yet. Instead, here is news of a pleasant surprise last Thursday when I was in London checking the route of a long-planned Goth Walk scheduled to take place in August, and having tea with a friend. Between these two events I remembered that I used to go quite frequently to the free exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection in Euston which were often fun and, well, free, so I decided to go there again for the first time in years. Sure enough, there were two shows, one about plants and one about air. The first was an exploration of the human relationship with plants, and combined artefacts with art: there was a very innovative section examining the use of plants in indigenous South American cultures, their exploitation and representation by colonial powers; the weird floating thing you can see in one of the photos is a holographic weeping eye, projecting onto a spinning fan, which inevitably made me think of Orlam. The second display was even more abstract and art-based - when your subject is air, there aren't that many artefacts you can bring out. The audiovisual presentation on the social and political implications of clouds was remarkable - I hadn't anticipated how left-wing the stance of the Wellcome might be.

And the art wasn't over! Just along the street, I recalled, was the Crypt Gallery beneath Old St Pancras church, another exhibition space I've often called in on. Was anything happening there? There was indeed - a show of degree work by a group of art graduates (I'm not sure where from). I thought whoever put together the display of curved bits of cardboard in one of the niches with the caption claiming they were 'in a dialogue with the spatial dynamics of the location, encouraging the onlooker to examine their own experience of their surroundings' was pushing their luck a bit, to be honest.

Another Gothic adventure in London many years ago was my Goth Walk about wells, which visited St Chad's Place in Kings Cross, the site of a holy well with a set of pleasure gardens attached in the late 18th century. Someone on the UK holy wells group on LiberFaciorum had been there and decided that St Chad's Well did indeed survive as a dribble of water visible below a mysterious grille in the pavement. I went to find it, and sure enough, if you peer down into the grille you can see in the photo, in contrast to all the other drains in the alleyway, there is water running - albeit about twenty feet down. Could the Well indeed survive? It would be nice to think so!

Hatfield House

As it is World Goth Day, I will delay relating what happened at the Bishop's Supper in favour of this topic. which has some vaguely relevant aspects. Yesterday I visited Hatfield House with Lady Wildwood, who is, after all, one of the very first people I met in London Gothic many years ago. Her Ladyship has just finished working in the tourism and heritage sector in Hertfordshire and is now marketing director at a London arts venue, so she knows Hatfield and the other local attractions very well, while I'd never been there. It seemed surprisingly quiet for a bright late-Spring Saturday, but Lady Wildwood says this is quite common: Hatfield makes most of its money from events and hiring itself out, and visitors are so relatively unimportant that it recently closed its souvenir shop. Both house and estate are appropriately grand but I will remember some of the smaller details best: the famous portrait of Margaret Beaufort; the tapestries of the Four Seasons lined with little allegorical vignettes which were only deciphered in the last ten years; the bust of Queen Alexandra in the robes of a graduate of the Royal College of Music; Queen Elizabeth's sleeve in the Ermine Portrait.

The last stage of our visit took us round the woodland walks, as far as The Castle, a Gothick folly dating from the 1780s which is fun but, at the moment, dreadfully underused when it could so easily make a splendid holiday let a la Landmark. We'd both have stayed there quite happily!