It's Always More Complicated

Yesterday partner and I went on an excursion to Rochester, as partner wanted to visit the cathedral and the castle, and I thought it would make a nice little trip - two trains an hour from St Pancras International. Also, it is not presently in the throes of having either of its twice-yearly Dickens Festivals, although there are quite a lot of manifestations of Charles D associations, from cafes called e.g. Tiny Tim's to plaques on buildings declaring that they are the originals of [some building in one or other of the novels].

The castle is Norman and there is quite a lot of it still standing. Realised that these days I am not so spritely about manouevring around rough-hewn spiral staircases and did not ascend all the way to the top of the tower. Apparently it is where Henry VIII met Anne of Cleves on her arrival in England (dooooomed! doooomed!). There were notices all over about the corpses of pigeons - these are preyed on by crows, the crows are a protected species, tough, pidges.

The cathedral is second oldest in England and has seen a lot of history, not to mention The Reformation, the Civil War and Commonwealth, Victorian church restoration, etc. There are some v kitsch early C19th funerary monuments. The crypt is v modernised and has a caff, a chapel to St Ithamar, first Saxon bishop of Rochester, and an exhibition of medieval manuscripts from the cathedral library (that survived the Henrician Reformation).

The high street is well worth strolling along, quite a number of picturesque ancient edifices, including Eastgate House and the Six Poor Travellers House.

I don't often remember much about my dreams these days - odd scenes or images - but last night I had quite a long one and though I don't remember all the details it sticks in my mind after waking.

Mostly perhaps because it is Return of That Dream, which is perhaps not a Recurrent Dream as such, as the specific details are never the same, but the as it were narrative trope of it is very similar.

I.e. I am somewhere, and I go out of a room or a space or a building for some temporary purpose and then when I go back I cannot find it or at least the way in is no longer there.

So last night I was in a church or a place set up for a church service with my mother (and I think other family members? or some other people). Waiting for the service to begin, I went out at the back for some reason, into a space which was not like the vestry/church hall/Sunday school rooms of the church of my youth, which have been wont to figure in dream-space, but somewhere which was a vague combination of a hotel/conference centre with people going about and rooms with different things going on and several floors and a lift.

I got into the lift at one point but realised I didn't want the floor it was going to.

There was also a bookshop, or more like a book-space, in the middle of the floor.

And as I was going about trying to find the way back in, with time ticking on, I was saying that this was just like that dream of mine.

Not sure I ever did get back - at one point I found myself outside whatever the building was in a space that felt a bit desolate and dangerous.

A busy day of seeing the sights (we are having a few days in Belgium).

(Wot is this minimalist thing with hotels that means there is never enough anywhere to put things? sigh)

First thing we went to look at some architecture near the station (turn of the century houses, v eclectic, from faux-Renaissance to Art Nouveau via various divagations): although all the weather forecasts I'd looked at said it was going to be warm and sunny all day it was in fact raining and a bit chilly, though brightened up eventually.

Then Rubens' House - chokker, including parties of quite small schoolkids, WTF, but at least there was not much in the way of Symbolickal Nekkid Ladybits on show among the plethora of artworks.

After lunch to the Plantin-Moretus Museum, which has quite a lot to offer via family which was MAJOR in printing in Antwerp for several centuries and did very well out of it, while advancing the state of the art of printing, knowledge, keeping in with the government, the Church, etc.

Also did the Cathedral, in which some items from the currently closed for refit Museum of Fine Arts are displayed - also has two Rubens altarpieces. There was also a set of carved 12 apostles + 12 female figures, alas and sigh, representing abstract concepts.

By the time we were done there it was coming up the time cultural sites were about to close, and we were ready to put our feet up.

ETA Felt I'd left something out: the Maagdenhuis Museum in the former girls' orphanage: which, compared to the Foundling Museum, is a bit less memorable, even if a lot older.

The Ponceyness Police wish to speak to Philip Hoare and give him a warning:

Lying on the pavement, it stared up at me, reproachfully, out of the late December morning. A perfect starling, its eyes still wide open as if at the shock of its death. So ordinary a bird, so utterly beautiful, a mosaic of shimmering iridescent green flashes on its wings, claws and beak sharp and gothic. It's a common, almost ignored component of the winter landscape, swooping in vast numbers in its twilight murmurations, but seen singly, in close-up detail, an exquisite corpse. It was already a ghost of itself.

Like all dead animals, it spoke of its own beauty, dumb yet eloquent. It seemed a dark emissary of these few days' grace, caught in the wavering light between the end and the beginning of the years.

Dept of, You don't say: Tax exemption for public access to treasured artworks is 'a racket'.

Dept of, Save Our Heritage more generally: East Anglian rood screens decaying as churches struggle for funds and threat to St Pancras Old Church (featured among my 100 London Things).

Dept of Race Matters: Britain's black power movement is at risk of being forgotten, say historians and How a Kenyan upbringing helped Njambi McGrath become a standup.

Dept of, Revisionism doesn't mean just inverting villain/victim: Kathryn Hughes on new book on the Ruskin marriage.

Dept of, Revisionism should mean It's All More Complicated: Amanda Vickery on new book on the impact of the Industrial Revolution.

Let's have another graveyard! This one has extra, added glooooooom with a certified Thomas Hardy connection!

Old St Pancras Churchyard (opened as public gardens in 1877).

Attached to The Oldest Church in London, though so massively restored in the Victorian era that I doubt one would initially surmise its Roman origins without going in and spotting the C6th altar.

It has numerous graves and memorials to the great and the good, not to mention being the Romantic trysting spot for PB Shelley and Mary W Godwin, though according to the Wikipedia article Mary Wollstonecraft's remains are not actually under the funerary memorial. But 'courting at her mother's grave' sounds so much better, right?

But to return to Thomas Hardy. The new railway and its terminal station impinged upon the then churchyard, necessitating removing the gravestones and exhuming the interred, a task which fell to a young architect's assistant, to whom the cluster of relocated tombstones around an ash tree is attributed. This inspired his poem, The Levelled Churchyard
"O passenger, pray list and catch
Our sighs and piteous groans,
Half stifled in this jumbled patch
Of wrenched memorial stones!

"We late-lamented, resting here,
Are mixed to human jam,
And each to each exclaims in fear,
'I know not which I am!'

"The wicked people have annexed
The verses on the good;
A roaring drunkard sports the text
Teetotal Tommy should!

"Where we are huddled none can trace,
And if our names remain,
They pave some path or p-ing place
Where we have never lain!

"There's not a modest maiden elf
But dreads the final Trumpet,
Lest half of her should rise herself,
And half some local strumpet!

"From restorations of Thy fane,
From smoothings of Thy sward,
From zealous Churchmen's pick and plane
Deliver us O Lord! Amen!"

Also buried there, Sir John Soane, whose tomb is said to have inspired the old red telephone box design, and Baroness Burdett-Coutts.

Oft, I know, my dearios, I have been dismissive about the Euston Road as a somewhat uninspiring thoroughfare. My excuse is that I have been working on the same block of the Euston Road, on and off, north side, south side, for over 40 years and mayhap am somewhat jaded about its actual awesomeness.

I will concede that much of the awesomeness is limited to the eastern stretch, King's Cross to Warren Street, and that furthermore, quite a lot of this is of fairly recent date (o my, the changes I have seen o'er the years).

But, still:

Mysterious Kings Cross Lighthouse!

Refurbished Kings Cross Station.

St Pancras Station frontage - Midland Grand Hotel, G G Scott - has never not been awesome. Because who does not love a Gothic Revival railway hotel? (breathes there a man with soul so dead?)

The British Library, which is only not awesome if you are some kind of nostalgia-freak who never actually had to do serious research when it was in Great Russell St, srsly, but has misty visions of the Round Room (never, ever, the North Gallery, hiss, spit).

Camden Town Hall, formerly St Pancras Town Hall, is a 1930s neoclassical revival edifice and thus not the building within which George Bernard Shaw campaigned for public loos for ladies (when a St Pancras Vestryman). It now houses the St Pancras branch of Camden Libraries, but I still mourn the amazing former (not old, I think it was 1960s) dedicated library building (now a hotel) with its really serious reference department. But the Shaw Theatre at least survives.

The Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital, founded by the eponymous pioneer woman doctor, by women, for women, now forms part of the UNISON building (its clinical functions having been taken over by University College Hospital) and there is a gallery and exhibition on the site.

St Pancras (New) Church.

The fire station is Arts and Crafts, go figure.

Euston Station was redeveloped during an indifferent period for station design, and the famous Arch was broken up and dispersed to much fury and proposals to restore to its former glory.

Friends House.

The Royal College of General Practitioners has recently moved into the rather grim building, formerly a Social Security Office, on the north side, just west of Euston station.

Another 1930s neoclassical revival edifice, the Wellcome Building, is now rather overshadowed by the post-modernist glass palace that is the Gibbs Building, but both are parts of the Wellcome Trust.

I have never worked out what, exactly, that mirror-tiled building on the north side is, but it's been there for decades.

(The new) University College Hospital.

I find Warren Street Station rather an interesting building.

I am less prepossessed by the massive development on the north side of Regent Place and Triton Square, which seems to be corporate HQs and branches of Starbucks and other chains, but it does have this, plonked outside the characterless Santander building:
Marble Frieze of the Battle of St Vincent.

Let's go South of the River, and, the better the day, the better the deed, have another religious edifice, Southwark Cathedral (Cathedral and Collegiate Church of St Saviour and St Mary Overie). As a cathedral it is a relatively new creation (1905), but the church has been there for much, much, longer. Like the previously mentioned St Paul's Covent Garden, it has significant thespian connections.

It also has the Mohegan Memorial, outside, overshadowed by a railway bridge.

There is an elaborate C17th memorial to a man called Lockyer, claiming that it is his PILLS (caps in original) which will make his name immortal and not this stone. And we think inappropriate advertising is a new thing.

Of the various bishops of Southwark, we consider that Mervyn Stockwood is probably the Most Likely to Feature in a Susan Howatch Novel.

Fascinating Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Life of the Day: Sara Losh: '(bap. 1786, d. 1853), architect'.

How cool was she? Very cool indeed.

Sara and her sister, Katherine (1788–1835), inherited their father's estate equally, and on Katherine's death Sara succeeded to the whole substantial estate, including the Walker alkali works managed by her uncle William. The sisters were very close, and Sara—who was quieter and more studious than Katherine—was deeply affected by her sister's death. Neither ever married, though one of them may have been romantically attached to a schoolfellow, Major Thain, killed in the Khyber Pass by a poisoned arrow in 1842, and commemorated by Sara in a pine cone vigorously carved on a large irregular shaped slab in the churchyard.
....
She read widely and deeply, mixed with the intellectual élite of the north, spoke French and Italian fluently, and could translate Latin extempore. Lonsdale says, ‘Her intellect … almost approached in power that of my friend “George Eliot”’ (Lonsdale, 215).

Losh would not have described herself as an architect. Apart from restoring the south front of Woodside (mostly dem.) she did not start building until 1828, and most of her eighteen architectural projects, from simple wells to village schools, were built in Wreay at her own expense. All her early designs were copies of what she had seen in her travels or studied in Britain.
....
But her masterpiece, St Mary's Church, Wreay, was astoundingly original.

In 1840 Losh offered to donate a site and pay for replacing the dilapidated Wreay chapel ‘on condition that I should be left unrestricted as to the mode of building it’.... [W]hatever her sources, the finished building has a total coherence and affecting simplicity. Losh aimed to reproduce an early Christian basilica. The aisleless nave opens into a semicircular colonnaded apse forming thirteen seats, with the altar (Italian marble supported by brass eagles) on the chord. She designed the prolific, vigorously expressive decoration, inside and out; the local builder's son William Hindson jun. executed the stone carving, and the wood-carving was by her gardener. Sara and her cousin William themselves carved the alabaster font. The profusion of naturalistic ornament (including a snake and crocodile as gargoyles) is best explained as an attempt to express a pantheistic celebration of creation.... There is no distinctive Christian symbolism, not even a cross, but the vitality of the carvings and the use of natural forms reflects the cycle of death, rebirth, and eternity. In addition Losh deploys her own symbolism and draws on fossil forms studied in the new science of geology.

Here comes the really obvious - the Doge's Palace, bits of St Mark's, the Grand Canal

( Under the cut )

Went to a private view of an art show in a converted church at the weekend. Was not massively impressed by the artworks on show and was, in fact, tempted to do the Stephen Potter Lifemanship thing of exclaiming and oohing and aahing over something quite irrelevant to the actual display - in this case, a rather fetching harmonium presumably left over from its consecrated days.

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It is a curious thing, that although I have long got used to taking the transparent lift up to a usual level, taking it to yet higher levels activates, at least to a mild degree, my heights-phobic-reaction.

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While I concur that people who interact with the public should be of a welcoming demeanour (there is a certain national repository which is notorious far and wide for its surly desk staff), is this actually more important than being able to help people with their effective knowingz? (and also, not to give out misleading info.)

Too much emphasis on happy smiling faces makes me think of that ghastly experience of ringing up somewhere to complain and getting someone who is gushingly polite and concerned* but completely incapable of doing anything that might, actually, you know, *FIX* the issue.

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ETA: Notification of an alleged tax refund ('click here!') via email from, I kid you not, phishng@hmrc.gsi.gov.uk.

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*And you just know that they have a script for this in front of them.