Westminster Abbey

Westminster Abbey

We were on holiday recently in Milan, where we made a thorough exploration of the magnificent Duomo as part of seeing some of the main sights of the city. After we got home, it struck me that although we have seen many of England's great Cathedrals (Lincoln, Salisbury, Norwich, Canterbury, Hereford ...), we have never been inside Westminster Abbey. I decided that I would treat Ange to a surprise visit there.

The first Minster was completed in 1065, but most of what you see today was built 1245-1272, in the reign of Henry III, as a new shrine for the remains of Edward the Confessor. The nave was not completed until 1498 and the vaulting not until 1517. The splendid west towers (see above) were only added in 1745, by Nicholas Hawksmoor.

Our first sight of the Abbey was the North Transept, seen from Parliament Square, where demonstrators against climate change were pretty much outnumbered by the police. The North transept is the main entrance, but you have to go round to the left of the main facade to get there.

Once inside, I reached for my camera to start taking a some pics. My first one was the Queen's Window, designed (on his iPad, naturally) by David Hockney. At this point there were loud cries of "no photography" so I stopped - hence the use of scanned postcards for much of this post.

Inside there is a route to follow which leads you initially into the magnificent nave ...

... and then into the elaborate Quire and Sanctuary. In front of the High Altar is the beautiful Cosmati Pavement started in 1268 and constructed by Italian craftsmen led by a man named Odoricus (how wonderful the name of the master craftsman has been preserved until today!).

Carrying on towards the east end of the church you pass the Edward the Confessor's chapel and the north ambulatory where the tombs of a great array of kings and queens are to be found including Henry III and Henry V.

This leads into the Lady Chapel, whose construction was ordered by Henry VII. At ground level, in the nort aisle, are the tombs of Henry himself and Elizabeth I and Mary I. I was absolutely stunned by the quality of the fan vaulting, which to me seemed even more remarkable than that at St George's Chapel in Windsor or in the chapel of King's College, Cambridge.

This was magnificent, but it was quickly followed by another surprise. After a brief review of Poet's Corner, we climbed the stairs to see The Queen's Diamond Jubilee Galleries, having been give the tip off when we entered the Abbey that we should not miss it. The Galleries occupy an unusual area known as the Triforium, a space above part of both transepts and the crossing. It was floored and strengthened by Wren in the 18th century. This area now houses a wealth of interesting material. The highlight for me was an effigy of the head and shoulders Henry VII made from his death mask. It was highly lifelike and you can really what a tough and determined man he was.

Perhaps even better than the artifacts on display are the incredible views along the nave. I have never seen a nave from a vantage point near the roof: it was an incredible sight. If only to gift shop had a photo!

I did take one guerilla photo however on my way down the stairs: the Houses of Parliament just across the way.

We passed Poet's corner and admired the wonderful rose window in the South Transept.

We entered the cloister to first of all see the wonderful Chapter House, which was begin in 1250.

There were some fine medieval wall paintings on the wall on the left hand side.

A little further along the Cloister was the strangely named Pyx chamber, which, along with the Undercroft was built around 1070-80 and is therefore one of the oldest parts of the Abbey. It contained a pyx, a box containing standard pieces of gold or silver against which the coinage was tested annually.

My final picture was the rear of the West Towers taken from the a corner of the Cloister.

Conditions: cool and grey.

Rating: five stars. Simply magnificent. A major warning against ignoring wonderful sights on your own doorstep.

Chelsea

The Royal Hospital, Chelsea

We met up with our friends John and Anne to do a partial walk around Chelsea and then have an early dinner. The walk started from Sloane Square, but the first point of note was the Royal Hospital Chelsea. It was founded by Charles II in 1662 for retired soldiers on similar lines to Les Invalides in Paris (completed 1674 under Louis XIV). The architect was Sir Christopher Wren. I hadn't realised that it was open to the public, but apart from a minor grilling at the closed gate you are made very welcome.

The Hospital is an independent charity and relies partly upon donations to cover day-to-day running costs to provide care and accommodation for veterans. Any man or woman who is over the age of 65 and served as a regular soldier may apply to become a Chelsea Pensioner (i.e. a resident), if they need and  "of good character". They must not, however, have any dependents and former Officers must have served at least 12 years in the ranks before receiving a commission.

The magnificent main building is shown above. There is also a new addition off to the left, dated 2008 ...

... and a less recent one to the right.

 

The central portico is flanked by two identical wings: the one on the right is the dining hall, while that on the left is the chapel (the beautiful interior is also by Wren). The painting of the Resurrection in the half dome is by Sebastiano Ricci.

Behind the main facade is an imposing courtyard, Figure Court, open on the side nearest the Thames. In the centre is a massive statue of Charles by Grinling Gibbons. It was re-gilded in honour of the Queen's Jubilee in 2002 and now looks very golden indeed.

Looking down towards the river (the area was closed today so we couldn't get any closer), we suddenly realised that we were looking at the redevelopment of the Battersea Power Station site.

We headed along Royal Hospital Road and turned left into Tite St, passing the house where Oscar Wilde lived from 1884-95 and where, at a dinner party, he met his future lover Lord Alfred Douglas. The house is not itself very distinguished. But further down the street on the other side is a house where the great painter John Singer Sargent lived - and this has a bit more visual interest.

We turned into Swan Walk to visit the Chelsea Physic Garden (or Chelsea Psychic Garden as my son's partner thought it was called). Before entering I took a picture of this classic 1930s appartment block on Royal Hospital Road

The Chelsea Physic Garden occupies 4 acres and was established by the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries (pharmacists) in 1673. In 1722, when the Society was in financial difficulties, the Lord of the Manor of Chelsea, Sir Hans Sloane, gave the Society a perpetual lease on the site for a rent of £10 per annum (now paid to the Cadogan Estate). Sloane's statue (well actually a reproduction) stands in the centre of the garden.

The garden was an absolute delight to explore and we also had a very informative and interesting guided tour by a volunteer guide. Most of the plants are there for their pharmaceutical value and we learned that the many plans whose Latin name included officialis were so-named by Linneus to denote their medicinal properties.

Among the non-medicinal plants we enjoyed this Judas Tree in full flower ...

... and the unusual Handkerchief Tree.

We returned to the embankment and admired the Peace Pagoda on the edge of Battersea Park. It was opened in 1985 and the permission to build it was the last legislative act of the Greater London Council.

On the street side this large red brick house with swan motifs was very striking.

Now into mansion land in Cheyne Walk. Perhaps the most interesting was this one, once the home of the painter Dante Gabriel Rosetti and also the poet Algernon Swinburn. (Algernon is an ancient name which apparently drives from the Norman French aux gernons, meaning "with moustaches". You don't hear it much nowadays, do you?)

Food was calling now and we headed north towards the excellent Wright Brothers Oyster Bar near South Kensington tube. I was very taken by St Luke's church in Sydney St. It was built in the 1820s, before Gothic revival churches had to be true to medieval principles. It is very striking, but seems too narrow for its height.

Conditions: surprisingly warm and sunny.

Distance: About three miles.

From: London's Hidden Walks by Stephen Millar vol 2 (Metro Publications)

Rating: four stars.

Kensington and Holland Park

St Mary Abbots

After a recent visit to Leighton House in Holland Park I realised that I ought to explore the area. I found this walk in the excellent London's Hidden Walks 2 by Stephen Millar. The walk starts at High Street Ken tube and you exit the station bearing right to quickly come face to face with St Mary Abbots. The present church is by Sir George Gilbert Scott (1872), although there was an abbey here until the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

After crossing the road to the church I looked back to see the wonderful art deco exterior of the former Barkers department store.

The route now meander uphill to reach Hornton St where there are some magnificent houses of red brick with white stone dressings.

Continuing uphill, the route envisages a let turn to reach Holland. This was closed for some reason and anyway I had decided to detour to the north to see the Sheppard Trust's almshouses in Lansdowne Walk (numbers 3 and 14). This is number 3, surely one of the most upmarket almshouses.

I headed back to Holland Park Avenue and turned left into Abbotsbury Road where I passed this lovely Mews.

Soon after this I entered the park from the other side and reach Holland House where I rejoined the walk route. The house dates back to 1605 and was known as Cope's Castle, having been built by Sir Walter Cope. It was largely destroyed during the Second World War. Nearby is the lovely Orangery, which rather defied photography.

Exiting by Ilchester Place, the route leads to Melbury Road, where in the right is Tower House, built by William Burges in 1877. A wonderful surprise as I have always admired Burges! It was bought by the actor Richard Harris in the 1960s and later sold to Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin (who allegedly outbid David Bowie for it).

I departed from the route again here to photograph a house with wonderful windows - obviously an artist's studio - we saw on the visit to Leighton House. A blue plaque reveals that the artist in this case was Marcus Stone RA, who painted illustration for books by Dickens and Trollope. This area was an important artists' quarter in Victorian times.

Further along Melbury Road on the right was a house with wonderful terracotta panels.

I turned right and right again to reach Holland Park Road and Leighton House, looking resplendent in the sun. It was built by the painter Frederick, Lord Leighton for his own occupation and is now a museum.

The current exhibition is absolutely wonderful, as it the interior of the building. It reunites a group of painting submitted to the Royal Academy by Leighton not long before his death. The most famous of these is Flaming June which is noiw seen as Leighton's masterpiece.

It has a wonderful story. It was on loan to the Ashmolean in Oxford in the early 1900s (leightion died in 1896), but vanished for decades before being rediscovered in the early 1960s, boxed in over a chimney in a house in Battersea. The composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose own collecting helped revive serious interest in the art of the period, never forgave his grandmother for refusing to lend him £50 to buy it when he saw it soon afterwards in a shop on the Kings Road. “I will not have Victorian junk in my flat,” she told him. It was bought by a collector in Puerto Rico and now graces the art gallery there. It was something of a coup for Leighton House to secure it on loan for this exhibition.

I headed back towards Kensington, pausing to explore the new Design Museum, which has just opened and is not of course mentioned in the walk book. It occupies the former Commonwealth Institute building on the south east corner of Holland Park.

The redevelopment of the site included a couple of blocks of flats by the famous Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. They are not especially memorable.

The real glory of the Design Museum is inside where the architect and designer John Pawson who has created a wonderfully spacious interior ...

... and made the concrete tiled roof an dramatic component of the design.

I continued along the walk route which heads towards High Street Kenthen diverts off to the south past Edwardes Sq and a number of, to be honest, not very interesting streets, before returning to the main road. I did rather like the gable of St Mary Abbots Mission Hall and Infants School with its bas belief brickwork and plate of grapes.

Kensington Square contained several houses where famous people had lived, notably John Stuart Mill, and led to Derry Street with the former Derry and Toms store with more art deco decoration on the left.

Conditions: a lovely sunny day.

Distance: officially 3.2, but I probably walked about 5 miles.

Rating: five stars if you visit Leighton House and the Design Museum. The final section of the route was disappointing.

London art nouveau: A Tube-walk

Michelin House

I discovered this wonderful "walk" on the London Cycling Campaign website and decided that it would make the ideal way to spend my birthday, having re-sequenced the route and worked out a combination of underground and walking to make it work. Maybe not everybody would agree. I am heading this post with Michelin House, which was planned as the end and culmination and certainly delivered.

We started however at the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill in SE23. We had a challenging time getting there, having to resort to the dreaded "rail replacement bus", but when we arrived we knew it had not all been in vain. It was founded by Frederick John Horniman, a Victorian tea trader and philanthropist, who first used his house to exhibit his vast collection of specimens and artifacts gathered on his travels and then had the house demolished to make way for a purpose-built museum.

It was the work of Charles Harrison Townsend (1851-1928), sometimes described as an Arts and Crafts architect, but to my mind stylistically art nouveau. The Museum was the third of his three great buildings and dates from 1898-1901. Pevsner says it is "no doubt one of the boldest public buildings of its date in Britain".

The building is distinguished by the lovely mosaic designed by Robert Anning Bell, telling the story of humanity, no less. The exterior is embellished with swirling flower and tree forms, like any art nouveau building in Paris. These are at their most expressive on the tower. (The building on the left in the picture above is an extension of 1911, also by Townsend but entirely devoid of decoration.)

Round the back is this wonderful conservatory. It came originally from the Horniman family home at Coombe Cliffe in Croydon, and dates from the 1890s. It's definitely not art nouveau, but it deserves inclusion for its elegance.

We now headed to Whitechapel where we found the Whitechapel Art Gallery. This dates from 1895-99 and was also opened in 1901. Pevsner describes it as "quite an epoch-making building" and "as original as any Art Nouveau on the continent". In 2009 it was extended to incorporate the former public library next door.

At first I thought that the gold decoration on the upper third of the facade was a return to something original which had been lost, but it turns out to be the Tree of Life by Rachel Whiteread, one of the major commissions of the London 2012 Festival. This area of the facade was apparently intended to house a frieze, but the money ran out. I think it is a wonderful addition to the building and, for me, the use of gold evokes the almost exactly contemporary Vienna Secession Building.

A short walk took us to Bishopsgate to see Townsend's third celebrated building, the earliest of the three (1892-4): the Bishopsgate Institute. The same foliage patterns which were so evident in the Horniman Museum are immediately apparent. Pevsner has similar words for this one too: "one of the most original buildings of the date in London". It is not, however, as dramatic as the other two.

A tube ride to St Pauls and a short walk through old streets with modern buildings brought us to the Black Friar pub at 174 Queen Victoria Street, near Blackfriars station. It built in 1905 on the site of a Dominican friary and was designed by architect H. Fuller-Clark and decorated by the artist Henry Poole. From the outside it is a fairly typical street corner Edwardian pub - but you do wonder what happened to the street that it was on the corner of. It was of course redeveloped and it seems that the Black Friar only survived demolition after a campaign led by Sir John Betjeman.

Inside, however, there is a feast of decoration, nowhere more so than in the back bar, now table service only, where there is a simply wonderful barrel vaulted ceiling covered with mosaics and Black Friars.

Over a door in the main bar I spotted this exquisite butterfly.

From Blackfriars we took the Tube to Sloane Square and as we were heading towards Hans Road, we spotted this rather lovely tower on the right - the tower of Cadogan Hall. Surely this was about the same vintage as the art nouveau buildings on our walk? It turns out that it was built as a Christian Scientist church in 1907 to the design of Robert Fellowes Chisholm in the Byzantine Revival style. It has relatively recently become London's newest concert hall.

When we reached Hans Road we found our target, this pair of houses by Charles Francis Annesley Voysey. They are pleasing proto-modern houses, but plainly have nothing to do with art nouveau. I can't now remember how they made their way onto our route - but I am glad to have seen them nonetheless.

Certainly on the list was Harrods Food Hall across the road. The shop was built between 1894 and 1905 and the food hall was the work of W J Neatby, who was chief designer for Royal Doulton before working independently. Neatby was also responsible for the extraordinary art nouveau facade of the Edward Everard Printing works in Bristol and the Fox and Anchor in Charterhouse St, Clerkenwell. (The Fox and Anchor belongs in this walk, but we saw it last year.)

The Food Hall is pretty extraordinary - these ovals with birds caught my eye - but overall I was strangely disappointed.

We now headed along Walton Place and Walton St towards Michelin House. We were struck by the unusual facade of this church, St Saviours. Not art nouveau, but it couldn't be ignored. It turns out to be by George Basevi and dates from 1838-40.

Here is Michelin House again, now Bibendum restaurant and oyster bar. It was opened in 1909, so a bit later than most of what we have seen today, and was designed by a Michelin employee, François Espinasse. It is, too say the least, very eye-catching and no doubt this was what was intended.

It is a wonderful building and some of the tiles and ceramic details are stunning.

We naturally completed an excellent day with a meal in the Oyster Bar.

Conditions: quite bright and warm.

Distance: hard to judge.

Rating: 5 stars. A truly memorable experience.