This is a Boxworth Salad. You don’t need the receipt ‘cos you can see it; simply scrumptious and recreated last week as a Rutland Gate Salad.
To get to Rutland G I walked past Knightsbridge Barracks and mused on new buildings that incorporate former bones in their reincarnations. Are you with me, or are there too many long words? These architectural homage steep me in nostalgic despair. They remind me of what has been destroyed in the second half of the last century to make undistinguished, often indistinguishable, often red brick, buildings of no merit.
Thomas Earp’s pediment is a prime example. It adds dignity and importance to a slew of buildings that today look like council accommodation. I had to look him up as old men forget. He is a distinguished 19th century sculptor and if you have been to Charing Cross Station you will have seen his Eleanor Cross.
The ceremonial nature of the main gate is made plain by its large pediment incorporating the carved tympanum, by Thomas Earp, from the Victorian riding-school, the original oculus being filled by a clock.
A tympanum (plural, tympana; from Greek and Latin words meaning “drum”) is the semi-circular or triangular decorative wall surface over an entrance, door or window, which is bounded by a lintel and an arch. (Wikipedia, and I won’t tell you again)
Basil Spence destroyed a fine Victorian set of buildings in the 1960s leaving only the pediment to remind passers by of his vandalism.
Spence evidently did not feel that the brutalist style of the architecture clashed with the Ruritanian pageantry of the occupants. ‘I did not want this to be a mimsy-pimsy building’.
A digression but silly old Spence thought he was being imaginative stabling the horses upstairs with equine lifts and a shute for shovelling the you-know-what. The building has re-inforced concrete and that doesn’t take kindly to being drenched in horse piss.
Lutyens took a different approach as I am discovering in Jane Ridley’s biography. “He believed that art began where words left off; it was an end in itself. He wanted, quite simply, to build beautiful buildings.” Nobody can call Delhi mimsy-pimsy.
When I was first in London as a student and lived on what was seen as ‘the wrong side of the park’, ie, the north side, the rumour about the extravagance of the lift to raise horses up to the mess on the top floor was a simple one. Tradition had it that horse, or horses, had to be brought into mess dinners. Cavalry after all. And as there was an insistence that the mess had to be on the top floor, the views, the views, best in London, there had to be a means of getting the horse, or horses, up there. Impeccable logic, ludicrous extravagance.