Category: Architecture

Hammersmith News

In this recent post there are pictures of Hammersmith and Fulham College as it is today. Here is what it may become.

The Grammar of Ornament

A book first published in 1856 and still in print deserves to be called a classic. That’s The Grammar of Ornament by Owen Jones.

The Wow! Factor

When a friend saw the kitchen Alan Higgs built for me she said Wow!  I was very pleased, as was Alan, by her reaction. On Thursday I visited a building that has the Wow! Factor.

Chalfont St Giles

My outing to Gerrards Cross and Chalfont St Giles was on the hottest April day in London since 1949. Trains to GC go from Marylebone, an intimate station compared to other London termini.

On Broadway

I sometimes use St James’s Park station as a cross country route to my club. Incidentally there is grim news in Clubland. The new business rates will see clubs facing rates rising by as much as 400% and my club is reluctantly phasing in higher subscriptions.

Blythe Spirit

This is the entrance to a building used by the V&A, the Science Museum and the British Museum for storage since 1979 but, maybe, not for much longer.

Two Architects in Kensington

This is the parliament building in Wellington, New Zealand, designed by Sir Basil Spence in the 1960s; one of his better efforts. I don’t have to look far to see one of his less successful civic buildings, Kensington and Chelsea Town Hall on Phillimore Walk.

PLA

Ten Trinity Square was built around the time of WWI as the headquarters of the recently established (1908) Port of London Authority (PLA). Today it is a luxury hotel and I thought that London now is insignificant as a port but, as so often, I am wrong.

William Pickering

I have been given a bottle of port by a generous friend who found himself unable to walk past Berry Bros & Rudd without making a purchase. It is a twenty-year-old tawny labelled William Pickering – not a port house with which I am familiar.