The St Pancras Renaissance Hotel was originally the Midland Grand Hotel designed by Sir Gilbert Scott in 1865. Did Sir Gilbert think he’d done enough that year?
It’s easy to take something you see every day for granted. I have lived in Barons Court since 1976, continuously since 1984, and have taken the station for granted, but it has many special features making it one of the most distinctive stations on the underground.
The brutalist 1960s Economist tower is losing its eponymous tenant, The Economist, and being given an internal make-over. Externally it will look the same as it’s grade II* listed. It was a bold choice fifty years ago and attracted the opprobrium of many denizens of St James’s.
Don’t think that I rant about all modern architecture. There is a lot of good stuff on my doorstep. Hammersmith Broadway and the flyover are not a good setting for anything but there are three interesting buildings which overcome their awkward positions.
I had a little rant about some modern architecture in July 2015 which I expect you’ve forgotten by now; I almost have, as Queen Elizabeth I said about something different. I refreshed my memory by re-reading Athens, 1931.
Friends invited me today to the Hindu temple in Neasden, as they thought it would interest me and it did. The building, opened in 1995, has intricate carving in stone and wood and an elaborate archway, above.
There are some unfathomable mysteries in life. One is why John Betjeman called his teddy bear Archibald Ormsby-Gore. He took Archie with him to Oxford and Archie appears in Brideshead Revisited as Sebastian Flyte’s teddy, Aloysius.
I had supposed that the Church of England is busy selling off vicarages and closing churches. Now I have found a new church, opened on St Anne’s Day in July 1991 and it has a link to a mountainous Mediterranean island.