Tag Archives: Architecture

Fanciful February Flotsam

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Some notes on three recent topics which I did not deem worthy of full-length articles in their own right:

Andrew’s Arrest

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was yesterday arrested at his home on the Sandringham estate and taken for police questioning, being released later the same day. He is suspected of misconduct in public office.

The King put out a statement acknowledging the situation and essentially declaring that he would not interfere with the process of law. Of course, even if Charles is going to personally recuse himself, his position as incumbent sovereign means that his name will be frequently invoked during any legal proceedings, as any prosecution would formally be “The King against…” (written as “R -v-…”), the barristers arguing for both for and against Andrew would likely be King’s Counsel and if the former prince is incarcerated it would be in one of His Majesty’s Prisons, “at His Majesty’s Pleasure”. Also, of course, the royal arms will be used on a great many letterheads in the process.

Something similar happened with the Duke of Sussex’s lawsuits regarding his security provision: As a judicial review case it was formally “The King on the application of…” and the defendant was one His Majesty’s Principal Secretary’s of State. The case was, furthermore, heard in The King’s Bench Division. As reported in The Telegraph, this was

the infelicitous situation where the King’s son is suing the King’s ministers in the King’s courts. That is pulling the King in three directions.

The government is also apparently considering legislation to remove Andrew from the line of succession to the throne. Given that he is now eighth in line with the first seven all being at least twenty-three years younger than him, the effect of this will be more symbolic than practical. The need to coordinate any legal changes with the governments of the other Commonwealth Realms add further political friction. There have also been calls to formally remove his eligibility to serve as a Counsellor of State. His removal from the line of succession would do this automatically, but otherwise it could be done by a relatively simple Act of Parliament. This status only applies to Britain so the other Realms would not need to be consulted.

A principle that has been invoked many times during these events is that “No-one is above the law.” while it doesn’t help his brother, the phrase is not strictly true: The King himself is immune to arrest in all cases due to the principle of sovereign immunity which applies to varying degrees to lots of heads of state both monarchical and republican.

Bishopric Gets Bishop Rick

Yes, I am including this one solely for the pun. Richard “Rick” Simpson has been announced as the next Bishop of Durham. The diocesan office, one of the five ost senior bishops in the Church of England, has been vacant for nearly two years since the retirement of Paul Butler. In the interim the role has been delegated to Sarah Clark, Suffragan Bishop of Jarrow, who herself was recently chosen to become the next Diocesan Bishop of Ely. It should also be noted that Sarah Mullally, having had her election confirmed on 28th January, took her seat in the House of Lords two weeks ago, but will still not be installed at Canterbury Cathedral for another month.

Chagos Chaos

Donald Trump has flip-flopped yet again on the British agreement with Mauritius to cede sovereignty of the Chagos Islands. Recently a group of four Chagossians, led by Misley Mandarin, staged a landing on the islands themselves in protest at the attempted handover. The British government ordered their eviction but that has been temporarily blocked by a court order. There has been yet another “pause” of the passage of the relevant legislation through the House of Lords where scrutiny has been very strenuous and embarrassing for the executive.

More Publications, More Podcasts

Dominic Sandbrook, whom I count among the notable people with whom I’ve communicated, is mostly famous now as the co-host of The Rest is History, an enormously successful podcast. He has recently launched another podcast, The Book Club, which he co-hosts with Tabitha Syrett. Their first episode is on Wuthering Heights. Having not read it yet, I must try very hard to avoid repeating lines from the climax of Peep Show episode 39, clips of which I now very frustratingly cannot find. Twenty-five minutes in there is a discussion of the poems and songs in The Lord of the Rings, with Syrett saying she skips over them and Sandbrook saying they’re the best bit. When I read the trilogy aloud to my mother in 2020-21 I included all of them, turning to amateur channels such as Clamavi de Profundis for musical guidance. I have learned a great many of them by heart and practice them while walking the dog along the river bank.

Sandbrook’s idea for a podcast based on books is, of course, far from original. I have already blogged about two different book-related podcasts in the last few years and searching BBC Sounds for “book club” reveals quite a long list. The idea that literacy is essential to civilisation, and that the widely-recorded decline in reading over recent years represents a serious threat thereto, is gaining traction in intellectual circles. Times columnist James Marriott, whom I’ve had on my directory page since last summer, is fast emerging as the the leader of the movement. His own book, The New Dark Ages, is already gaining critical acclaim despite the fact that it isn’t due to be published for another few months.

Secretarial Succession

Dame Antonia Romeo has indeed been appointed Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service, a few days after the resignation of Sir Mark Wormald. Allegations against her have apparently failed to amount to anything.

Westminster Woes

Political power-couple Richard Marc Johnson and Lee David Evans, speaking on their own podcast (yes, yet another one), discuss the state of the Palace of Westminster (as I brought up last week). They also concur with the idea of putting Charles III in charge on the grounds that the royal family clearly has a much stronger track record with this than MPs, peers and civil servants do.

Review: Discovering Watermills by John Vince

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At eighty pence and eighty pages, this is among the lightest book purchases I have made in the past few years. I picked it up from the Dovehouse Hospice shop in Hedon two weeks ago. An inscription on the title page indicates it was previously owned by a J. Richardson. Little explanation is required for the topic of the book. Vince recounts, in a very compact format, the emergence of the practice of grinding grains for food, from the prehistoric world to the ancient, then medieval, then modern, from hand tools to human-powered wheels to the titular watermills and the various substances — including copper, paper, snuff and lead, which were extracted or refined with their aid. There follows a similarly-compressed explanation of the materials and construction techniques — the different ways in which the pins, braces and clasps can be arranged, as well as the financial considerations involved in switching from wood to cast iron (or some hybrid arrangement) in the eighteenth century. After that came an explanation of how the mill apparatus actually works; not just the internal interaction of all the cogs and pulleys, but also the way the external landscape has to be manipulated to direct the water to the mill. The main piece of information that I picked up from here is the distinction between an undershot wheel where the water pushes along the bottom and an overshot wheel where it pushes along the top. There were also two warnings, perhaps slightly contradictory, about mills left unattended: A waterwheel left locked into a stationary state can suffer rotting in its lower half which results in the whole construction disintegrating over time, yet a wheel left unlocked is liable to spin too quickly under heavy wind or rain so that the dry components inside fly apart or even catch fire. This part of the book was accompanied by mechanical diagrams as well as a brief table of statistics about the machines’ power, speed and output.

All that I have just described was concluded on page 20. The rest of the book, apart from the index and a few pages of photographs (on glossier paper but still monochrome), was a list of “some notable watermills” (with “some” here meaning many dozens) in the United Kingdom. Each had a short paragraph about its history, construction, operation, current ownership and opening times. Since this edition was published in 1987 I don’t imagine much of what was written in that chapter is still true. I would be minded nowadays to look these places up on the internet before dialling any of the telephone numbers Vince has given. What struck me most about this section is that, among all the counties of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (and even the Isle of Man) that were documented there was no mention of East Yorkshire, whether under that name or as “Humberside”. If there aren’t any, surely that itself is worthy of mention? I can only infer that none of our mills met Vince’s standard of notability!

It’s The Dunn Thing

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Today I noticed that BBC Four has started airing the documentary series The Architecture the Railways Built, presented by historian Tim Dunn, and put the whole first season on iPlayer. This series was originally made five years ago for Yesterday, a UKTV channel technically owned by BBC Studios but run more like the commercial stations. This series was already watchable on UKTV’s own catch-up website and repackaged on at least two different licensed YouTube channels, but the lack of advertisements and all-around superior functionality of the BBC’s service will make iPlayer my preferred platform. This makes for a rare case of televisual upcycling in a partnership where downcycling is the norm, the most obvious locomotion-related example being Michael Portillo’s many Great Railway Journeys programs.

Each episode of TATRB is forty-five minutes long and typically covers three locations, two in the United Kingdom and one abroad. No obvious connection is made between the three, so I’ve often been left feeling that it would be better if the three locations chosen were grouped by geographic region, architectural style or railway feature. Alternatively, they could be split up so that each location had a fifteen-minute episode to itself.

In addition to broadcast television, Dunn has made regular appearances in railway-related online channels, including several times presenting Sudrian pseudohistorical lectures hosted by the Talyllyn Railway.

Art Deco – Building Style of the 1920s and ’30s

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Rachael Unsworth in profile

For my first virtual lecture of 2025 I joined Leeds City Walking Tours, though obviously on this occasion I walked very little.

The presentation was by author and geographer Dr Rachael Unsworth, and it focused on the Art Deco architectural style of the interbellum period.

Art Deco was dubbed some some as the most glamorous style of the 20th century. It stood in stark contrast to the misery and gloom of the First World War. It had its antecendents in both the Beaux Arts and Bauhaus movements – the latter, Unsworth notes, has proven extremely influential on other artistic and architectural movements ever since despite not being very long-lived in its own right.

The Art Deco movement is traditionally traced back to the 1925 Paris Exposition, though the actual term “Art Deco” is a retronym not properly established until the 1960s. It overlapped with Modernism and was notable for sticking to some of the established rules of the preceding Classical period (especially regarding the overall shape of a building) while radically changing its ideas about materials and ornamentation. The decorative flourishes of this fashion focused on bold geometric shapes and the Greek Key symbol (of which Unsworth pointed out a few examples). It also saw the widespread adoption of Portland Stone, steel frames, reinforced concrete, “Crittal windows”, chrome fittings, vitrolite and fluorescent lights.

Dr Unsworth listed some of the “architectural lynchpins” of Art Deco – Charles Reilly, Robert Atkinson, Thomas S. Tait, Howard Morley Robinson – then some rapid-fire examples of the Art Deco buildings themselves. As you would expect from the name of her organisation, these were mostly focused on Leeds.

Particular attention was given to the university, where she brought up the anecdote of the Parkinson Building which was faced with Portland Stone at the front but ordinary brick at the lesser-seen back, because the latter was 4% cheaper. There were also some examples closer to (my) home, such as the Dorothy Perkins building in central Hull.

Unsworth closed out by noting the paradox of Art Deco – it was used as a component of national identity in some countries but stood for internationalism in others. It also stood for peace and democracy at the same time as standing for the power of dictatorships. The League of Nations headquarters in Geneva had the same aesthetics as the Reich Chancellery in Berlin.

She had hinted at the start of the lecture that this topic had particular salience at the moment. I had no idea what she meant.

FURTHER READING

Art Deco style is popular again, a century after its heyday – Associated Press

Armory and Architecture

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This evening I attended a virtual lecture at Arts University Bournemouth. The presenter was David Lund and the subject was the history of architectural model-making, particularly that of John Brown Thorp.

Modelling is an invisible profession to most people as the model-makers are largely executing the ideas of architects, who thus take all the credit for the design. British model-making kicked off in the late sixteenth century with the arrival of trends from Italy. The earliest record is of a 1567 model of Longleat House, made for Sir John Finn. Sir Christopher Wren would go on to commission architectural miniatures on a regular basis.

Originally timber was favoured for model-building, but card proved to be more adaptable. Thorp is considered the grandfather of architectural model-making. He had his headquarters near to the Inns of Court, and his extremely-detailed scale models were used in court cases. By 1940 his firm was employing forty other modellers. The emergence of modelling as a dedicated profession allowed an increase in the size and standards of their creations.

Modelling boomed in the 1950s and ’60s, with the material fashions of the models changing in line with those of the buildings themselves – card representing brick was replaced by perspex representing glass and steel. The economic slump of the 1970s caused a change in clientele, with modellers working for private developers instead of state architects. Nowadays it is common for models to be designed on computers and then 3D-printed, incorporating lighting and even animation.

In the Q&A session, Lund was asked about the phenomenon of public disappointment when a finished construction fails to live up to what the model promised. Lund conceded that models and artistic renderings often gave a sanitised, optimistic prediction of the built environment, replete with happy people and clean surfaces, whereas the reality (especially in modernist constructions) proved quite different. Developers and the public often unfairly blame the artists and modellers for this, even though they are only following what the developers tell them to do.

On an entirely unrelated note, late last night I discovered that Sir Lindsay Hoyle, Speaker of the House of Commons since 2019, has finally been granted a coat of arms. I was relieved to come across this news at all, yet also a little perplexed to realise that the news articles were from almost a month ago. I don’t know how I missed this, given that I have been obsessively looking out for this ever since his election. The not-so-grand reveal came at the unveiling of a new set of stained-glass windows in the Palace of Westminster, the other panels of which were decorated with the arms of British Overseas Territories.

None of the news articles I have uncovered so far gave the blazon for the new achievement, so my illustration for Wikimedia Commons is based on visual inspection of the artwork in the photograph. It indeed includes the red rose of Lancaster, “busy bee” and rugby references as Sir Lindsay hinted two years ago. The use of the parliamentary mace Or on a fess conjoined to a bordure Vert is almost certainly copied from the arms of Sir Harry Hylton-Foster, who became speaker sixty years before Hoyle did – though one has to hope that Hoyle does not end his tenure quite so abruptly. The window shows mantling Gules and Argent (rather than Vert to match the shield), so I have copied that. It is not clear exactly when the grant was made, nor whether the grant was to Sir Lindsay himself or to his noble father (the mace makes the latter seem unlikely).

The search for other new grants continues. Last month I got a pretty strong hint about the arms of Lady Amos, but those of Sir Tony Blair remain as elusive as ever.

Link

Today’s virtual event was by the Foundation for Integrated Transport, and its content is adequately explained by the title.

“Car dependency” is a term used in the urban planning community to mean the inability of a resident (or visitor) to move around a settlement without the use of a personal motorcar. It is often cited as a defining (and damning) feature of suburban environments, particularly in the United States following the Second World War. As their name implies, urban planners (and urbanists more generally), tend to focus their attention on cities and dense conurbations, with comparisons made to the suburbs. Smaller towns and rural environments are often overlooked, hence the theme of today’s seminar.

Though interested in the premise, I was a little disappointed by the format – although the participants spoke to each other over Zoom, the guest attendees were made to watch it through YouTube, so other than the chatbox (only available to those who had YouTube accounts) there was no meaningful interaction with the hosts.