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A house, with a door.
Sep. 20th, 2011 09:47 amA little known fact about me is that as a child I spent a few months in an orphanage run by the Modern Arts movement. My mother, bless her, didn’t have the finest memory and had a distressing tendency to forget about me on trips to the shops or the countryside. She’d load up the shopping into the car, drive it home and unpack again all the time with a slightly vacant expression on her face as she fought a nagging feeling that there was something middling important she’d forgotten – the milk or bread, perhaps – before after about twenty minutes clapping her hand onto her forehead and driving back the supermarket to collect me from where she’d left me weeping by the trolleys.
On one of these occasions she didn’t arrive back in time and I was found by the local council and popped into care at an institution founded by several members of the Bauhaus who wanted to give something back to the community. To be fair, it wasn’t a success. All the children had to use bedpans after Marcel Duschamps found out what they’d been doing to his exhibits, and every Thursday we had a group come in to help the children come to terms with being orphans through the medium of interpretive dance. The food wasn’t that great, either – six children starved to death after Kandinsky designed the canteen menu - but later we were lucky enough to get Salvador Dali in as chef and the worst that happened after that was our eggs were always bit runny.
Eventually my parents arrived to take me home. It took them a while to find the place because Rene Magritte had painted “Ceci ne pas une orphanage” on the sign, which I always thought was a bit of a cruel trick to play on unhappy and confused children.
Anyway, the result of that formative experience is that modernism in all its forms leaves me pretty much completely cold. I like pictures which look like something, music which has a tune you can whistle, and architecture which produces buildings that look nice rather than confusing jumbles of jenga-like blocks such as the South Bank centre, and it was the pursuit of buildings which look nice that took me out into London this weekend just gone for the Open House weekend.
Open House is an annual event during which civic and private buildings throughout London which are usually closed to the public throw open their doors so the slovenly oafs who clutter up the streets (such as myself) can clutter up the corridors instead, gawping at the wonders of what lies inside whilst simultaneously reminding the owners why they don’t let people like me in more often. It’s an event which grows every year and this year several hundred buildings were opened (for a full list click here) – far more than anyone could possibly see in the time – so you have to pick your itinerary with care and on Saturday morning I started my tour by leaping from my repose like an excitable gazelle and twinkling my merry way off to pall Mall, where I took a look over Marlborough House.
The Duke of Marlborough, whose house it originally was (the clue is the name), had been given oodles of land and cash by a grateful nation after sorting out the armies of Louis XIV at the battle of Blenheim in 1704 during one of those periodic disagreements which have marked relations between Britiain and her neighbouring continentals over the years. The Duke used some of his new revenues to build a large and highly impressive pile just off Pall Mall which, just to remind people of what he’d done, he decorated with a a series of paintings on pretty much every interior wall of the battle in order; so as you progress through the house you pass pictures with titles like The British army sneaks up on unsuspecting French troops, The British descend upon the French like wolves upon the fold, Ha! Take that Froggy!, and Johnny Crapaud runs like cheap paint. My favourite painting was the last one, which showed the aftermath of the battle: peasant women stripping uniforms off the bodies of dead soldiers which, the guidebook informed me, would be washed, mended, and sold back to the army for the next batch of recruits. The rest of the house is as monumental and lavishly decorated as the builders of the time could make it and it really is very impressive. I recommend it to you for next year’s event. Eventually Marlborough moved out and it became a royal palace for a while – some of the Georges lived there as did William right up until he noticed the Duke of Buckingham had a far nicer house just over the road and moved out. These days Marlborough House is the headquarters of the Commonwealth, and I was charmed by the way they’d kept most of the original fittings whilst making it fit for purpose; the old dining room is now the boardroom and the long table with places marked with the flags of dozens of nations gave me a warm feeling inside of genuine, inclusive patriotism. I really like the Commonwealth, and would like to see it do more. The presentations in the house gave me hope that it yet might.
Anyway, I couldn’t hang about – there was much to do. Scooting out of the house I made my way to Wellington’s Arch at Hyde Park Corner, which is a great monument with a fab view but not much else. I climbed up to the viewing gallery and gazed out over West London. And then I gazed some more. And then did some more gazing. To be blunt, if spending £3.90 for a jolly nice view for about ten minutes until you feel you’ve done all the gazing you can is the bag you’re into, the Wellington Arch is for you. If not, well, maybe not.
This was followed by a (very) quick turn around the Argentinian Embassy which demonstrated that Ambassadors live in fine old style but there were no Ferrero Rocher to be seen. The thing about the Argentineans was that the staff was just so genuinely friendly and welcoming and it was plain that of all the nations out there they really, really want to be friends. I liked them tremendously (indeed, I’ve never met an Argentinian I’ve disliked – it’s a reason I wanted to take a dekko at their embassy) and it’s a shame that there’s the sticking point of the Falklands which they stand precisely no chance whatsoever of getting sovereignty over until every last drop of oil has been sucked out from under them. It’s a sticking point which sours relations with otherwise lovely people.
Anyway, after a spot of lunch I (now joined by the she-David) pressed on to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on Whitehall. The thing about Whitehall is that it is, genuinely, one of the best streets in the world. You can walk down Regent Street, across Trafalgar Square and down Whitehall to Westminster and I defy pretty much any other city anywhere to match it in grandeur and sheer brilliance of architectural vision. It really is a patch of style and design unmatched by anything else I’ve ever seen as a single walk – and the Georgians and Victorians must have made a heck of a dent in Portland Bill to build it. It beggars belief that in the 1960’s a plan was seriously drawn up to bulldoze the lot and replace it with a progressive concrete office block which would have stretched the length of Whitehall and lined it with plenty of pre-stressed concrete, right angles, and no trees whatsoever. It would have looked a bit like East Berlin without the charm. I don’t know what the heck is wrong with town planners, but, like politicians, anyone who wants to become one should be automatically banned from doing so and given a job more fitting to their talents, like sweeping streets or unblocking drains. Possibly they should be punched first.
Anyway, the FCO building was saved from the bulldozers and a jolly good thing too because it is magnificent. It was built in 1865 when the British government realised it was running a third of the world and the foreign ministry was until that time based in a terraced house up the road, so someone suggested something a bit more keeping with the dignity of the office might be handy. And boy, did they do it. If you conquered the world and then gave me an unlimited budget to build something to let everyone know it, I wouldn’t stand a hope of doing better. It’s yet another imposing edifice of white Portland Stone and crammed with marble; sweeping staircases, every floor inlaid and on every corner a statue of a Victorian luminary looking stern but noble and got up like Caesar. There are still holdovers from the glory days of the Empire, with departmental names like The department of speaking loudly and slowly, The department of irritating France, and The department of are you sure this is your country? Because I reckon it looks like mine and my friend Mr. Gunboat agrees. It all made me feel totally patriotic, and I can’t see how working there could do anything other than make someone feel several inches taller and put a spring in their step. At the centre of the whole thing is the Durbar Court, a courtyard (more marble) in a mix of classical and Indian styles which gained its name when the Coronation Durbar of George V was held there and the princes of India came to get fed and drunk and generally whoop it up in fine old style at his expense. And in 2009 the after-premiere party for Twilight: Full Moon was held there, so it’s nice to know British influence on the world stage is undiminished.*
At the end of the tour I was given a questionnaire about what I thought of the Foreign Office, and one of the questions was What Did I Think The FO Should Be Doing? The multiple choice checklist of possible answers was a litany of pinko crap like fighting climate change and supporting human rights, so I crossed them all out and wrote Confound their politics, and frustrate their knavish tricks, because that’s what our diplomatic corps should be doing – and if you think different then I’m very sorry to have to break it to you like this, but you’re a moron.
And that was Saturday. I’ll write up Sunday soon, featuring a trip to the Bank of England to see the gold!
*One of the things the last government did was run down the influence of the FO, seemingly as a matter of policy. They even closed the FO language school, because obviously there’s no reason for diplomats to be taught to speak other languages. However, in what was a greater act of philistinism they also cleared out the FO library and sold off most its documents, a storehouse of over 500 years of treaties and innumerable other pieces of immense historical interest including the original 1692 charter of the State of Massachusetts and a 16th century reiteration of the treaty of Windsor (first signed in 1386) between Britain and Portugal – the oldest alliance in the world still in force. Many of them were directly sold or ended up on eBay.
And some of you still vote for that slack-jawed troupe of intellectual baboons. Shame on you.
On one of these occasions she didn’t arrive back in time and I was found by the local council and popped into care at an institution founded by several members of the Bauhaus who wanted to give something back to the community. To be fair, it wasn’t a success. All the children had to use bedpans after Marcel Duschamps found out what they’d been doing to his exhibits, and every Thursday we had a group come in to help the children come to terms with being orphans through the medium of interpretive dance. The food wasn’t that great, either – six children starved to death after Kandinsky designed the canteen menu - but later we were lucky enough to get Salvador Dali in as chef and the worst that happened after that was our eggs were always bit runny.
Eventually my parents arrived to take me home. It took them a while to find the place because Rene Magritte had painted “Ceci ne pas une orphanage” on the sign, which I always thought was a bit of a cruel trick to play on unhappy and confused children.
Anyway, the result of that formative experience is that modernism in all its forms leaves me pretty much completely cold. I like pictures which look like something, music which has a tune you can whistle, and architecture which produces buildings that look nice rather than confusing jumbles of jenga-like blocks such as the South Bank centre, and it was the pursuit of buildings which look nice that took me out into London this weekend just gone for the Open House weekend.
Open House is an annual event during which civic and private buildings throughout London which are usually closed to the public throw open their doors so the slovenly oafs who clutter up the streets (such as myself) can clutter up the corridors instead, gawping at the wonders of what lies inside whilst simultaneously reminding the owners why they don’t let people like me in more often. It’s an event which grows every year and this year several hundred buildings were opened (for a full list click here) – far more than anyone could possibly see in the time – so you have to pick your itinerary with care and on Saturday morning I started my tour by leaping from my repose like an excitable gazelle and twinkling my merry way off to pall Mall, where I took a look over Marlborough House.
The Duke of Marlborough, whose house it originally was (the clue is the name), had been given oodles of land and cash by a grateful nation after sorting out the armies of Louis XIV at the battle of Blenheim in 1704 during one of those periodic disagreements which have marked relations between Britiain and her neighbouring continentals over the years. The Duke used some of his new revenues to build a large and highly impressive pile just off Pall Mall which, just to remind people of what he’d done, he decorated with a a series of paintings on pretty much every interior wall of the battle in order; so as you progress through the house you pass pictures with titles like The British army sneaks up on unsuspecting French troops, The British descend upon the French like wolves upon the fold, Ha! Take that Froggy!, and Johnny Crapaud runs like cheap paint. My favourite painting was the last one, which showed the aftermath of the battle: peasant women stripping uniforms off the bodies of dead soldiers which, the guidebook informed me, would be washed, mended, and sold back to the army for the next batch of recruits. The rest of the house is as monumental and lavishly decorated as the builders of the time could make it and it really is very impressive. I recommend it to you for next year’s event. Eventually Marlborough moved out and it became a royal palace for a while – some of the Georges lived there as did William right up until he noticed the Duke of Buckingham had a far nicer house just over the road and moved out. These days Marlborough House is the headquarters of the Commonwealth, and I was charmed by the way they’d kept most of the original fittings whilst making it fit for purpose; the old dining room is now the boardroom and the long table with places marked with the flags of dozens of nations gave me a warm feeling inside of genuine, inclusive patriotism. I really like the Commonwealth, and would like to see it do more. The presentations in the house gave me hope that it yet might.
Anyway, I couldn’t hang about – there was much to do. Scooting out of the house I made my way to Wellington’s Arch at Hyde Park Corner, which is a great monument with a fab view but not much else. I climbed up to the viewing gallery and gazed out over West London. And then I gazed some more. And then did some more gazing. To be blunt, if spending £3.90 for a jolly nice view for about ten minutes until you feel you’ve done all the gazing you can is the bag you’re into, the Wellington Arch is for you. If not, well, maybe not.
This was followed by a (very) quick turn around the Argentinian Embassy which demonstrated that Ambassadors live in fine old style but there were no Ferrero Rocher to be seen. The thing about the Argentineans was that the staff was just so genuinely friendly and welcoming and it was plain that of all the nations out there they really, really want to be friends. I liked them tremendously (indeed, I’ve never met an Argentinian I’ve disliked – it’s a reason I wanted to take a dekko at their embassy) and it’s a shame that there’s the sticking point of the Falklands which they stand precisely no chance whatsoever of getting sovereignty over until every last drop of oil has been sucked out from under them. It’s a sticking point which sours relations with otherwise lovely people.
Anyway, after a spot of lunch I (now joined by the she-David) pressed on to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on Whitehall. The thing about Whitehall is that it is, genuinely, one of the best streets in the world. You can walk down Regent Street, across Trafalgar Square and down Whitehall to Westminster and I defy pretty much any other city anywhere to match it in grandeur and sheer brilliance of architectural vision. It really is a patch of style and design unmatched by anything else I’ve ever seen as a single walk – and the Georgians and Victorians must have made a heck of a dent in Portland Bill to build it. It beggars belief that in the 1960’s a plan was seriously drawn up to bulldoze the lot and replace it with a progressive concrete office block which would have stretched the length of Whitehall and lined it with plenty of pre-stressed concrete, right angles, and no trees whatsoever. It would have looked a bit like East Berlin without the charm. I don’t know what the heck is wrong with town planners, but, like politicians, anyone who wants to become one should be automatically banned from doing so and given a job more fitting to their talents, like sweeping streets or unblocking drains. Possibly they should be punched first.
Anyway, the FCO building was saved from the bulldozers and a jolly good thing too because it is magnificent. It was built in 1865 when the British government realised it was running a third of the world and the foreign ministry was until that time based in a terraced house up the road, so someone suggested something a bit more keeping with the dignity of the office might be handy. And boy, did they do it. If you conquered the world and then gave me an unlimited budget to build something to let everyone know it, I wouldn’t stand a hope of doing better. It’s yet another imposing edifice of white Portland Stone and crammed with marble; sweeping staircases, every floor inlaid and on every corner a statue of a Victorian luminary looking stern but noble and got up like Caesar. There are still holdovers from the glory days of the Empire, with departmental names like The department of speaking loudly and slowly, The department of irritating France, and The department of are you sure this is your country? Because I reckon it looks like mine and my friend Mr. Gunboat agrees. It all made me feel totally patriotic, and I can’t see how working there could do anything other than make someone feel several inches taller and put a spring in their step. At the centre of the whole thing is the Durbar Court, a courtyard (more marble) in a mix of classical and Indian styles which gained its name when the Coronation Durbar of George V was held there and the princes of India came to get fed and drunk and generally whoop it up in fine old style at his expense. And in 2009 the after-premiere party for Twilight: Full Moon was held there, so it’s nice to know British influence on the world stage is undiminished.*
At the end of the tour I was given a questionnaire about what I thought of the Foreign Office, and one of the questions was What Did I Think The FO Should Be Doing? The multiple choice checklist of possible answers was a litany of pinko crap like fighting climate change and supporting human rights, so I crossed them all out and wrote Confound their politics, and frustrate their knavish tricks, because that’s what our diplomatic corps should be doing – and if you think different then I’m very sorry to have to break it to you like this, but you’re a moron.
And that was Saturday. I’ll write up Sunday soon, featuring a trip to the Bank of England to see the gold!
*One of the things the last government did was run down the influence of the FO, seemingly as a matter of policy. They even closed the FO language school, because obviously there’s no reason for diplomats to be taught to speak other languages. However, in what was a greater act of philistinism they also cleared out the FO library and sold off most its documents, a storehouse of over 500 years of treaties and innumerable other pieces of immense historical interest including the original 1692 charter of the State of Massachusetts and a 16th century reiteration of the treaty of Windsor (first signed in 1386) between Britain and Portugal – the oldest alliance in the world still in force. Many of them were directly sold or ended up on eBay.
And some of you still vote for that slack-jawed troupe of intellectual baboons. Shame on you.
