Saturday 15 February 2014

Georgian Valentine's Ball at The British Library
Valentine's Day 2014
with
The British Library, Edmonds and Gerrish, Peyton & Byrne, The Georgian Group and The Young Georgians


2014 is the Tercentenary of the Hanoverian Succession and the Georgians, a peoples who shaped so much of what we treasure so many years later. This is a bumper year for all things Georgian!!

Sophie Edmonds and I arrived at the Library armed with a dozen full Georgian costumes, umpteen bunches of flowers, petals, silverware, table centrepieces and all the other trappings of a party…all to sort out in under two hours! I always think the adrenalin rush from not having quite enough time to do something makes doing that thing well even more of a thrill, and I hope people enjoyed the Ball, hosted by us, The British Library, Peyton & Byrne and in conjunction with The Georgian Group and The Young Georgians. 


Drinks commenced by The King's Library and there guests drank Eighteenth-Century-style cocktails and were serenaded by music by Mozart, Haydn, Vivaldi and more.
From The King's Library guests were beckoned to the Ballroom by the Master of Ceremonies resplendent in his L'Ordre du Saint-Esprit.



Miss Zuleika Parkin and The Master of Ceremonies

Air on the G String…music for Valentine's Eve

The Ballroom was adorned in flowers, red and gold and, after guests had sat, the parade of the Pig's Head to herald dinner being served.



Homage to Lady Hamilton

Guests dined on three huge hog roasts, expertly cooked by Peyton & Byrne. During dinner there were tableau, poetry, ballet and opera…this was me singing from the balcony hoping not to put people off their food!











Quadrilles commenced and people forgot the threat of indigestion and danced with much gusto and energy! Outside the Ballroom, by The King's Library, the Georgian Speed Dating began. This was interesting to see and more so to take part in; one poor chap was put on the spot as a finely dressed diamond festooned lady enquired as to the length of his drive, as she had heard he had a large acreage, and would it be too rough for her to ride down…!!

During all of this a great Meringue Dome arrived in the Ballroom to sustain the revellers.



Speed Dating


All in all the Ball was a marvellously fun start to this momentous year, and there is much more to come from us at The Georgian Group and The Young Georgians!





The Gorgeous Georgians!!





Sunday 9 February 2014


The Georgian Group 
Architectural Awards
2013

Part Two


The variety of buildings entered for the Awards was, as in the past, huge and vibrant. I visited a handful of the entries, mostly those in London, near to London and in my home county, Derbyshire.

Bentley Priory is one of a small group of surviving grand country houses on the periphery of London. It is dramatically situated and looks across at my alma mater, Harrow School. 


The building has elements by Sir John Soane, most of which have been drowned in a grand Italianate veneer. The restoration of Bentley and the creation of the Battle of Britain Museum and shrine to Lord Dowding has been exemplary; Soane's entrance hall is back to its colourful best, lanterns restored, cornices recreated and intricate verandas installed on the garden front.

Soane's newly restored entrance Hall at Bentley

Robert Bargery (Secretary of The Georgian Group) and I were at Bentley for the opening of the museum by HRH The Prince of wales.

HRH The Prince of Wales and Robert Bargery

Oliver Pepys of Spink & Son and Oliver Gerrish at Bentley Priory

After the country grandeur of Benley Priory it was interesting to see a private house in Aubrey Row, Holland Park, were a nondescript garage had been rebuilt as a Soanian lodge and an extraordinary miniature room in the style of the great architect in the link beside. This sort of project, and the imagination required, were so refreshing to see despite all the red tape and hurdles in today's quest for planning permission.


       Study in the new Soane-style lodge in a private house in Holland Park


From Holland Park to Kennington and The Kia Oval to see Hugh Petter's marvellous reordering and redesigning of the entrance front. This is modern classical architecture at its best - Lutyens, Raymond Erith and E.S Prior all sprung to mind when I first saw it. The facade is sturdy and grand and makes, at last, a fitting entrance to the ground. A great portico opens from the rather dingy internal bar. The columns are unique with their capitals modelled on the Prince of Wales feathers. The brickwork is exquisite and the whole project has given The Oval a facade to rival any sports stadium in Britain. On the parapet wall are urns modelled on the Ashes Urn. These references add to the tremendous history of the place. Plans are now afoot for a great Colosseum like range of terraced houses around the ground.


The new entrance front of The Kia Oval
Under the portico with the unique Prince of Wales capitals


Hugh Petter, Oliver Gerrish, John Martin Robinson, Diane Nutting, David Watkin and the Manager of the Kia Oval


Trinity Church Terrace is an example of a clever, smart and beautifully built modern development. The survival of this precious enclave of late Georgian London is a marvel in itself and the new terraces are a worthy addition. The elements of the facades have been expertly copied from the originals opposite and a whole new mews-like street has been created. The architecture here is exciting and monumental, such a relief to see these days when so many  nondescript and dull attempts at Georgian revival are springing up all around.  

Trinity Terrace

The new mews behind Trinity Terrace


Marcus Williams of London Realty explaining his project to us

The Cornhill Pump is something that one would have, until recently, walked past quite without noticing. Now it has been restored and looks splendid in its original attention-grabbing colours which also deter the absent minded bypassed on his iPhone from banging himself.

The Cornhill Pump

Number 4 Brabant Court crouches beneath the bulbous hulk of the 'Walkie Talkie'. Luckily for this early Georgian townhouse there is a forecourt which stops the dreadful looming skyscraper throwing scorching rays at it, thus escaping the fate of many of the burnt cars in the vicinity. It is a great rarity to find a four storey grand Georgian townhouse in the midst of the City. Number 4 has been restored to a high standard and is in fine fettle. Nothing has been made too fussy and the plain, sensible Georgian interiors must form the perfect antidote to the crazy toolbox of buildings the city dweller now has to live among in day to day life. 

Brabant Court with the Walkie Talkie looming


The Theatre Royal Drury Lane is a palace of the arts. it must have helped the cause of the Actor no end when it was built, giving to the thespian the social cache often denied to those who trod the boards - either this or it made the theatre more palatable to the aristocracy?! A gift, in the form of a great Neo-Classical statue,  from perhaps our greatest living theatrical aristocrat, Lord Lloyd-Webber gazes down on this palatial scene. The building has been given a much needed face lift and is now far more like a St Petersburg Palace than a West End playhouse. The bar must surely be the most stately theatre bar in London. Gone is the Barbara Cartland-like gaudiness, replaced by cool Neo-Classical hues and gilding just the right side of too shiny. I can't wait to see what the next series of rooms intended for restoration look like. One of the judges enquired whether it was safe to have such a valuable piece of statuary in full public view. I have little doubt that we all respond favourably to beautiful surroundings and that the newly restored theatre Royal will delight and inspire respect from those luckily enough to enter its portals.


The Dome at the Theatre Royal


The Bar

The last building I viewed as a judge for the Awards was on home turf in the Midlands, St Helen's house, Derby. This has been saved by architectural crusader Richard Blunt. I had driven past the sad wreck of St Helen's House for years and pondered on its uncertain and worrying future. I need not have for it has been reborn and will, it is hoped, regenerate this part of Derby so cruelly sliced through by the ring road. 

St Helen's is one of the very grandest Georgian townhouses. It was really both a town and country house as it had to its rear a large landscape park and a surrounding estate. Inside the scholastic clutter has been cleared away, water damaged ceilings mended and masses of woodwork, plasterwork and stonework restored. It is now home to a solicitors firm. I asked one or two of the people working there what it was like to spend so much time in such a building, each said it was a delight and a privilege. 

The Awards themselves were a fascinating time and many projects were given very well-deserved recognition. Lord Salisbury presented the prizes. I hugely enjoyed my time as a judge and do hope to be asked again!

The Georgian Group Architectural Awards 2013 - Charles Cator, Crispin Holborow, David Watkin, John Martin Robinson, Oliver Gerrish, Diane Nutting and the Marquess of Salisbury










For more information on the work of The Georgian Group please go to our website:-






All images in this blog are the copyright of Oliver Gerrish. Please ask permission before using them



Thursday 6 February 2014

A ramble through the Haute Marne and Arc-et-Senans


It is the time of year that we, as a family, migrate across France to Switzerland, with a car full of warm clothes, English things and a lively and inquisitive Jack Russell! Last year we stopped at Laon, to see the great cathedral there, and the massive Basilica of St Quentin. This time we were nearing Dijon and it was decided to explore an unknown area to us, the Haute Marne, where some of our family had lived at Droyes. It was here that my great great Grandmother, Camille Adelaide Lefebure (nee Bourdot), would have spent some of her childhood with her maternal grandparents, the Thomassins. Pierre Remy Thomassin had owned the Inn at Droyes-haute-Marne and his Thomassin kinsmen were Lords of the manor there and had owned the Chateau de Puellemontier and the land surrounding adjoining Droyes since the early Seventeenth Century. The family were also Comtes de Bienville.



Camille Adelaide Lefebure

The Haute-Marne is a secret area seldom visited and is, in some ways, an oddity. The architecture is eccentric and eclectic. On the way to Droyes we passed one church with the most extraordinarily ornate and fine Gothic/Renaissance carving and cathedral-scale portals.

A Gothic/Rensaissance portal in the Haute-Marne

 Around another corner came the unforgettable sight of the little half timbered church of the Exaltation de la Ste Croix at Bailly-le-Franc. The church was built in 1510 and is somewhere between a house and a barn in its construction, apart from the spire, which surmounts its quirky west front.

The West Front


 Inside there is little decoration save some ornate plasterwork and woodwork on the eighteenth-Century altarpiece and the beautiful Sixteenth Century stained glass windows, one of which shows a pieta. 


This little church, one of a dozen in this strange style, has been beautifully restored although one does wonder how it stays up at all when the winds start to howl around the desolate hillocks of the Haute-Marne.

West 'Portico' 

The East End

The parish church at Droyes is a different affair; large, cruciform and set grandly in its graveyard. We found the Thomassin family plot at the West  end close to the half timbered inn owned by our ancestor and less than a mile away from the Thomassin family stronghold, the Chateau de Paulemontier. Bertie, our dog, also clearly felt some ancestral claim to the place as he tried to challenge a very large St Bernard dog to a ruck outside the old inn!

The West End of Droyes Church from the Thomassin plot


The Thomassin's Inn at Droyes-haute-Marne

Chateau de Puellemontier


Bertie and the St Bernard of Droyes

Our next stop was Arc-et-SenansClaude-Nicolas Ledoux is surely one of the most visionary European architects of the last five hundred years. Sadly much of his work has been lost or remained unbuilt, but his legacy, in his remaining buildings and extraordinary plans, lives on magnificently.

                  The entrance to the Saline Royale, Arc-et-Senans

Ledoux was a Neo-Classicist of the most inventive type. Despite being somewhat of a Utopian in his vision for the perfect city he remained, incongruously, under royal patronage for the majority of his career. The incomplete yet sublime Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans remains his most magnificent work. 

                       Aerial view of the Royal Salt Works, or Saline Royale

Ledoux designed palaces, townhouses, bridges and more. Of his sixty marvellous tollgates around Paris a bare handful survive. Despite their beauty and unique architecture these gates became symbols for all that was wrong with French society and bureaucracy and were widely hated.

The brilliant museum at Arc-et-Senans
Ledoux was born in 1736 in Dormans-sur-Marne. In his youth he became extremely proficient at drawing, Classics and engraving. He commenced his studies in architecture with Jacques-Francois Blondel. His further studies with other architects brought him in to contact with the great classical buildings and the work of Palladio. Ledoux attracted a rich and aristocratic clientele. Between 1769-71 he visited England. and was a friend of the equally imaginative William Beckford.

       One of Ledoux's Parisian palaces - a coach could drive under the building!

The Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans bare testimony to the value that Eighteenth century Europe gave to salt. In France an unpopular salt tax kept the King happy and the people cross. Contrary to the wishes of the government Ledoux placed the saltworks close to the forests rather than the source of the salt water as, he surmised, it was easier to transport water than wood. The present structure was constructed between 1775-1778 and was intended as just a small part of a grand new city.


One enters the complex under a colossal portico inspired by the temples at Paestum and then a salt grotto of utterly theatrical nature. The gifts of Nature and the genius of man are contrasted in stone and cement in this man-made cavern.

                      The Director's House
The great semicircular courtyard is bordered by ten buildings containing forges, bothies and other offices. The centrepiece is the Director's House, which once also housed the chapel. The portico of this building is extraordinary; colossal, grotesque in the sculptural forms of the columns one part cylindrical the other a segmental square. The scale is enormous and this great and beautiful albatross is lost amidst the countryside which was to be the site of Ledoux's Utopian city.





The Saltworks declined and, like much of Ledoux's architecture, was a symbol for all that was wrong with monarchy in France. It is a wonder it has survived at all and, even more so, that is is in such splendid shape. The museum is exquisite and the endlessly varied models of Ledoux's works, built and unbuilt, are like faberge boxes in their elegance and imagination.




Ledoux was an innovator through and through. In his theatres , including his lost work at Besancon, he created a far more egalitarian plan for seating allowing the social classes, especially the lower echelons, better viewing and more comfort. He also invented the orchestra pit at the theatre in Besancon.

                       Cross-section of the theatre at Besancon

                      Model of the interior of the theatre at Besancon

          Ledoux's celebrated image of the eye looking from the stage at Besancon

With the Revolution much of Ledoux's aristocratic clientele dispersed in one way or another and his glory days ended. History has been kinder to the great man and one need only visit Arc-et-Senans to be bowled over by his masterful design and a genius imagination that is hard to fathom.


Now, where will we get to next ski season?!





For more information on the Royal Saltworks visit:-






All images in this blog are the copyright of Oliver Gerrish. Please ask permission before using them