Gillian Darley is an architectural historian whose books include Excellent Essex and biographies of Sir John Soane, John Evelyn and Octavia Hill, the founder of the National Trust.
Charles Holden was responsible for an astonishing 48 new Tube stations as well as the London Underground headquarters, a great tower at 55 Broadway, overlooking St James’s Park. That done, he shifted his focus to education, in 1931 winning the competition to design the University of London campus in Bloomsbury.
The richness of Pevsner’s Leaves of Southwell lies above all in the photographs, printed in the best photogravure available in the postwar months.
The Drawing Office has been newly revealed after a programme of cleaning and investigation. Too small and fragile to be open to more than handfuls of interested visitors, it turns out to be the sleeping beauty in the museum.
Directly underfoot, or under the tarmac and tyres, completely invisible, is a place synonymous with some of the sharpest minds of the early 18th century, Alexander Pope’s grotto.
While London’s National Gallery is heading for its 200th anniversary, branded NG200, the Guggenheim in Bilbao is celebrating its 25th. The stone treasure chest on Trafalgar Square and the titanium snail shell on the banks of the River Nervión may have little in common, yet the different ways in which the two galleries are looking ahead, architecturally speaking, are instructive.
It is hard to resist the conclusion that Soane’s central place in architectural mythology is connected to the fact that he can be ‘reinvented’ more freely than those architects whose buildings do...
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