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.
The day before leaving for Cyprus, I read an excellent account of the sinister weather conditions of 1783, which Benjamin Franklin surmised were the result of recent volcanic activity in Iceland. I’m writing a book about Vesuvius and this was by way of light research. I was about to leave Nicosia for home when Eyjafjallajökull erupted.
San Gennaro (St Januarius) has a chapel in Naples Cathedral to himself, a church within a church, a bombastic Counter-Reformation affair of precious metals and rich marbles, encrusted with busts and frescoed to the rafters. The decoration celebrates his status as protector of Naples against pestilence, disaster and Vesuvius. The volcanic eruption on 16 December 1631 was the most severe since the one that entombed Pompeii. Since at least the 17th century, Neapolitans have been giving the saint three chances a year to prove himself, through the miraculous liquefaction of his blood, encased in two phials within an ornamental glass reliquary.
At the age of 70, we learn from the intimate and largely unpublished letters that are the raw material of Nicholas Fox Weber’s biography, Le Corbusier was still justifying his work, his name and his fame to his mother, by then in her late nineties. As always, he was trying to gain her favour over his (only just) older brother, the gentle but troubled Albert, a musician. The letters add...
Nikolaus Pevsner’s introduction to his Buildings of England volume for Essex made it clear that he considered the county tainted by association. Who, he wondered in 1954, would ever want to go ‘touring and sightseeing’ there, after experiencing the ‘squalor of Liverpool Street Station’, its horror compounded by the ‘suicidal waiting room on platform nine’? His hatred, oddly, even extended to ‘the cavernous left-luggage counters behind platforms nine and ten’.
‘Surrey is the Country of my Birth and my delight,’ John Evelyn told John Aubrey; and like Surrey, Evelyn has had more than his fair share of bad press over the years. Yet to picture him as simply the pious sermoniser the Victorians eulogised is as misleading as to write off Surrey as wall-to-wall Weybridge. The gouged-out lanes which thread through and over the thickly wooded...
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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