Trafalgar Square, London, and beyond

A new view (2)

Having taken in the view of St Martin in the Fields described in the previous post, I turned through 90 degrees and saw in the distance the clock tower of the Houses of Parliament, the structure popularly known, after the great bell it contains, as Big Ben. A touch on the zoom ring and there was another photograph of a familiar building from a new viewpoint.*

The clock tower is of course the most famous part of maybe our most famous building. The Houses of Parliament, built after its predecessor was destroyed by fire in 1834, took decades to complete. The basic design was by Charles Barry, but Barry enlisted the aid of A W N Pugin as a specialist in the Gothic style, and Pugin became more and more involved in the design to the extent that it became as much his own as Barry’s. Burning the candle at both ends, Pugin poured out drawings of decorative details of all kinds, creating the glorious interior of the House of Lords, designing wallpapers, mouldings, carvings, and furniture, and bringing Barry’s scheme to full Gothic life. The clock tower seems to have been completely designed by Pugin, who based its distinctive shape and refined details on a tower he did for Scarisbrick Hall in Lancashire.

By 1852, Pugin, sick with what was to be his final illness, was still overworked with drawings for Barry. His biographer, Rosemary Hill, quotes an extraordinary letter, which veers from lucidity to incoherence, in which Pugin describes his overwork: “I never worked so hard in my life for Mr Barry for tomorrow I render all the designs for finishing his bell tower & it is beautiful & I am the whole mechanism of the clock.”† He meant to write that he was to design the mechanism of the clock, but his slip seems apposite – Pugin was doing drawings at a relentless and mechanical pace, although the content, full of artful touches, was far from mechanical.

A few months after his frantic letter, Pugin was dead. He never lived to see the tower that would become his most celebrated work. We take it for granted now and see it everywhere, reproduced on news programmes, sketched in the background to political cartoons. But glimpsing it from the National Gallery steps made me see it anew: its artful vertical lines, its distinctive roof, the way the tower swells slightly to emphasizes the clock, the manner in which the gilded details catch the light of the sun. My new view of the tower revealed something else too: the structure’s lightness of touch in contrast with the grey ventilation towers of Portcullis House, the 2001 parliamentary office building across the road from the tower. It rises above them as a medieval church spire might against a background of dark, Satanic mills.

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*In spite of the marked difference in the cloud cover, this photograph was taken just a few seconds after the one in the previous post. England’s skies are ever varied, ever changing.

†Rosemary Hill’s book, God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (2007) is one of the best and most enjoyable architect-biographies of recent years.

Toddington, Gloucestershire

Here in the Cotswolds, celebrity neighbours are so common they’re usually greeted with a shrug. Half the royal family lives round here, after all. (‘Tetbury man to wed’ was the local paper’s laconic headline when Charles and Camilla announced that the time had come to put their relationship on a more formal footing.) So the revelation that no-longer-Young British Artist Damien Hirst was buying Toddington Manor hardly raised an eyebrow in these parts, except among those for whom sharks, dot paintings, and diamond-studded skulls aren’t the last word in art.

But a few of us rejoiced. Toddington Manor is a stunning Victorian house that has been empty and unloved for years. It was designed by its first owner, Charles Hanbury Tracy, who was on the committee that chose Barry’s design for the then-new Houses of Parliament. The building has more than a touch of the Houses of Parliament about it – late-Gothic windows and tower, some stunning gargoyles, a cloister corridor, lots of Gothic details inside and out.

It’s very grand, but it isn’t exactly homely. Which is why, I think, that many of the well-heeled who’ve considered it have backed out. The rooms are grandiose – but not that big. The main route around the house is the cloister, which is more churchy than housey. Putting en suites in upstairs would cause all kinds of conservation nightmares. And the repair bill must be stratospheric. What it needs is an owner who’s rich, but doesn’t just want to live there.

Enter Mr Hirst and his art. He plans to restore the house and use it to show off his collection. And he seems to be getting on with the task in hand. Shortly after he bought the place, the whole house was covered by the world’s biggest span of scaffolding. Now he’s sheathing the place in plastic too. It looks as if he’s commissioned Christo and Jeanne-Claude, wrap-artists extraordinaire, to do what they did to the Reichstag a few years back. But it’s probably an indication that there’s some serious restoration going on in there. Roll on the time when the work’s done and we can visit the house. After all, if we don’t like the art, we can still admire the gargoyles and the stained glass. As Grand Designs’ Kevin McCloud is fond of saying, ‘It might just work.’

Toddington Manor: the house as it was