Marylebone Road, London

Maestoso, etc

I often walk along Marylebone Road and I usually admire the Royal Academy of Music as I pass. The other day I did what I’ve always meant to do, and stopped to take a photograph. It’s a building of 1910 by Sir Ernest George, a good late-Victorian and Edwardian architect known for his country houses and his versatility (his practice designed all kinds of buildings from Golders Green Crematorium to mansion flats) but always rather in the shadow of his even more successful pupil, Edwin Lutyens.

I like the well-mannered baroque of his Royal Academy design. The materials, red brick and Portland stone, are thoroughly at home in London, the facade looks rather like a country house, with its side wings, but is also urban, somehow – perhaps it’s the sense of height conveyed by those vertical ranks of windows and the tall chimneys.

Towards the top it gets very fancy, with those round oeil de boeuf windows, the curved pediment, the reclining figures with musical instruments to hand, and the extraordinary window in the centre of the pediment, that can’t make up its mind whether it’s oval or rectangular. It’s majestic, but also very lively – in musical terms, maestoso, but with decidedly allegro passages. Altogether, it’s a building that enlivens my days when I pass, as the work of some of its alumni enlivens my evenings.

Clifford Chambers, Warwickshire

Place in the sun

Clifford Manor is at one end of the main street of a village nor far from Stratford-upon-Avon. A timber-framed house of the 15th or 16th century on the site was remodelled in 1903–9, but this building was badly damaged in a fire in 1918. Edwin Lutyens was called in to repair the house, and he and Gertrude Jekyll are also said to be responsible for the gardens.

I don’t know how much of the house as it stands today is Lutyens’ work, but this façade is certainly something he could have designed, taking the familiar English country-house look and giving it individuality with features such as the oeils de boeuf and small triangular pediment.

This house is not open to the public, so I felt privileged to get a glimpse of it. Lutyens designed and modified a lot of country houses, but so many of them are tucked away down long drives or hidden by trees. It’s good that this one, its bricks glowing in the late-afternoon sun, forms such a visual asset to its quiet village of timber-framed and brick houses.

Page Street, London

Checkmate

A few years ago I was involved in a campaign to provide more affordable housing in the small Cotswold town where I live. Some people argued that they didn't want new buildings cluttering up the town, and I would say that social housing didn't have to be ugly. It could be well designed and a visual asset to a place. It could be well built in local stone in the Cotswolds, whereas in London, maybe brick or stucco might be more appropriate materials. Get a good architect to do the designs and you'd really enhace the neighbourhood. Well, I know it doesn't always work out like that, but it's good to aim high.

I was reminded of these discussions the other day when I was on my way to Tate Britain. I’d often admired and boggled at these flats in Page Street and neighbouring Vincent Street before finding out their history. Interestingly, they're an example of getting a successful architect to design social housing using, as it happens, those quintessentially London materials, brick and stucco. Of course there are plenty of brick and stucco buildings around, some as vibrantly patterned as streaky bacon, some more restrained. But none of them are quite like this. The chequerboard-patterned blocks were designed by Edwin Lutyens no less, and built in 1929–30. Lutyens was the great master of country houses, banks, and other grand buildings, and, famously, did the design for the Cenotaph in Whitehall. These flats were his only large-scale social housing scheme, and were done for the Westminster City Council. The blocks, by the way, are divided by little Classical pavilions containing shops and entrance halls that are much more in the expected Lutyens style. But what catches the eye are these expanses of brick and stucco, traditional materials put to unprecedented use. On the eve of the 1930s, the Edwardian master had not lost his eccentric touch.

Baker Street, London

There’s a whole world on the rooftops of London – roof gardens, modernist balconies with ship-like rails, groves of trees launching attacks on penthouse ceilings with their roots. Look up in London and you see visual treats like this 1930s “arch in the sky” atop the former Abbey National building in Baker Street. This building is the place that acted as the mailbox for all the correspondence people sent to the fictional address (221B Baker Street) of Conan Doyle’s character Sherlock Holmes. But I like it for its tower, which makes me smile whenever I pass by. Its stone shines in the sun, enlivening bright, cold winter days like the one on which I craned my neck to take this photograph. I don’t know much about it, but I think this piece of aerial triumphalism must have been designed by someone who’d spent a lot of time admiring the buildings of Edwin Lutyens. I seem to remember the building below was gutted and renovated in 2005, and the arch had to be held up with scaffolding. I think the effort was well worthwhile.