London revealed

London Night and Day: Illustration of the Month

In contrast to my illustration last month, this month’s offering is from a well known illustrator and author. Osbert Lancaster (1908–86) was probably best known as a cartoonist and had a small but important influence on the development of British political cartooning through the daily ‘pocket cartoons’ he did, for decades, in the Daily Express. But Lancaster had more strings to his bow. He was an enthusiastic traveller, and recorded some of his impressions – of Greece especially, in books such as Classical Landscape With Figures and Sailing to Byzantium. Both of these books are funny and perceptive and have interesting things to say about the places he visits and the buildings he looks at and draws. He also wrote a number of books on architecture, illustrated with his own cartoons. Pillar to Post is probably the best known of these. Others include Drayneflete Revealed and Progress At Pelvis Bay – their titles are true to their lighthearted tone.

London Night and Day is a book Lancaster illustrated but didn’t, as far as I know, write.* My illustration is the cover of the first edition, which came out in time for the Festival of Britain in 1951. The book shows you the sights of London, through the prism of a 24-hour day, introducing different aspects of the city at appropriate times – shops in the morning, some cultural sites in the afternoon, theatre in the early evening, clubs later, and so on into the early hours when the market traders of Billingsgate are at work, offloading their piscatorial produce.

Lancaster’s cover encapsulates the architectural side of the book, though not the omnipresent human side of it (perhaps the influence of the publishers, The Architectural Press, was at work here). But even without Lancaster’s tweedy, hatted human characters, the cover is appealing. Its simple flat-colour drawings sum up a world of London architecture, from Thames-side warehouses to Regency terraces, and a lot of what the book describes, from parks to theatres, churches to shops. The diagonal division into night and day is a lovely touch and the lettering in the central panel works very well – particularly the way the illustrator has made use of the light and dark division of the cover to allow the word ‘NIGHT’ to appear black on white and the word ‘DAY’ to be reversed out of grey.

For anyone interested in this sort of thing, it’s worth looking out for a copy of London Night and Day. I already have two, one a slightly later edition with the Festival of Britain material removed and a higher price (five shillings instead of three and sixpence: inflation city). But you don’t have to haunt the secondhand bookshops. Old House Books have thoughtfully done a reprint that’s surely worth a purchase by any lover of London. Hurrah!

- - -

*Note No author’s name is given, but the title page credits one Sam Lambert as the book’s ‘editor’. No one I’ve asked knows the identity of Sam Lambert. Did Lancaster himself write it? Or some of it? Is ‘Sam Lambert’ a portmanteau name made up of the names of two or three writers (it has a bit of ‘Osbert’ in it, of course). Who knows?

Yarnton, Oxfordshire

The real thing

After Jacobean revival doorway of the previous post, here’s an example of a genuine Jacobean manor house. It’s Yarnton Manor, not far from Oxford, and it was built in around 1611 by Sir Thomas Spencer, altered in later centuries, and restored in 1895. The facade that’s visible today is restrained – curvy gables,* but quite small ones, projecting bays that don’t project very much, minimal classical detailing around the doorway – but lovely. It looks an attractive, welcoming house, without aspiring to the grandeur or extravagance of the great ‘prodigy houses’ of the 16th century.

The building was not always home to lords of the manor. By the 19th century it was a farmhouse and it then passed through various owners, institutional and individual. One owner well known around Oxford in the mid-20th century was George Alfred Kolkhorst, university Reader in Spanish, who moved in after he came into his family fortune, having previously lived in rooms in Oxford itself, where he famously entertained students at Sunday-Morning salons. Kolkhorst was known to generations of undergraduates as ‘Colonel’, though he held no such rank: the name was probably applied ironically because he was the least martial of men. The writer and cartoonist Osbert Lancaster, in his autobiographical book With An Eye To The Future, recalls his time at Oxford, when he attended Kolkhorst’s salons in the Oxford rooms, which were full of questionable antiques, or, in Lancaster’s words, ‘objects of dubious virtue’. Lancaster goes on to say that when the ‘Colonel’s’ father died, Kolkhorst ‘moved into what he hoped was a Jacobean manor house’. Clearly, in spite of the later modifications, the hopes were justified.

After Kolkhorst died in 1958, the house was used as a dormitory by a local school before becoming the home of Oxford University’s Postgraduate Centre for Hebrew Studies. The Hebrew Studies centre is now relocating, and the manor house was put on the market earlier this year. In its quiet setting, so near the city but removed from it, it looks good for another 400 years.

- - -

* Some sources say that these are the result of later remodelling.