Stop and research
My photograph shows part of the façade of the Bishopsgate Institute in London. This building, opened in 1895, provides educational facilities including courses and a library and was but one of many institutes set up in this period by charities and communities to fulfil cultural and educational aims – in the words of the Institute’s website, ‘for the benefit of the public to promote lectures, exhibitions, and otherwise the advancement of literature, science and the fine arts’. The Institute is fortunate to be housed a stunner of a building, one of three major buildings in London (the others are the Whitechapel Art Gallery and South London’s excellent Horniman Museum) designed by the great turn-of-the-century architect Charles Harrison Townsend.
Townsend’s work, as is widely acknowledged, combines wonderfully the traditional values of the Arts and Crafts movement with the decorative flair of Art Nouveau. That decorative element is shown in the ornament on the Bishopsgate façade, created by architectural sculptor William Aumonier. There is an additional influence on Townsend’s style (noticed by the authors of the revised Pevsner volume on the City of London) – the work of the great American architects of the late-19th century, especially Henry Hobson Richardson. That generous entrance arch is a very Richardsonian touch.
I especially wanted to share the decoration on this building, but standing on the opposite side of Bishopsgate pointing my camera at it reminded me of something else. Back in 2004, when Peter Ashley and I were doing preliminary work on The English Buildings Book (see right), I asked Peter to take a photograph of the striking police station up the street from the Institute. This simple, but perhaps naïve, request led Peter into a long and rather sticky ‘conversation’ with the police: ‘You nearly got me arrested,’ he said to me the next day.
This all came back to me the other day when I read in the paper complaints by photographers who had been stopped and questioned for photographing apparently much less sensitive buildings in London (for example, St Paul’s Cathedral, another Wren church, a fish and chip shop, and 30 St Mary Axe, aka the Gherkin). It made me think that the authorities are taking things rather too far if photographers – professional or amateur – cannot stand outside a building in London and aim their camera at it without being questioned and, in some cases, required to delete from their memory cards the images they have made.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m well aware that the police need to go about their business, and part of that business includes measures to combat terrorism. As someone who knew one of the victims of the London bombings of July 2005 this is very much in my mind. But we also need to preserve the freedoms that terrorists would take away from us, and one of those freedoms, a significant one I’d argue, is to be able to stop, and look, and take photographs of our glorious built environment – and disseminate the resulting images and the fruits of our research for educational and cultural purposes. The founders of the Bishopsgate Institute would, I hope, have agreed with that.
