Your Places or Mine

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Detmar Blow was one of the brightest stars of the Arts and Crafts Movement – but his story is also dark and mysterious.  A pupil of the Kensington School of Art, where he met Lutyens – a lifelong friend – he won a travelling scholarship to draw cathedrals in France.  At Abbeville, he had a chance encounter with the great Victorian sage aesthete John Ruskin, then in the decline of his old age.  Blow escorted Ruskin to the Alps and imbibed his radical philosophy.  On his return to England, he did not complete his architectural apprenticeship but became a clerk of works to learn the fundamentals of building, as dictated by the principles of the Arts and Crafts Movement.  So he directed the building of Ernest Gimson’s Stoneywell Cottage in Leicestershire, a building that seems to have grown out of the ground it stands on.  And in 1896 he was with William Morris when he died and drove his coffin to the churchyard in a yellow harvest wagon decorated with willow boughs and vineleaves.  
Immensely good looking, Blow became an intimate of the intellectual aristocrats of The Souls, for whom he designed or remodelled several country houses,  according to the philosophy of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.  He had an affair with at least one of them, Pamela. Tenant.  In 1910 he married Gertrude, a daughter of the Hon. Hamilton Tollemache, whom he had met while touring Suffolk in a gypsy caravan.  The horny-handed craftsmen with whom he worked were given prime seats at his wedding in St Paul’s Cathedral.  Yet by then, despite his impeccably Arts and Crafts credentials, he had taken a French partner, Fernand Billerey, to undertake fashionable work in the West End.  He also, fatally, came into the orbit of Bendor, the 2nd Duke of Westminster.  After the First World War he became his factotum.  He was on the latter’s yacht, the Flying Cloud – whose interiors he had designed in Cotswold style – that Blow’s star came crashing down to earth.  He was accused of peculation and never recovered.  How did this extraordinary story unfold?  What were the motivations of the key players?  What role was played by the ideal country house that Blow created for himself and his family at Hilles, on a Cotswold escarpment with views to the Severn Estuary?  Do Clive and John have the answers?  Some of them, perhaps….

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This week John takes Clive through Windsor Castle, a creation not just of the Middle Ages (subject of part 1 of this series) but of successive monarchs since the Restoration of Charles II in 1660.  George III, a King who had been trained in architecture, made it into a family home, before being confined here during his years of madness.  Typically, his eldest son George IV had bigger ideas, employing Jeffry Wyatt to revamp the castle after 1824.  This included a remodelling of St George’s Hall and making the Waterloo Chamber to accommodate the famous Waterloo Banquets at a table 150 metres long.  Wyatt also gave Windsor the romantic skyline we see today.  Knighted in 1828, Wyatt changed his name to the supposedly more medieval Sir Jeffry Wyatville with the King’s blessing and was finally buried in St George’s Chapel at Windsor in 1840.  For a time, he was joined by the Prince Consort who died in 1861, whose were removed to the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore 10 years later. 

Clive and John both vividly remember the Windsor Castle fire which roared through the building in 1992.  Discussing its significance they come to some possibly surprising conclusions.

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This week John and Clive are frothing with disapproval at Network Rail’s plan to upgrade Liverpool Street Station.  It is proposed that this will be funded by a development which will impose an out-of-scale tower at the entrance to the station, which will deprive the concourse of natural light and destroy the surroundings.  What a pity.  Liverpool Street was brilliantly reimagined in the late 1980s, to make a virtually new station so much in the spirit of the old that many people assume that it is largely Victorian.  If only there was someone who could offer a design of similar sensitivity.  Fortunately there is!  John McAslan of John McAslan and Partners has come up with a spectacularly clever alternative scheme, fulfilling Network Rail’s objective at a fraction and far less environmental damage.

This is an emergency podcast.  The City Corporation are about to decide whether the Network Rail proposal gets planning permission. John and Clive want McAslan instead. Listen as they debate what makes really good railway station architecture and what makes it so important.

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This week John and Clive present their long-awaited podcast on one of the most essential but least discussed rooms in any dwelling – the lavatory.  Or (because no object in English or any other language is subject to so many euphemisms and circumlocutions) the necessary, the little house, the smallest room, the going place, the jakes, the john, the pissing place, the bog, the toilet…the list goes on.  Although it fulfils a universal need, the loo has taken many forms over the centuries, being subject not only to technological innovation but social change.  Today’s norms were not always those of the past.  Did multi-seater conveniences provide users with the chance to talk to friends, or do they reflect the discipline of monastic or military life – to be frequented only at certain times and in a regulated manner?  From the magna cloaca of Ancient Rome to Sir John Harington’s funny but laboured book on the first water closet, via the Victorian sewers (which Clive has visited) beneath London, ypompod shines a light on a subject that, in some respects, cannot be too private.  Warning: the episode may contain schoolboy humour, however much John and Clive have attempted to avoid it.

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Sir Francis Dashwood, who used to dress as a Franciscan monk and allegedly took part in orgies in the ruins of Medmenham Abbey, was one of the most notorious libertines of the 18th century.  Is this a correct depiction of his character?  John thinks not.  Instead, he acquired his dubious reputation as a result of slurs cast by his political enemies, which Sir Francis, who didn’t care what anyone else thought about him, chose to ignore.  His refusal to stoop to the level of his opponents has meant that some of the mud has unfairly stuck.  But he can now be reexamined as one of the Georgian period’s most fascinating and complex personalities, who among other achievements, published a book of common prayer for ordinary people with his friend, the American statement Benjamin Franklin. 
Today, Dashwood’s reputation as a dilettante is kept alive by his country house, West Wycombe Park in Buckinghamshire, owned by the National Trust but still lived in by Dashwood’s family.  His mentor was his guardian, John Fane, 7th Earl of Westmorland, who built Mereworth Castle in Kent as a homage to Palladio’s Villa Rotunda in the Venetian.  Dashwood employed several architects to create not only a splendid house with, unusually, different facades that could be read independently, but a fine landscape park well-stocked with follies.  The dazzling interiors of the house are so rich that no subsequent owner has seen fit to replace them.   They survive as an extraordinary document of 18th-century taste and ideas.