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Watts Chapel
IS THIS the most beautiful door in England? The Watts Chapel in the village cemetery of Compton in Surrey is certainly one of the most remarkable buildings in the land. I have to admit it completely...
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Liverpool’s Irvingite Church
The soi-disant “Catholic Apostolic Church” was one of the strangest but most fascinating Protestant sects the Victorian world brought forth. It was entirely novel — perhaps outright bizarre is a better...
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New England Baroque
The sign of a decent place, province, or land is that it can do architecture well in both its highest and lowest forms. Above, the New England baroque of Dunster House, one of the residential colleges...
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A Home for Bard and Ballet
Sir Basil Spence’s unbuilt Notting Hill theatre Sir Basil Spence was just about the last (first? only?) British modernist who was any good. His British Embassy in Rome is hated by some but combines a...
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L’Élysée à la plage
The Fort de Brégançon: Riviera Retreat of France’s Presidents When France’s head of state needs to let his hair down every summer, the Republic has a convenient presidential residence just for him to...
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Bonnington Square
This little enclave is one of the best-kept secrets of London. I used to live just around the corner from Bonnington Square and walking into it was like entering a secret world. Just steps from the...
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The Sultan Nazrin Shah Centre
Níall McLaughlin Architects at Worcester College, Oxford WORCESTER is one of the most spacious and scenic of Oxford’s colleges. The classical symmetry of its entrance terminates the view down the...
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Puritan in Spanish Garb
Plymouth Congregational Church, Coconut Grove, Miami The traveller passing down Devon Road in the Grove neighbourhood of Miami might be forgiven for thinking he had stumbled across one of the ancient...
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Fire the Architects!
Good news everyone! We can fire the architects! That much-hated subset of humanity who have inflicted banality and cheap unpleasantness on the rest of us for nearly a century can finally be chucked...
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The Other Modern in Jewish Amsterdam
Jacobus Baars’ Synagoge Oost, Linnaeus Street There were few places where architecture’s competing forms of modernism overlapped more than the Netherlands in the 1920s. Traditionalists like Kropholler,...
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The George
“FORTUNATE IS SOUTHWARK in her possessions,” Sir Albert Richardson wrote, “for she holds in this fragment a key to the aspect of her many vanished inns…” The George Inn features largely in the deep...
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St Vincent Ferrer
This week marked the ninetieth anniversary of the consecration of the high altar of the Dominican Church of St Vincent Ferrer in New York — one of the most beautiful churches in Manhattan. To mark the...
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Sibiu/Hermannstadt
SIBIU’s name comes from a Bulgar-Turkic root word meaning “rejoice”, and having spent a few days in the city I can see why. It is handsome, clean, and clearly well looked after — perhaps well loved is...
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Skeleton Coast Baroque
Examples of baroque architecture in Namibia are — sadly — not numerous enough to deserve so much as a monograph. (Of the Namibian jugendstil, we can say more.) But being few does not mean not existing...
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St Paul’s: Before and After the War
Wren’s post-Fire St Paul’s Cathedral was an icon of resistance to German aggression and an emblem of survival during the Blitz, but while the dome survived the church did suffer damage: A bomb fell...
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Horseshoe for Quebec’s Salon bleu
Refit will change seating plan in Quebec’s parliament chamber An upcoming renovation to the Hôtel du parlement in Quebec City will also bring a change in the seating plan of the Assembly’s...
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Crisis Averted at Chartres
The rather garish and invasive plans to renovate the parvis of Chartres cathedral, turn it upside down, and install a museum underneath — previously reported on here in 2019 — have been radically...
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Unfinished Business at Audubon Terrace
One of the little tragedies of New York urbanism is that when Archer Milton Huntington was transforming a block of upper Manhattan into an acropolis of culture he failed to buy the entire block....
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Articles of Note: 6 January 2024
Articles of Note The Epiphany – 6 January 2024 ■ It is well-known that ‘Welsh’ means ‘foreigners’, whereas Cymraeg, the Welsh word for ‘Welsh’ means ‘fellow-countrymen’. As the linguist Danny Bate...
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A Cape Dutch Garden at Chelsea
Jonathan Snow at the 2018 Flower Show I’m ashamed to say I’ve never been to the Chelsea Flower Show, the most florid event on London’s social calendar. It is a delight flâneur-ing around the...
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