The man says - here - look at this, opening a hinged wall of paintings to reveal in the bottom left hand corner a painting of the ruins of the bank of England.
It is 10 o'clock in the morning in the Sir John Soanes museum and the boys are wary but intrigued. I am trying ( and failing ) to drop them off early to a holiday workshop in the basement next door. I feel like a pushy mum with my attempt to saturate them in a beautiful cultured place but also in my attempt to do this and get to work on time. The workshop starts at 10.30 and my work starts at 10 but with the ludicrous and often unfounded optimism with which I often lead my life I thought if I was half an hour early for one and half an hour late for the other somehow it would work out - but it isn't doing. There seems to be a rather strict 10.30 drop off policy. However, rather than just hang about outside we look around the house - 'don't touch' I have to hiss, 'don't run' I whistle through the spit of my teeth - though I can see that out of the fresh air and stretch of a campsite in Dorset this is a darkly lit, odd place stuffed with odd old stuff and yet I want them to love it.
'Sir John Soanes was fascinated by the buildings he designed being abandoned and another culture taking over' our narrator explains. I think of Roman Temples left to ruin in a green damp landscape alongside the huge arc of the Thames as the Romans departed in 410AD. Then I imagine our own landscape in ruins - the Bank of England ( mostly changed since Sir John Soane's original building) with the pillars tipped, grass growing and nearby the tumble of Next, Accessorize and Eat. I wonder at the archaeology of our chilly sandwiches and co ordinating consumer concerns. As a child I thought that in the future orange groves would grow where junior football teams spat pips from juicy segments at half time, though I also wanted to rewrite Cinderella from the view point of the ugly sisters.
Watching Newsnight I laugh dryly hearing an American Economist say that George Osbourne would have failed economic policy if it was an exam.
The painting is squashed in a room stacked with Hogarths and Canelettos and shows the Bank of England cut away, tall scruffy trees growing alongside, a misty fog coating the air, masonry tumbled against a dark stormy sky. It was painted by Joseph Gandy the romantic but tragic architect and draftsman who worked for 40 years alongside the significantly more successful Sir John Soane. Both were obsessed with posterity and Roman ruins and spent hours discussing and working on their melancholic dreams of excavated remains and the future. Though it was Sir John that could rouse himself from these reveries to talk of bricks and plumbing to his many clients while Gandy only ever built a couple of buildings and ended mad and penniless in a windowless cell in an asylum in Devon.
Sir John Soane also wrote 'Crude Hints towards the History of My House' in 1810 imagining returning to his home in the 1830s to find a dilapidated ruin. Though this somber mood is believed to be provoked by his disappointment in his sons, his friendship with Turner breaking down and rows with the Royal Academy of Architects.
Watching Newsnight I laugh dryly hearing an American Economist say that George Osbourne would have failed economic policy if it was an exam.
The painting is squashed in a room stacked with Hogarths and Canelettos and shows the Bank of England cut away, tall scruffy trees growing alongside, a misty fog coating the air, masonry tumbled against a dark stormy sky. It was painted by Joseph Gandy the romantic but tragic architect and draftsman who worked for 40 years alongside the significantly more successful Sir John Soane. Both were obsessed with posterity and Roman ruins and spent hours discussing and working on their melancholic dreams of excavated remains and the future. Though it was Sir John that could rouse himself from these reveries to talk of bricks and plumbing to his many clients while Gandy only ever built a couple of buildings and ended mad and penniless in a windowless cell in an asylum in Devon.
http://tweedlandthegentlemansclub.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/remembering-exposition-at-sir-john.html
Sir John Soane also wrote 'Crude Hints towards the History of My House' in 1810 imagining returning to his home in the 1830s to find a dilapidated ruin. Though this somber mood is believed to be provoked by his disappointment in his sons, his friendship with Turner breaking down and rows with the Royal Academy of Architects.
In front of the painting the stooped but impassioned guide also says to the boys - holding their attention with a severe eye - 'look within the ruin - who does Sir John think will survive', 'Are they workmen? one falters. 'Yes. People building again. People who can use their hands.'
Leaving them, their heads dipped in concentration in a beautifully proportioned Georgian basement cutting, sticking and drawing I leg it. From the Boris Bike corner of the elegant square I can see a towered gateway opposite - I have no idea what it is but it looks like an entrance to a castle. I don't know this area of London at all but every corner is almost a pantomime extreme 'untouched London view'.
I am trying to get into St Mary Le Strand church at Aldwych - we pass it every morning on the bus as we go to these workshops so I think it must be possible but the timing is always just too tight. One day exh who is skimming his own work by half an hour to pick them up at lunchtime rings to say he is going to be late. I set off hurriedly from work cycling over the river to pick the boys up and hold onto them before exh gets there ( though I get lost in the back streets and find myself pushing the BB over the crunch of gravel amazed in the grounds of St Lincoln's Inn thinking about Volpone and discovering the gatehouse that I had seen from the square is the gatehouse of St Lincoln's Inn. ) I attempt to bribe the boys with a bag of sweets to come to SMLS with me while we wait. They are up for it but exh phones to say he has arrived and I pass them like a baton into the back of the car and pedal back to work without getting into the church.
This is the end of the summer - the summer holidays petering out into trips to Clarks, Sports Direct and name tags sewn in the neck of soft collars. Optimistic sticker charts ( times tables and music practice ) are stuck to the kitchen wall, ironed clothes laid out and the alarm clock set.
Back into the routine of school and work I think I will be able to get to SMLS in a lunch break but I don't seem to have them. I love the work - the mixture of organising photo shoots across the world and looking at beautiful pictures but the desk is understaffed by stress and illness and the amount of work is unrelenting. Losing a job at the beginning of the year has knocked my sense of safety and I worry and worry that I am not quite fast enough, organised enough. I work 5 days a week, often until 8pm then at home I often do more.
Finally I cycle out on a Friday lunchtime determined to get to the church. I want to be quick but can't find a docking bay free for the bike. This is the Westminster border and I am at the edge of an area I know so enjoy circling old streets looking for a place to park. Though time is ticking for I meant to just slip out for a quick break and will get behind at work by this jaunt. I thought SMLS to be open at lunchtimes but the gates are shut and padlocked.
Oh, I think, then walk up the end bit of The Strand, just before it becomes Fleet Street wondering if there might be a church in the Royal Courts of Justice though with a bit of nosing about there doesn't seem to be anything. I have been helping my friend edit her poem about the Resurrection Men - Bishop, Williams and May who killed to sell bodies for anatomical research - and much of it is based in this area for they were caught trying to sell a 'fresh' body at King's College. I think I tormented her by knowing nothing of the subject and clean of knowledge depended entirely on her words to imagine these places - so it feels funny but fascinating to be in her landscape. I will try Lincoln's Inn I think - I feel completely out of my own time now as if there isn't really an office to go back to and a lot of work waiting to do. I turn down an alley - an old bell hung from an old building, shop windows bowed onto the street - lawyers rooms crammed together. At the end of the yard is a street that swerves off at the end with low village like buildings, like a Dickensian scene
Writing this I discover it is Carey Street previously the home of bankruptcy courts a possible etymology of the term queer street.
I duck under a low alley lined with lawyers bookshops and into a huge green square. It is so bright and perfect looking - a little bit New England with white fences. There are beautiful old roses tumbling over a wall, tourists milling around and the scurry of lawyers passing. I know there is a church here but I am not sure which building is the church - all of it is historic, turreted and ornate most of it could be ecclesiastical - just as I think I will have to go to the gatehouse to ask I see a sign saying that there are guided tours that start in the chapel and instructions on how to find it.
I am trying to get into St Mary Le Strand church at Aldwych - we pass it every morning on the bus as we go to these workshops so I think it must be possible but the timing is always just too tight. One day exh who is skimming his own work by half an hour to pick them up at lunchtime rings to say he is going to be late. I set off hurriedly from work cycling over the river to pick the boys up and hold onto them before exh gets there ( though I get lost in the back streets and find myself pushing the BB over the crunch of gravel amazed in the grounds of St Lincoln's Inn thinking about Volpone and discovering the gatehouse that I had seen from the square is the gatehouse of St Lincoln's Inn. ) I attempt to bribe the boys with a bag of sweets to come to SMLS with me while we wait. They are up for it but exh phones to say he has arrived and I pass them like a baton into the back of the car and pedal back to work without getting into the church.
This is the end of the summer - the summer holidays petering out into trips to Clarks, Sports Direct and name tags sewn in the neck of soft collars. Optimistic sticker charts ( times tables and music practice ) are stuck to the kitchen wall, ironed clothes laid out and the alarm clock set.
Back into the routine of school and work I think I will be able to get to SMLS in a lunch break but I don't seem to have them. I love the work - the mixture of organising photo shoots across the world and looking at beautiful pictures but the desk is understaffed by stress and illness and the amount of work is unrelenting. Losing a job at the beginning of the year has knocked my sense of safety and I worry and worry that I am not quite fast enough, organised enough. I work 5 days a week, often until 8pm then at home I often do more.
Finally I cycle out on a Friday lunchtime determined to get to the church. I want to be quick but can't find a docking bay free for the bike. This is the Westminster border and I am at the edge of an area I know so enjoy circling old streets looking for a place to park. Though time is ticking for I meant to just slip out for a quick break and will get behind at work by this jaunt. I thought SMLS to be open at lunchtimes but the gates are shut and padlocked.
Oh, I think, then walk up the end bit of The Strand, just before it becomes Fleet Street wondering if there might be a church in the Royal Courts of Justice though with a bit of nosing about there doesn't seem to be anything. I have been helping my friend edit her poem about the Resurrection Men - Bishop, Williams and May who killed to sell bodies for anatomical research - and much of it is based in this area for they were caught trying to sell a 'fresh' body at King's College. I think I tormented her by knowing nothing of the subject and clean of knowledge depended entirely on her words to imagine these places - so it feels funny but fascinating to be in her landscape. I will try Lincoln's Inn I think - I feel completely out of my own time now as if there isn't really an office to go back to and a lot of work waiting to do. I turn down an alley - an old bell hung from an old building, shop windows bowed onto the street - lawyers rooms crammed together. At the end of the yard is a street that swerves off at the end with low village like buildings, like a Dickensian scene
Writing this I discover it is Carey Street previously the home of bankruptcy courts a possible etymology of the term queer street.
I duck under a low alley lined with lawyers bookshops and into a huge green square. It is so bright and perfect looking - a little bit New England with white fences. There are beautiful old roses tumbling over a wall, tourists milling around and the scurry of lawyers passing. I know there is a church here but I am not sure which building is the church - all of it is historic, turreted and ornate most of it could be ecclesiastical - just as I think I will have to go to the gatehouse to ask I see a sign saying that there are guided tours that start in the chapel and instructions on how to find it.
On the east side of the square I find myself under a low arched open crypt with stunted buttresses like squat thick tree trunks - still unsure where to go. Hesitantly I walk up the stairs at the back of this area and then at the top open the doors into the chapel. There is a man speaking to a tour gathered though the pews are so high they are like wooden booths. The windows are tall with jewel stained glass in a dense patchwork of coats of arms. It is as if I have lost all sense of time for I sit for a while just looking at the glass and listening to the talk.
He talks of John Donne who laid the foundation stone of the chapel in 1620. Donne had been the preacher at Lincoln's Inn between 1620 and 1622 and preached the first sermon in 1623 packing the congregation so full that people passed out and were taken for dead. The chapel bell that rang out at midday to mark the passing away of a 'bencher' ( a member of the inn's governing body ) is to have inspired John Donne's line 'Never send to know for whom the bells toll; it tolls for thee'. The tour guide in the pulpit also talks of the aristocracy sending their second or third son's to Lincoln's Inn to learn law so that disputes of land could be resolved.
Later I find out that originally during the 12th and 13th century the law was taught in the City of London by the clergy. However Henry III decreed that no institutes of legal education could exist in the City of London and a papal bull declared that the clergy could no longer teach common law only canon law and so the institutes of legal education fell apart. Common lawyers collected at the hamlet of Holborn - the nearest place to the law courts of Westminster Hall that was outside the City - and at sometime ( it is unknown exactly when ) Lincoln's Inn was formed. Ben Jonson is reputed to have helped as a brick layer in the construction of the Inn, and Oliver Cromwell lived over the gateway nearest to Chancery Lane. Dickens wrote in Bleak House:
‘This is the Court of Chancery; which has its decaying houses and blighted lands in every shire; which has its warn-out lunatic in every mad-house, and its dead in every churchyard; which has its ruined suitor, with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress, borrowing and begging through the round of every man’s acquaintance; which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right; which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope; so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart; that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give - who does not often give - the warning, “Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than come here!”
On a trip to the Natural History Museum with the boys we find a room on Earth's Restless Surface just after the earthquake simulator. Briefly I find the statement that change is all that is certain comforting and then as I move around the exhibition I panic. I think it is the sense of scale and time that disturbs me - tiny drops of water building or carving rock, gravity itself eroding matter, everything shifting, everything tumbling. When my eldest son was little he would talk and talk about outer space from the strapped child seat at the back seat of the car as I drove. I wonder now if it was before the youngest was born or more likely just after. Each question would make our own position in the car more tiny, more ridiculous, it was like a zoom lens rendering us invisible. I attempted to answer each question though sometimes I didn't know the answers and often the answer was just yes. Though infinity seems like a guess sometimes, a dinner plate to fall off.
I discover too that Sir John Soane's disappointment with his two sons was more than ( or perhaps because of ) a pushy parent's inability to cope with a lack of achievement - though he pushed and pushed them both to become architect's. The elder son John died young while the youngest George exhorted money from his family with threats of becoming an actor, was imprisoned for debt and fraud and then published anonymously an article 'The Present Low State of the Arts in England and more particularly of Architecture' in which Soane was singled out for personal attack. Later George lived in a menage a trois with his wife and her sister subjecting the family to domestic abuse and though Soane's paid for the grandson's education - again attempting to keep the lineage of architecture in his name by placing him under the guidance of another architect the grandson was dismissed for staying out late with a known homosexual. At night just before sleep I think about the rage and secrets hidden in this story.
I hear a woman on radio 4 talking about writing her own life as a book and she said between describing the drug habit she picked up once it was published that the trick was just to call everyone really good looking - they don't mind what you write as long if you say that - it made me laugh out loud as I washed up.
Finally I have a vivid dream that my hand is held by a ghost. That I am just standing in a lobby somewhere and my hand is held warm and tight by nothing. It is a real shock even in a dream and I wake frightened.
Amen
