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Philip Downer

@philip.downer

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An all-you-can-read buffet of buildings and neighbourhoods, mostly (but far from exclusively) C19/C20 London. Weekend ephemera (books, art etc).

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INTERLUDE: this channel is now going to take a break for a couple of weeks or so, due to other pressing (and interesting) commitments... Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible... Do not tamper with your vertical hold... Stay tuned to this station… by @philip.downer

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3 days ago

Ernő the Brutalist Cat is joining me to thank everybody who participated in one of this summer’s five (!) tours of Brutalist architecture in central London, which I led on behalf of the the @c20society.

Shall we do it all again next year? taken in London, United Kingdom by @philip.downer

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3 days ago

Going green: we’re on the junction of Chester Road and Dartmouth Park Hill, where a giant green thing has emerged from the ground over recent months.

This is a new development by Camden Council to provide temporary accommodation for up to 50 families. It’s been erected on the site of the old Chester Road Hostel, the southernmost point of Highgate New Town, built in the late 1970s to designs by Bill Forrest. The old hostel (pics 6-7) was an L-shaped building facing into a private courtyard, and appears to have been a careful, humanitarian design from the era of the Sydney Cook team’s great and various achievements in Camden.

And now it’s gone, replaced by crinkly-tin green boxes linked by stair towers. The emphasis on temporary accommodation is borne out by the development’s unfortunate resemblance to a stack of shipping containers. While Forrest’s building nestled protectively into the landscape, its replacement shouts brashly at passers-by, its in-yer-face appearance almost confirming to the temporary residents “you don’t really belong here”.

Which is a pity, given Camden’s history of social housing, all within yards of this location. The New Town is represented by Peter Tábori’s monumental Whittington Estate (8) and Bill Forrest & Oscar Palacio’s more domestic Stage 2c of Highgate New Town (9), from around 1980. At the far end of Chester Road stands Rick Mather Architects’ recent social housing scheme (10), the first in the country to be built to Passivhaus standards. Today’s green tin speaks of changes in both funding and aspiration. Which is a pity. taken in Dartmouth Park by @philip.downer

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4 days ago

Up the hill forwards: a walk through Crystal Palace Park perhaps provides more variety than any other London park (discuss).

After yesterday’s dinosaurs, we pass through the National Sports Centre comprising a stadium and, more excitingly, a sports hall containing swimming pools and basketball courts and that sort of stuff. This was designed by Norman Engleback and the LCC Architects Department, who went on to give us the Southbank Centre (Hayward/QEH/Purcell), and it features a large flat roof cantilevered off V-shaped concrete columns. While I never advance beyond the turnstiles, I always stick my head around the door when I’m here. @faulknerbrowns’ plans for transformative renovation of this Grade II* listed structure were approved a couple of months ago.

Beyond, the modern (1960s) staff houses with their butterfly roofs are simple and beguiling, and the eleven-storey hostel, built for students and/or athletic competitors, is a handsome and doomed exercise in complex geometry (it comprises six hexagons grouped around an atrium). Unfortunately, its timber cladding and inadequate safety provision mean it can never be used again, so catch it before it goes.

As we climb, we reach the Palace site proper, dominated by the giant head of Joseph Paxton, created by WF Woodington, who also sculpted the much-loved Red Lion brewery lion on the South Bank.

@crystalpalaceparktrust has embarked on an extensive restoration and transformation project across the Park, which has also seen significant improvements to the Italian Terraces that stood in front of the Palace. The red sphinxes are looking spruce, but sadly the recently-restored underpass to the vanished High Level station can only be opened occasionally, and was closed when we were there.

Nevertheless, we close out with the TV tower, London’s eighth-tallest structure, built by BICC (with the assistance of my father) in 1956. And that’s Crystal Palace, the one and only. taken in Crystal Palace Park by @philip.downer

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5 days ago

Here be monsters: the Crystal Palace dinosaurs have had once-and-for-all, this-is-it-this-time restorations three or four times in my lifetime, but the latest iteration really sparkles.

After the decision was taken to relocate the 1851 Great Exhibition’s Crystal Palace from Hyde Park to bosky Sydenham, plans were laid out for a large park, with the Palace on a terrace at the top, and a multitude of attractions throughout the grounds. The boating lake at the bottom was an ideal location for visitors to combine some idle oaring with an educational visit to the distant past.

Dinosaurs had only been properly identified and named (“terrible lizard”) over the previous thirty years, and no complete skeletons had yet been discovered. The park promoters employed natural history artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins to create 33 life-size concrete (plus discreet brick and cast iron as required) models of dinosaurs, based on the latest scientific discoveries and theories.

Inevitably, this meant Hawkins made mistakes, placing thumbs on noses etc, but no one knew any better - the point was that, for the first time ever, you could catch a train and come face-to-face with these extraordinary, gigantic and terrifying creatures.

Showmanship played its part too, with a famous dinner staged inside the mould used to make the Iguanodon in December 1853, garnering much press attention. The public was primed for the dinosaurs’ unveiling in 1854, and they’ve been firm London favourites ever since.

The most recent restoration has seen the dinosaurs steam cleaned, repaired (with the addition of 3D-printed elements) and structurally strengthened, and repainted in their original colours. They look better than ever today, they’re Grade I listed, and are a fine a day out regardless of one’s age or paleontological competence.

@crystalpalaceparktrust taken in Crystal Palace Dinosaurs by @philip.downer

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6 days ago

I’ve been asked, in the wake of all the Fougasses, Batemans, Ponts, Lancasters etc that I’ve shared, whether there were any female cartoonists back in the golden days of Punch.

And the answer is yes, of course - though proportionately their numbers were similar to those of female barristers, MPs, surgeons and newspaper editors, back in the day. So, a bit thin on the ground.

Anton, though, was a mid-century star at Punch. Born Beryl Thompson in Queensland, she moved to Brighton as a child, and later adopted the name Antonia, marrying John Yeoman, sometime mayor of Chelsea. Her first cartoons were published in the late 1930s and at first “Anton” was a partnership with her brother, though Beryl/Antonia later took sole charge.

Her tall, mannered ladies and gents, clergymen, shopwalkers and spivs inhabited a unique world of closely scribbled shadows: elegant, restrained and sometimes deadly: while Punch was her principal outlet, she also illustrated advertisements and appeared in the New Yorker, Liliput and even Private Eye.

She was the only female member of Punch’s Toby Club, and the first woman elected to the Chelsea Arts Club. (See observations at the top of the page.) Anton’s drawings are always a joy to stumble upon - and the jokes still hold up too. The captions are necessarily teeny-tiny, but dig out your magnifying glass, as everything here merits your careful attention. The jokes are good too… taken in Bouverie Street by @philip.downer

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7 days ago

There is a very nice municipal assemblage on the corner of Lewisham High Street and Ladywell Road, and better yet (given my mixed review of the run north from Rushey Green), there are plans afoot for significant improvements.

There’s a school-of-Norman Shaw feel to much of this group. In order of appearance, we have the fire station (LCC, 1899), police station (Lewisham Board of Works/J Carline, 1899) mortuary/coroners court (1894), and public baths (Wilson, Son & Aldwinkle, 1884). All four buildings are listed.

The fire station was in use until 1956, with four vehicle entrances, accommodation for firefighters, and stabling for the horses. It now houses commercial users.

The police station was sold in 2003 and converted to resi, and the coroners/morgue is semi-derelict but much used by filmmakers: Lewisham Council is seeking permanent users.

The bathhouse is the most interesting, but it’s been on the At Risk register for twenty years, with a Curzon cinema proposal collapsing, and the building suffering from fire and vandalism.

Lewisham has now announced a shortlist of proposals for the building’s future, from Hackit CIC, Liquid Listening, RUSS (Rural Urban Synthesis Society) and Turner Works, and public consultation has started. I’ve included a few of outline images from the shortlisted organisations. Here’s to a secure future for all of these fine buildings. taken in Ladywell by @philip.downer

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8 days ago

God’s acre: we’re at St Mary the Virgin, Lewisham’s original parish church - there’s been a place of worship on this spot for over a thousand years. Today’s church is Georgian (though the tower is older), heavily altered (“deplorably” - Pevsner) by Blomfield in the 1880s, and reordered again in recent years.

The church was sadly locked, so my internal photographs are drawn from St Mary’s own website. The churchyard is fascinating, though, with some robust and impressive graves that illustrate the status of some of Lewisham’s earlier residents. They include a zoetrope designer, a sailmaker with “a dread of the arts”, a moth cataloguer, a cutlery manufacturer, the world’s first philatelist, and Captain Charles Weller of the East India Company (those heavy iron ropes).

It is salutary to consider that this single church once served Lewisham and the hamlets, fields and hills for miles around, and I’ve appended a remarkable list of parishes that were formed out of St Mary’s. It shows the pace at which South London grew in the C19.

nb: Julian Watson’s guide to the church - included within the St Mary’s website - has been an invaluable resource. taken in St Mary the Virgin Parish Church, Lewisham by @philip.downer

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9 days ago

If you’re walking north from Catford to Lewisham, you pass along a thoroughfare that barely seems to be a place at all: a seemingly abandoned terracotta library, a pair of houses brutally sprayed dark grey, an uninspiring assortment of “affordable” modern homes on top of a Tesco…

Some shape is given to things by a couple of reminders of the world before the Welfare State - a short terrace of Norman-windowed almshouses, “built and endowed in 1840 for Six Aged Females”, and the University Hospital, whose core buildings formed the Lewisham Workhouse until the early C20 - the workhouse crest, complete with the Invicta horse of Kent, is still in place over one of the entrances.

Further north, we arrive at Olby’s builders merchants, a pleasing exercise in minimal Deco (with bullseye glass!) - extraordinarily, a photo exists of buildings that stood here prior to 1877.

All told, though, it’s a bit tired and lost. We’ve reached the second quarter of the C21 and this is all pretty liminal. We really should be able to do better. We’ve got some proper history tomorrow, though. taken in Lewisham High Street by @philip.downer

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10 days ago

Park sentinels: three blocks - Bredgar, Malling and Kemsley - make up the Lewisham Park Towers estate. They’re fine examples of 1960s point blocks, 18 storeys in height, and they’ve recently undergone a £20m programme of modernisation, with particular attention paid to energy efficiency.

The towers were built on the site of a row of large Victorian houses, which faced Lewisham Hospital and the old Workhouse across the busy lower end of Lewisham High Street. To the east is Lewisham Park, though the rear aspect is somewhat compromised by subterranean garaging.

In the C19, the land was owned by William Walter Legge, aka Viscount Lewisham, aka Lord Dartmouth. Lewisham town was a district of large houses for City merchants and the independently wealthy, so Dartmouth decided in the 1870s to build substantial villas - rural retreats for the plutocracy - overlooking a handsome private park.

Of course, Lewisham subsequently became more densely developed and infilled, and the park entered municipal ownership in due course. Then towards the end of WWII, three doodlebugs landed in the immediate vicinity, causing major damage to the hospital and the grand houses. Many were subsequently demolished and replaced, but the war memorial in front of the Park Towers survived, and is the focus for Lewisham’s Remembrance commemorations.

The Park Towers are now included in the Lewisham Park Conservation Area, and very smart they look too. There is room to breathe around these towers, with sizeable gardens at their base - somewhat more than the “pocket parks” that today’s hutch stacks have to settle for. taken in Lewisham Park by @philip.downer

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11 days ago

In search of the Bride of Frankenstein: in outward appearance, Catford seems fairly careless of its history, but a council information board telling me that Elsa Lanchester had been born in the vicinity sent me off down the back streets.

And a delightful mash-up of Victorian terraces they are too, with a full pattern book of mouldings and fretwork to delight the eye. There’s a sense here of houses that are special just because they aren’t special. (Does that make sense?)

Lanchester’s birthplace (no. 8) has sadly been pebbledashed at some point in the past. It isn’t clear how long she spent here: her parents were socialist freethinkers who refused to marry, and her mother Edith (Biddy)’s plan to live in sin with her father Seamus resulted in Biddy’s committal to an asylum, at the behest of her own father (Elsa’s grandfather). A national scandal ensued: the Social Democratic Foundation sang “The Red Flag” outside the asylum walls and the newspapers had a field day. The common law couple settled in Catford, and Elsa was born in 1906. At some point the family moved to Battersea, where an unofficial blue plaque commemorates their residence.

Elsa Lanchester became a dancer who studied under Isadora Duncan: she sang in revues (and ironically recorded the song “Don’t Tell My Mother I’m Living In Sin”), met and married Charles Laughton (in 1936 she was Peter Pan to his Captain Hook at the Palladium), made The Private Life of Henry VIII together for Alexander Korda, then headed for Hollywood.

She appeared in dozens of movies and broadcasts, and is best remembered as Boris Karloff’s bride: in the 1960s she sang alongside Elvis Presley in one of his more dreadful films, and was the unhappy Katie Nanna in Mary Poppins. All of this from a little Catford house.

#elsalanchester taken in Catford, London by @philip.downer

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12 days ago

Well, how did THAT happen? By some miracle of modern telecommunications, my account now has 20,000 followers. This is amazing and extraordinary, and I’d like to thank each one of you for coming along for the ride, and congratulate you on your discernment.

I’ve been asking the bots how one reaches 20,000 Instagram followers, and apparently you need “a mix of algorithmic optimization, high-value content, and clear conversion strategies”. I have no idea what the first or third of those requirements really means, and while I hope I’m delivering “high-value content” (what a dismal prospect that sounds), I can’t pretend to be “focusing on one clear problem, one specific audience, and one primary topic [e.g., local food, fitness coaching, design tips]”.

While London’s buildings sit at the core of this account (because I live in London and I love its buildings), I’m afraid the content bounces all over the place like a pinball. My propensity for “testing hooks, analyzing what performs, and repeating winning formats” is low to non-existent.

Still, it’s wonderful to know that you’re all joining in, despite the grinding predictably of kindly old Mr Zuckerberg’s ranking systems and machine learning models, rather than because of them. Long may we collectively fly the flag for individuality, unpredictability and rigorous criticism of Thomas Heatherwick.

And that’s enough self-congratulation. We need to get back on track to Hollywood. Or Catford. Either way…

Hat-tip to Patrick Hamilton, the Midnight Bell and @swkplay. by @philip.downer

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13 days ago