Subterms
On the night of 30 May 1942, Air Marshal Arthur Harris, Commander-in-Chief of Royal Air Force Bomber Command, launched the first of his 1,000-bomber raids on Nazi Germany. The target was the ancient city of Cologne. By the following morning a sixth of the city’s homes were damaged or destroyed. But this terrifying raid was […] More
Wentworth Woodhouse in Yorkshire, the longest if not the largest country house in England, has been a problem ever since the late Manny Shinwell, Attlee’s Minister of fuel and power, in a one-sided skirmish in the class war, ordered its park to be dug up for open-cast coal mining shortly after the Second World War. […] More
In 1874, the year before he died, the architect Alexander Thomson delivered a series of public lectures on the history of architecture. His Glasgow audience must have been surprised at some of his observations. ‘Philosophers,’ he told them, ‘in explaining the nature of light and endeavouring to give us some idea of the rate at […] More
A town that has, in its centre, a street called the Land of Green Ginger surely cannot fail to be interesting, but this intriguing name is nowhere near as old as the much bombed and much abused city of Hull itself. Properly called Kingston upon Hull since the reign of Edward I, and situated where the […] More
In May 1968, as students rampaged through the streets of Paris, a rather more positive cultural event took place some 30 kilometres to the southwest. Vaux-le-Vicomte, the great 17th-century chateau, the precursor of Versailles, set in its magnificent formal garden, was fully opened to the public for the first time. Given that there is no […] More
A century ago, in the summer of 1915, the Victoria & Albert Museum mounted an exhibition of the work of a living artist for the first time. This was the sculptor Ivan Mestrovic (1883–1962), to whom two whole galleries were devoted in a display designed by the English architect Charles Holden (who had already collaborated […] More
Ruins are not usually inhabited. By their very nature, they tend to be abandoned, neglected and remote. Such places as Tintern Abbey or Rievaulx were not very hospitable once the original buildings, deliberately built far from centres of population, had been pillaged and made roofless. There can be ruins in city centres, of course, as in […] More
‘We speak of the sky as a vault, a dome,’ wrote W.R. Lethaby in his recondite but influential book of 1891, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth; ‘It may be said that at great periods of architecture ceilings were always skies.’ He was thinking of, among other things, the mosaic-covered vaults and domes of Byzantine churches on […] More
