Wednesday, 16 October 2013
Tuesday, 15 October 2013
Remembering Rosemary Verey
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| Influential designer: Rosemary Verey at Barnsley House Photo: NADREW LAWSON |
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| Barnsley House |
It is now almost a
decade since the death of Rosemary Verey, gardener-owner of Barnsley House,
Gloucestershire.
By Tim Richardson/ 01 Dec 2010/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/8160347/Remembering-Rosemary-Verey.html
Verey was one of the most influential designers and authors
of the Eighties and Nineties, admired for elegant plantings that raised her
work into the realm of classic garden design.
An evening in her honour held earlier this month at the
Garden Museum in London was intended to be a timely reappraisal of her work,
although it was to prove most remarkable for the revelations provided by Sir
Roy Strong. But first, why the need for a reappraisal at all?
It has been fashionable in recent years to deride or ignore
the Verey style. For some, she was the ultimate establishment designer, a
shires lady in pearls and quilted jacket who worked for the Prince of Wales at
Highgrove while also enjoying a career "selling" her Englishness to
the United States through books, lecture tours and garden commissions.
Her star began to wane in the early Nineties as garden style
moved on from the "good-taste" pastel tones inherited (or so it was
believed) from the Arts and Crafts movement of Gertrude Jekyll, and towards the
exotic palette of Christopher Lloyd of Great Dixter and Nori and Sandra Pope of
Hadspen.
This was a long way from the Verey look, which depended on
the soft tones of flowers such as alliums, geraniums, campanulas, clematis and
aquilegia.
Also ranged in implicit opposition were Modernist designers
(led by Dan Pearson and Christopher Bradley-Hole) and, a few years on, the many
influenced by the New Perennials planting approach of Dutchman Piet Oudolf.
These were matters of taste in planting, but one element of
Verey's style that genuinely dated quickly was the high degree of
"historical" effects in her gardens, in the form of potagers, knot
gardens in yew and box and small classical buildings (such as the 18th-century
temple her husband, David, installed at Barnsley House in the Seventies).
Indeed, Verey's book Classic Garden Design (1984) was
subtitled: How to Adapt and Recreate Garden Features of the Past. But by the
Nineties knot gardens, sundials and statuary seemed so "last decade"
in style - as dated as Brideshead Revisited.
But if there had been any danger of the evening at the
Garden Museum becoming over-reverential, that was soon averted by Sir Roy
Strong.
He began by stressing the influence his friend had had on
his own garden-making and also mentioned her bluestocking credentials: despite
her ultra-conventional appearance, Verey had studied maths and economics at
London University, when she had also enjoyed japes such as waterskiing down the
Thames.
Sir Roy wondered, nevertheless, how it was, aged 62, that
she was able to burst upon the scene, a fully fledged doyenne of country house
garden design. Was it really down to a passion for antiquarian gardening books?
Sir Roy went on to produce a startling revelation: that
Verey had had a serious love affair with an interior designer who, he
suggested, may have had a strong influence on her emerging design style and the
layout of the garden at Barnsley in the Seventies.
The identity of this designer was David Vicary, an architect
whose best-known foray into garden design was the fountain garden at Wilton
House.
Details of the affair are recorded in a shoebox of love
letters that document their trysts (now in the possession of garden designers
Julian and Isabel Bannerman, who were friends of Vicary's and inherited his
effects).
Vicary lived at Kilvert's Parsonage, near Chippenham in
Wiltshire. He was part of the wider David Hicks circle of country-house
designers, although he ended up losing his mind: Sir Roy painted a vivid
portrait of Vicary's tragic final days, sleeping in his car under newspapers.
Verey was "hot stuff in Gloucestershire",
according to Sir Roy, "highly sexed, like many who follow the hunt"
and "the only woman I have ever known who kissed me full on the lips the
very first time we met". She was so well known for her risqué behaviour
that she was "barred from several houses" in the county.
Not that Sir Roy was in any way censorious, noting that
Verey herself had said that her marriage to David Verey was an affectionate one
that suited both parties. What raised the Vicary revelations above the level of
tittle-tattle was Sir Roy's contention that it was Vicary who opened Verey's
eyes to the possibilities of design.
By "outing" Verey in this way, I do think Sir Roy
was making a serious point, a decade after the subject's death.
Such relationships are important in designers' lives, and
it's a measure of Verey's legacy that it should be deemed interesting at all.
What scandalised some - more than the revelation of the affair(s) - was the
implication that Verey, as a woman, would have needed this male designer to
give her all her ideas, or at least start her off on the right track.
But again, I don't think Sir Roy was being misogynistic; it
was just his take on this particular relationship.
As the audience emerged into a London blighted by a Tube
strike, the general chaos seemed an appropriate epilogue to an event that had
seen the genteel world of Cotswolds garden design turned upside down and shaken
about.
• Tim Richardson is a garden writer and critic
She was born Rosemary Isabel Baird Sandilands and educated
at Eversley School, Folkestone, and University College, London. In 1939 she
married David Verey, whose family owned Barnsley House.
Verey's most famous garden design was that of her own house,
Barnsley House, near Cirencester in Gloucestershire. In 1970 she opened the
garden for one day to the public for the National Gardens Scheme but eventually
it was open 6 days per week to accommodate the 30,000 annual visitors. In 1984
when her husband David died, Rosemary Verey began designing gardens for
American and British clients. Most notable are HRH the Prince of Wales, and Sir
Elton John, Princess Michael of Kent, the Marquess of Bute and the New York
Botanical Garden.
Rosemary Verey was well known for taking imposing elements
from large public gardens and bringing them into scale for the home gardeners
use. Her laburnum walk, which has been photographed many, many times, is an
example of this technique. The National Trust's Bodnant Garden in North Wales
has a very large laburnum walk that inspired Verey to plant a similar, smaller
scale laburnum walk at Barnsley House. Verey is also noted for making vegetable
(ornamental potager) gardens fashionable once again. The potager at Barnsley
House was inspired by that at the Château de Villandry on the Loire in France.
She was awarded the OBE in 1996 and in 1999 from the Royal
Horticultural Society the highest accolade that Society can award, the Victoria
Medal of Honour (VMH).
A bolder, more dramatic Barnsley
Mary Keen on the
future of the late Rosemary Verey's Gloucestershire garden, celebrated
worldwide for its 'English' style
By Mary Keen / 16 Jun 2001/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/4793708/A-bolder-more-dramatic-Barnsley.html
ROSEMARY Verey's death signals the end of an era. I doubt we
will see her like again. She belonged to a generation of Englishwomen who
possessed an uncompromising sense of duty and strength of character. The
daughter of a naval officer, she always knew the value of self-discipline and
her world-famous garden at Barnsley House in Gloucestershire was run with
meticulous attention to detail.
Every day she rose early to walk round the beds and borders
before her gardeners arrived at 8am. A diary of the work done was kept by her
staff, so that when her son, Charles, took over the running of the place three
years ago, he found records of daily maintenance going back for 10 years. The
garden, he says, is a mine of her knowledge and skill, but he knows that she
would have wanted it to evolve, because she understood that all gardens age and
change. Last winter, after a ceanothus died, she said to him: "Now you can
choose the right plant for that place."
With her husband, the architectural historian David Verey,
she spent years choosing the right varieties to plant around Barnsley, their
beautiful, 17th-century stone house. They shared an interest in buildings and
history, and when she began to design and plant the garden, her influences were
the early horticultural manuals that she had begun to collect.
The box hedges and knot gardens, punctuated by small-scale
topiary that she devised specifically for Barnsley, were copied all over the
world. Clipped balls and domes may seem obvious to us now, but they were not a
common feature in the early 1980s. The tight, trimmed layouts that she wrote
about in Classic Gardens made formality fashionable, but it was the potager
that Verey designed for Barnsley in the mid 1980s that was perhaps her greatest
triumph. Inspired by the celebrated gardens of Chateau Villandry in the Loire
Valley, the potager was witty and original, its small, box-edged beds filled
with vegetables that none of us had ever seen before.
Long before the River Cafe opened, I remember noticing
Cavolo Nero there. When I admired it, in a spontaneously generous act that was
typical of her Verey fetched an envelope and addressed it to me on the spot,
promising she would send the seed when it was ripe.
The other remarkable feature at Barnsley, which has perhaps
been more photographed than any other garden, is the formal laburnum walk,
underplanted with the shadowy mauve globes of Allium aflatunense. After her
funeral it was looking its best. Walking under laburnums in dappled shade is a
very different experience from confronting their flowers in broad daylight. It
was the gentleness of it all that made it so striking. Any brighter, and it
would have become vulgar.
As the look of the garden changes, the colours within it
will get stronger. Charles Verey likes red, and modern trends are brighter. His
mother loved colour, but it was the colour of gentle English skies. Misty
mauves, purples and blues, clear pinks and plenty of greens all melted into one
another in her flower-beds. Although she never used primary colours together
and strong contrasts and brassy orange were rare in her gardens, in its day,
her palette was as original as her formal layouts.
Like Vita Sackville-West, Verey believed in planting
abundantly, within a formal framework, but where Sissinghurst was strong on
roses, Barnsley was the place for herbaceous plants and bulbs. In spring, the
bulbs were dazzling, because she felt that early in the year bright colours
worked better. She was clever with yellow, which is often difficult to use. I
learned from her that it can light up gardens where stone is the dominant
material. Good Planting, published in 1990, explains how she achieved her
effects; by planting in layers so carefully planned that one picture faded into
another throughout the year.
Her forte was high-maintenance gardening, the kind that has
to be watched and managed every day. Timing is critical: the lifting of bulbs,
dropping-in of annuals, cutting-back of faded perennials and constant judging
of the picture. The meticulous attention to detail may be replaced by Charles
Verey's broader vision. He likes the idea of developing the drama of the
terraced lawn at the front of the house, but he is wary of adding to the
workload and wants to continue exploring organic methods of pest control.
The fame of Barnsley brought her commissions all over the
world for clients who loved her English style. She made a drought-tolerant knot
garden in Florida and a herb and bee garden in Montreal. She was in Kentucky
advising a new client five weeks before she died. In England, she devised
rainbow borders for Elton John and laid out knot gardens, herb gardens,
Elizabethan gardens and potagers in counties from Scotland to Kent. Her most
prized commission was for the Prince of Wales at Highgrove; it was the pinnacle
of a glittering career.
In all her famous comings and goings, Rosemary Verey never
lost touch with her values, her village and the Church. In the end, it was not
as a gardener that we praised her - that went without saying - but as a devout
Christian who belonged to an age that is over.
Sunday, 13 October 2013
Raymond Erith New-Classical Architect.
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Raymond Erith with Quinlan Terry
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Raymond Erith New-Classical Architect
Raymond Charles Erith RA FRIBA (7 August 1904 - 30 November
1973) was a leading classical architect in England during the period dominated
by the modern movement after the Second World War. His work demonstrates his
continual interest in expanding the classical tradition to establish a
progressive modern architecture, drawing on the inherited experience and wisdom
of the past.
At a time when traditionalists were routinely dismissed as
Neo-Georgian, Erith’s skill and originality set him apart, as did his complex
and creative use of his sources of inspiration and his quirky sense of humour.
The sheer pleasure he found in architecture is evident in his buildings.
Erith was appointed architect for the reconstruction of
Downing Street (1958), elected a Royal Academician (1959) and served on the
Royal Fine Art Commission (1960–73). Since his death, exhibitions of his work
have been held by the Royal Academy of Arts (1976),Gainsborough’s House,
Sudbury (1979), Niall Hobhouse (1986) and Sir John Soane’s Museum (2004).
Raymond Erith was born in London, eldest son of Charles
Erith, a mechanical engineer and his wife May. At the age of four he contracted
tuberculosis, which led to twelve years of intermittent illness and left him
permanently lame. He trained at the Architectural Association (1921–26) and
worked for Morley Horder and Verner Rees before setting up his own practice in
London in 1928. From 1929-39 he was in partnership with Bertram Hume, with whom
he won an international competition for replanning the Lower Norrmalm area of
Stockholm (1934).
In 1934 he married Pamela, younger daughter of Arthur and
Elsie Spencer Jackson, who had also qualified at the AA. They had four
daughters. In 1936 they moved to Dedham, Essex. Among Erith’s early commissions
were Great House, Dedham (1937) and gates, lodges and cottages in Windsor Great
Park for King George VI (1939). As a young man he looked back to the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in order to pick up the thread of
tradition while it was still unbroken and carry it forward from there. This led
him to John Soane, an important influence on his early designs but later he
turned to earlier sources of inspiration and especially to Palladio and the
robust practicality of his farmhouse villas.
During the Second World War from 1940-45 Erith became a
farmer in Essex, where he lived for the rest of his life. This experience and
his country practice in East Anglia immediately after the war gave him a
profound understanding of the local vernacular architecture, which was to have
a subtle influence on his mature style.
In 1946 Erith opened an office in Ipswich, moving it to
Dedham in 1958. His architecture ranges from cottages and small houses to
public buildings such as the Library[8] and quadrangle at Lady Margaret Hall,
Oxford (1959-1963), Jack Straw’s Castle on Hampstead Heath (1963) and the New
Common Room Building at Gray’s Inn (1971). Major work includes 15,17 and 19,
Aubrey Walk, London W8 (1951), the Pediment, Aynho, Northamptonshire and its
garden buildings (1956–73), the Provost’s Lodgings at the Queen’s College,
Oxford (1958) and the Folly in Herefordshire (1961).
His larger country houses are Bentley, Sussex (1960–71), Wivenhoe
New Park, Essex (1962) and King’s Walden Bury, Hertfordshire (1969). The best
known of his many restorations was the reconstruction of Nos 10 and 11 and
complete rebuilding of No. 12, Downing Street (1959–63). He also remodelled
numerous houses including Morley Hall, Wareside, Hertfordshire (1955),
Wellingham House, Ringmer, Sussex (1955–71), Hunton Manor, Hampshire (1962) and
Shelley’s Folly, Cooksbridge, Sussex (1968). After Erith’s death in 1973, his
partner Quinlan Terry carried on his practice (now Quinlan and Francis Terry
Architects).
That Erith was an outstanding draughtsman is seen in his
sketchbooks, working drawings and designs for the many competitions he entered
in his early years. His fine drawings were regularly exhibited at the Royal
Academy Summer Exhibitions. These showed many of his most important
commissions, as well as unexecuted schemes such as a Factory, Warehouse,
Offices etc. at Ipswich (1948), a House in Devonshire to be called the Redoubt
for Mr Freeman (1949) and Variation on a theme by Palladio: Design for a Church
in Italy (1952).
From 1962 onwards Erith’s designs were regularly exhibited
at the RA in the form of linocuts by Quinlan Terry, who became his pupil in
1962 and subsequently his partner.
For a detailed information on Erith’s life and work,
including full bibliography, see:
Lucy Archer, Raymond Erith Architect (1985)
Margaret Richardson, Lucy Archer, Kenneth Powell, Quinlan
Terry and George Saumarez Smith, Raymond Erith (1904-1973): Progressive
Classicist, Sir John Soane’s Museum 2004
A neglected architect who shunned concrete
THE outcry at the closure of landmark pub Jack Straw’s
Castle on the edge of Hampstead Heath last summer wasn’t the biggest hullabaloo
caused by the only post-war listed pub in England.
According to Lucy Archer, daughter of the late architect
Raymond Erith, who designed the pub in North End Way, Hampstead: “There was
huge opposition when it was built in 1963. People wanted it to be more modern.”
But, typical of Erith, he preferred to show how a modern,
open-plan building could be made attractive and functional using a traditional
timber frame.
He said: “Wood suits pubs. With a concrete frame, the beams
have to be cased. My posts and beams are the real thing. You can see them and
touch them and the landlord can knock nails into them.”
The result was a building lauded by Highgate-born poet
laureate Sir John Betjeman at Erith’s memorial service following his death in
1974 as “true Middlesex” and “a delight”.
According to Mrs Archer, Erith’s adherence to tradition in
an age of modernist architecture “inevitably limited his commissions,
especially for public buildings, which is why Jack Straw’s Castle is so
important”.
The former pub, while retaining its outside appearance, is
being turned private inside, with flats and a gym. However, many more Erith
buildings can now be appreciated in a new exhibition of his work, Raymond
Erith, Progressive Classicist, at Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn
Fields, Holborn.
The show marks the centenary of the architect’s birth in
1904 and has been curated by Mrs Archer, not only his daughter, but also an
architectural historian.
The show includes Erith’s extensive yet seamless remodelling
of 10 Downing Street, where one contemporary wag wrote Harold Macmillan “was
chased out by termites” in 1959.
Also on show are pictures of more local Erith buildings,
including the new Common Room and Buttery at Gray’s Inn, South Square, Holborn
(1971) and the 1968 London Underground ventilation tower in Gibson Square,
Islington.
Mrs Archer says the exhibition couldn’t be in a better place
– The former house of Sir John Soane, the neo-classical architect active around
1800. “My father trained in the age of the young modernist architects,” she
says, “but he didn’t want to throw out tradition. He was genuinely inspired to
learn from Soane, to move classical architecture on, as he felt Soane had done.
“So he must have spent a lot of time at Sir John Soane’s
Museum when he was young, and I can remember coming to meet him here when I was
about 18.”
The resulting Erith designs, Mrs Archer says, were never
pastiche, but “modern and geometric. They couldn’t be anything but 20th-century
buildings. But he would also always look at the surrounding neighbourhood and
wanted them to fit in and appear as if they had always been there.”
So Jack Straw’s Castle, which replaced an earlier,
bombed-out pub on the site, was unusual in being “a completely free-standing
one-off, and the only time when Erith achieved the shock factor”, Mrs Archer
says.
The Hampstead Heath pub was typical in showing the famous
Erith sense of humour.
Jack Straw was the deputy leader of the 1381 Peasants'
Revolt, who is said to have lived on the site and bequeathed his name to the
earlier pub. The architect of its replacement therefore gave Jack Straw’s
Castle wooden battlements and two towers and one housed the building’s water
tanks and the other the lift gear.
London born but Surrey bred, Raymond Erith had a highly
unusual childhood.
Mrs Archer explains: “He contracted tuberculosis at the age
of four and was largely bedridden until 16, when he recovered. But this gave
him a lot of time to think, and he developed a great intellectual independence.
“He spent a particularly lonely time between the ages of
five and eight at a nursing home in Margate, Kent, where, to pass the time, he
started drawing. One picture of a lighthouse was precociously drawn on fancy
grey paper which he had specially requested to be brought from home.
“He never talked about his illness afterwards, because he
absolutely didn’t want to be seen as an invalid. And he was always a very happy
person from a very affectionate family, who made his sick room the centre of
the home.
“Nevertheless, he only managed to complete four terms at
school. But he still got accepted to train at the Architectural Association in
Bedford Square, Bloomsbury, at the age of 17, in 1921.”
Now 65, Mrs Archer, lives in an Erith house originally built
for her grandparents in Essex, the area he later moved to himself.
“It was very exciting to watch him at home, drawing,” she
recalls. “He had tremendous concentration. If one of us four girls would come
marching down the corridor, he used to shout out ‘Don’t shake!’ And sometimes
he would draw through the night. Then, over breakfast, he’d make a deliberately
provocative remark, to get us all thinking and discussing.”
The exhibition features some of Erith’s sketchbooks, filled
not only with exquisite watercolours, but obsessive drawings of nuts and bolt,
reflecting the intensely practical interest he inherited from his father, a
mechanical engineer.
Raymond Erith died suddenly, aged 69. Mrs Archer recalls:
“He had a cough which was diagnosed as lung cancer, he got through a dangerous
operation, then died two days later from a heart attack. He had been so active
so it was a tremendous shock.”
Past Exhibitions
Raymond Erith (1904-1973): Progressive Classicist
An Exhibition in the Soane Gallery from 8 October to 31
December 2004
Sponsored by Lisbet Rausing and
Peter Baldwin / Sir John Soane Museum http://www.soane.org/exhibitions/raymond_erith_1904_1973_progressive_classicist
Sir John Soane's Museum is pleased to announce a new
exhibition examining the work of Raymond Erith, one of the most accomplished
and original English architects of the last century. Raymond Erith: Progressive
Classicist will take a fresh look at Erith's extraordinary body of work,
bringing together the best of his drawings with a series of stunning new
photographs.
Raymond Erith occupies an unusual position in the history of
British architecture. Like his great hero, John Soane, he did not always follow
the prevailing stylistic currents of his age. He also shared Soane's belief in
'progressive classicism', deciding not to reject tradition but draw creatively
on its accumulated wisdom. Although in sharp contrast to the work of many of his
contemporaries, Erith's architecture, with its subtle use of natural materials,
meticulous (sometimes playful) detailing and skilled craftsmanship earned him
wide respect and admiration. His work ranges from small houses to public
buildings, such as the library and quadrangle at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford;
Jack Straw's Castle on Hampstead Heath and the New Common Room Building at
Gray's Inn, London. The best known of his many restorations was the
reconstruction of 10, 11 and 12 Downing Street.
Erith was a superb draughtsman and a selection of fine
drawings, produced for the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibitions will be included
in the exhibition. These will be augmented by a series of new photographs of
Erith's work commissioned from the acclaimed architectural photographer Mark
Fiennes.
This exhibition, curated by Lucy Archer, will not only
provide the opportunity for a reassessment of Erith's architecture but it will
also introduce his work to a new generation, too young to remember the
exhibition which was held at the Royal Academy in 1976. During the thirty years
since his death there has been a growing awareness of the continuing relevance
of architectural tradition and there is much in the skilful blending of
classical and vernacular in Erith's work to inspire designers of the
twenty-first century.
Raymond Erith: Progressive Classicist will be accompanied by
a lavish 80-page colour catalogue featuring essays by Lucy Archer, Ken Powell
and George Saumarez Smith.
Catalogue available from Museum shop
History
10 Downing Street
By the 1950s, the material state of 10 Downing Street had
reached crisis point. Bomb damage had worsened existing structural problems:
the building was suffering from subsidence, sloping walls, twisting door frames
and an enormous annual repair bill.
The Ministry of Works carried out a survey in 1954 into the
state of the structure. The report bounced from Winston Churchill (1951 to
1955) to Anthony Eden (1955 to 1957) to Harold Macmillan (1957 to 1963) as one
Prime Minister followed the other. Finally, a committee set up by Macmillan
concluded that drastic action was required before the building fell or burnt
down.
The committee put forward a range of options, including the
complete demolition of Number 10, 11 and 12 and their replacement with a new
building. That idea was rejected and it was decided that Number 12 should be
rebuilt, and Numbers 10 and 11 should be strengthened and their historic
features preserved.
The architect Raymond Erith was selected to supervise the
work, which was expected to take 2 years and cost £500,000. It ended up taking
a year longer than planned and costing double the original estimate. The
foundations proved to be so rotten that concrete underpinning was required on a
massive scale.
Number 10 was completely gutted. Walls, floors and even the
columns in the Cabinet Room and Pillared Room proved to be rotten and had to be
replaced. New features were added too, including a room facing onto Downing
Street and a veranda at Number 11 for the Chancellor.
It was also discovered that the familiar exterior façade was
not black at all, but yellow. The blackened colour was a product of two
centuries of severe pollution. To keep the familiar appearance, the newly
cleaned yellow bricks were painted black to match their previous colour. Erith's
work was completed in 1963, but not long afterwards, dry rot became apparent
and further repairs had to be undertaken.
Margaret Thatcher (1979 to 1990) appointed architect Quinlan
Terry to refurbish the state drawing rooms at the end of the 1980s. Two of the
rooms, the White Drawing Room and Terracotta Room, gained ornate plasterwork
ceilings. In the White Drawing Room, this included adding the national emblems
of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
All the building work of the past few decades could have
been ruined when a terrorist bomb exploded in 1991. An IRA mortar bomb was
fired from a white transit van in Whitehall and exploded in the garden of
Number 10, only a few metres away from where Prime Minister John Major (1990 to
1997) was chairing a Cabinet meeting to discuss the Gulf War.
Although no one was killed, it left a crater in the Number
10 gardens and blew in the windows of neighbouring houses. John Major and some
of his staff moved into Admiralty Arch while damage caused by the bomb was
repaired.
By 2006, it was clear that the Downing Street complex was no
longer able to support the business of the Prime Minister's Office reliably.
Independent surveys established that the building was no longer weather-tight,
the heating system was failing, and the information and communications
technology (ICT) network was at the limits of its operation. Power outages and
water leaks were frequent occurrences and impacted significantly on the
day-to-day operation of the Prime Minister's Office.
In addition to deterioration through age, pressures on the
buildings had increased dramatically over recent years, through an increase in
occupancy (stable at around 50 for many years) to around 170. In 2006, Prime
Minister Tony Blair (1997 to 2007) authorised a new programme of improvements,
with the building remaining operational throughout. Work was launched to
address structural failure, renew the infrastructure, improve access and
enhance the building's sustainability.
Structural issues were among the first to be tackled, and a
phased exterior repair project was launched to address failing lead guttering,
cracking brickwork and other structural issues. The distinctive black
colourwash was also renewed, as it had faded away in many areas to reveal the
yellow brickwork beneath. During the course of the works it was discovered that
the façade of 11 Downing Street was unstable, and had to be secured using 225
stainless steel pins. All work was carried out in consultation with English
Heritage.
Other projects have been undertaken to renew the building's
ageing infrastructure and to replace many of the building's key services,
including heating, fire protection and electrical power distribution.
Sustainability is a key feature of the programme and a 10% reduction in carbon
emissions was achieved during 2011. Rainwater harvesting was introduced in
2009, providing a sustainable source of water for the garden. Accessibility for
disabled visitors has been significantly improved through the introduction of
ramps and modernisation of lifts. Many of the public areas of the building have
also been restored, including the front entrance hall, the state and small
dining rooms and the study.
An ongoing programme is in place to upgrade facilities to
modern standards, and to ensure the preservation of this historic building for
years to come.
Charlie gives an exclusive 'Olympic 2012' tour of 10 Downing Street
10 Downing Street
Restoration and modernisation
"The architect Raymond Erith was selected to supervise the work, which was expected to take 2 years and cost £500,000. It ended up taking a year longer than planned and costing double the original estimate. The foundations proved to be so rotten that concrete underpinning was required on a massive scale.
Number 10 was completely gutted. Walls, floors and even the columns in the Cabinet Room and Pillared Room proved to be rotten and had to be replaced. New features were added too, including a room facing onto Downing Street and a veranda at Number 11 for the Chancellor.
Friday, 11 October 2013
Wednesday, 9 October 2013
"HaarBarbaar" Barbershop
Indeed ! All over Europe, reacting against mass production, creative and skilled young professionals are rediscovering the lost qualities of courtesy and 'savoir-faire'.
Barbershop HAARBARBAAR in Wolvenstraat 35/ Amsterdam offers a true revival of professional barber craftsmanship together with authentic gentleness
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HaarBarbaar Barbershop is housed on one of the main streets
in Amsterdam negen straatjes namely the Wolvenstraat. This complete brand new
shop is absolutely stunning and runned by two brothers from Rotterdam-Zuid
namely Donny and Nick Eimers. These incredible sympathetic brothers carry
craftsmanship at it’s highest form…With cut-throat shaves, splendid
old-fashioned 1920-1930's haircuts, all this in traditional barbershop chairs
with a perfect collected Spotify music playlist on the background. There’s
plenty to prove HaarBarbaar Barbershop is simply the best Barbershop in the
West. Oh, and don’t miss out on the matchless hot towel shave+face massage. And
Jack Daniels on the rocks. No woman allowed and only walk-in first come first
serve. A-One-Not-to-pass-by!
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Wolvenstraat 35
1016 EN Amsterdam, Netherlands
Phone 020 773 7175
Email info@haarbarbaar.nl
Website http://www.haarbarbaar.nl
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| Oh, and don’t miss out on the matchless hot towel shave+face massage. |
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Nick Eimers relaxing with a cigarette outside the
Shop
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