an English garden

On our last day of summer school, a Saturday, we had a blissful break from buildings and headed south to Surrey to see the garden of Gertrude Jeckyll, a pioneer in garden design who created over 400 gardens in England before her death in 1932. We visited the small corner of Munstead Wood, a large private estate, where Jeckyll lived (in a complex of rustic out buildings)and worked, creating gardens whose free-flowing, naturalistic aesthetic flew in the face of Victorian formality and exoticism. Jeckyll planned her gardens with an eye to the existing landscape, and with a sensibility for the seasons; thus, when we visited in late July, the "July" gardens were all but over and the "August gardens" had not yet emerged. I'm no horticulturist, but I did observe a lot of blues and whites in this transitional garden- and lots and lots of industrious bumble bees!

The special thing about this lovely garden is that it is being revived -and literally restored- by a woman who bought the property in 2002 and obviously has a passion for Jeckyll and for cultivating plants and creating peaceful outdoor spaces. Like Jeckyll, Gail Naughton lives in one of the out buildings, a small barn, and has for the past several years, largely by herself, followed original Jeckyll designs and planting schemes (with some variations here and there) in order to faithfully recreate the Munstead Wood gardens of 1900. I was glad to see that Ms. Naughton left her own mark on the property, in a small way: she had a stone mason build a little arched cat-door in the laid-stone foundation of her barn, so kitty can come and go as she pleases!

There's something so English about a rambling, slightly unkempt garden with small surprises --a sun dial, a lily pond-- tucked away here and there, that it puts me in mind of... Peter Cottontail! Lois made a point of taking what little free time we had to visit the Beatrix Potter exhibit on at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and I am so glad we made it there to see the two small galleries full of Beatrix's tiny sketches and finished water-color illustrations for The Tale of Peter Rabbit. She was quite a talented artist and a keen observer of nature; her rabbits, so simply yet fluidly drawn, seemed to bound off the page!

A note on the photos

I am still figuring out how to blog, so the photos in my last post appear in backwards order- so just read my post, then look at them bottom-to-top.

Flowers and model tenements

Our first Sunday in London we took a trip to London's East End, historically the city's poorest, working-class neighborhood. What we found when we got there was a vibrant flower market along a stretch of narrow Columbia Road, the vendors all but hidden behind drifts, sprays, and bunches of flowers and plants of all colors, textures, and sizes. The flower-men and women, actually mostly men, were hawking their plants at high volume in really terrific regional British accents that I will not attempt to identify. Each Sunday the Columbia Road flower market literally fills the street for a good five blocks, leaving barely any room to pass two abreast between stalls. A flea market spilled off onto the side-streets of the flower market, with vendors selling vintage clothing and shabby-chic knick knacks that seemed to be attracting London's hipsters- I could have been in Brooklyn! Framing this lively scene were unbroken ranks of 1860s brick row houses, each one barely bigger than an American suburban garage, but with cheerful polychrome brickwork and decorative lintels and cornices. These row houses were built for working-class people, but are now home to creative-looking boutiques, artisanal bakeries, coffee shops and the like. Leaving the flower market, reluctantly, we walked a few blocks to visit a set of "model" tenements that were planned and constructed in the 1870s by a group of progressive architects and philanthropists aiming to build better designed, more sanitary working-class housing... and thus to alleviate the condition of the poor and contribute to their general "moral uplift." The design of these five-story brick and stone tenements was innovative because each apartment ("flat," to use the English) was accessed via an exterior stairway with iron balcony-landings at each story. This meant more fresh air for tenants, less direct contact in dank, airless hallways (and so less chance of spreading contagious diseases such as cholera, typhus, and yellow fever), and greater fire safety because each apartment was separated by brick, not wood, partitions, and the exterior stairways were brick. By the 1890s, tenements identical to this one had been constructed in Brooklyn.

All aboard!

Train stations are the quintessential building type of London. It seems that they are the organizing principle of the city’s urban fabric, and certainly the a determining factor of people’s varied trajectories through it. In an interesting parallel to the story of historic preservation’s birth in New York City following the demolition of McKim, Mead & White’s Rome-inspired Pennsylvania Station in 1963, London’s Greek Revival-style Euston Station and Euston Arch were callously demolished in 1961, triggering a dramatic shift in public opinion about the virtues of modern planning and the presumed obsolescence of 19th-century buildings. We visited two of London’s most magnificent train stations, St. Pancras Station (Barlow & Ordish, 1863-65) and the Liverpool Street Station (Edward WIlson, 1874). The photos will hopefully say all that needs to be said about the monumental scale of these iron-and-glass structures, which represented the cutting-edge of engineering for their time. St. Pancras Station, which was recently refurbished and re-opened as a terminus for the high-speed Eurostar train, was constructed on a module determined by the width of the beer barrels originally stored in the building’s cellar. Applied engineering!