Open House Weekend

This was London's Open House Weekend, an event we all look forward to every year as lovers of buildings and architectural spaces. London is a very large city -- 620 square miles according to the tourist information bureau -- New York City is only half the size of London coming in at between 300 and 320 square miles (none of the sources seem to agree). While some visitors to New York may know there are five boroughs, only Manhattan really ever figures in planning a holiday itinerary. I bet that very few visitors to London know that this city is made up of 33 boroughs with names like Redbridge and Merton and Bexley, along with the better known boroughs of Camden or Westminster or Kensington and Chelsea that figure in every London holiday itinerary. Every September, Open House invites public and private buildings, owners and architects to open up their spaces to the public with free admission for everyone. This year, buildings in 31 of the 33 boroughs participated. (In the interests of complete accuracy, some sources correctly say that London has 32 boroughs, because technically the City of London is not a borough.) So what went wrong with you, Kingston and Barnet?

Every year I promise myself that I will use Open House Weekend to visit sites in the outer boroughs, but I usually end up closer to home in the inner boroughs. This year I had great plans to visit some ancient churches, but the on-going rehab of the Tube and train lines regularly close transport lines on weekends, and sure enough on Saturday morning I discovered that my plans to travel both east to Barking on Saturday and north to Stanmore on Sunday would be very difficult with line closures on those days. Also Bob was looking forward to spending time at a favourite stamp show on Saturday morning. In the past few years he has begun collecting stamps again. His maternal grandfather was a serious stamp collector who cultivated Bob's interest in stamps when he was a boy. When we moved to London, he began attending stamp shows which can be very interesting. Stamps are after all little tiny pieces of art work, so it is quite easy to become enthralled with their designs. The most fun at stamp shows are the displays by collectors of themed stamps. For example, someone might collect stamps with dolls -- and if you are able to gather all the stamps from all the countries of the world who feature dolls in their design -- you have an amazing display of style, geography, and culture that might equal the display in an art or ethnographic museum, but all in tiny visuals. I have been tempted to collect stamps featuring needle crafts. I think everyone remembers the wonderful quilted basket stamps the States issued in the 1970s. Quilt design books, now refer to that basic basket pattern as the "stamp basket." The States also issued a set of stamps with the Gees Bend quilts in a little booklet a few years ago when the quilts were traveling to museums around the country. The Scandinavian countries are always issuing wonderful stamps with knitting and embroidery designs too. As it is, I never seem to get done all the things I want to get done -- hello book pile, hello yarn pile, hello fabric mega-pile -- so can I really add stamp collecting to my life? Maybe next year. Therefore I sent Bob off by himself so he could enjoy himself without me huffing every time he spends money -- which I know is terribly unfair because he never huffs when I buy needless yarn and fabrics.

We set out mid-afternoon for the heart of London, the Royal Academy complex on Piccadilly. The Royal Academy exhibition galleries are situated in Burlington House, remodeled in the Palladian Style by Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington, in 1717 when he assembled the supreme Georgian architecture team of Colen Campbell and William Kent. Their remit was to revive the classical Italianate style brought to England by the architect Inigo Jones in the early years of the 17th century before the Civil War. In the 1860s, the Royal Academy moved into Burlington House from their purpose-built rooms at Somerset House in the Strand, and at the same time, the service wings of Burlington House were rebuilt to house various scientific societies. Each society is housed in a suite of rooms that includes meeting rooms and a fantastic multi-level library. The Royal Society of Chemistry is not quite so interesting because their rooms were redesigned in the 1960s. The Linnean Society and the Society of Antiquaries where the original rooms have been left largely as they were designed, including their libraries with a light-filled central courts surrounded by multi-levels of bookshelves, were just wonderful. The Linnean Society is where Darwin and Russell gave their 1858 paper on evolution by natural selection. At that time the Society met in the main body of Burlington House, not in these rooms, so we were not standing in the actual rooms, but since the Linneans moved in only a few years later, there is no doubt, some of the great battles were fought in these historic rooms. I see on today's Alternet feed, they have reprinted the Guardian's article from earlier this week on how the new film about Darwin, Creation, cannot find distributors in the United States of Stupid because it is "too controversial" since only 39% of Americans believe in evolution according to some Gallup poll, although it has to be said that a nearly equal percentage has "no opinion one way or the other," and that undoubtedly includes people who are tired of stupid polls that ask stupid questions.

After Burlington House we moved on to Marlborough House. Sarah Churchill knew a good piece of real estate when she saw one. When her husband, the Duke of Marlborough was busy having Blenheim Palace built in Oxfordshire, Sarah secured the land next to St James's Palace, hired (and later fired) Christopher Wren to build her a town house. Sarah lived in the house until her death in 1744. A series of Dowager Queens and princes and princesses lived in the house until 1959 when Marlborough House became the headquarters of the Commonwealth secretariat. The original house is an eye-stopper with Orazio Gentileschi's Saloon ceiling, painted originally for Inigo Jones's Queen's House in Greenwich, but never installed, the Wren designed cantilevered staircase with wall paintings of Marlborough's battles with the French, culminating with his great victory at Blenheim. The State rooms include the impressive conference room with a huge mahogany table that seats the delegates from 53 commonwealth nations, according to the guide pamphlet, with 2 billion world citizens represented. (Although I do remember that Fiji was expelled earlier this month, so that makes one fewer country, but probably doesn't alter the population count by much.)

On Sunday, we headed out early for the Benjamin Franklin House on a charming Georgian street between Charing Cross station and the Embankment. When I moved to London, the Franklin house had just become a new project supported by a number of American civic groups and clubs here in London. Then it seemed to drop off the radar until a few years ago when it finally had a very low key opening. I had never been to visit, and I'm glad we went when entry was free because the house is pretty much totally empty. The interior has been beautifully rehabbed, but there isn't anything to look at. I gather from their website they have a costumed actress who guides booked visitors with a sound-and-light show to fill the space. That doesn't sound like a programme I would enjoy.

After Ben Franklin, we visited the Royal Institution founded in 1799 as a science research laboratory where great discoveries have been made by great scientists. Research continues today, but the Society, in its gorgeous headquarters building in Mayfair, now seems to concentrate on educating the public about science through lectures, exhibits, and especially children's activities. We finished the afternoon with two churches in Kensington and Chelsea: a Victorian masterpiece near the Albert Hall and a later Arts and Crafts masterpiece near Sloane Square. A profitable Open House Weekend with at least a half dozen new places for me to find out more about their activities and programmes.