M A RT I N R A N D A L L T R AV E L
Bulletin 2, 2018
LONDON DAYS
‘Dear, damn’d, distracting town’ – Alexander Pope
London’s Top Ten Unveiling the famous sights See page 5 for full details
If you would like to receive our fortnightly e-mail updates on the latest range of London Days, please e-mail info@ martinrandall.co.uk, or call us on 020 8742 3355. Details and dates are released frequently throughout the year.
The itinerary is detailed and meticulously planned with special arrangements and privileged access significant features. Refreshments and lunches are included and planned in appropriate settings for sustenance, conversation and reflection.
London Days are all-inclusive, non-residential tours opening doors in the capital to its wonderful art, architecture and history.
These are active, fulfilling days, often with a lot of walking and standing. Travel is mainly by Underground, sometimes taxi, occasionally by private coach or bus.
They are led by carefully-chosen experts who enthuse, interpret and inspire, bringing to life each specialist theme. Radio guides enable lecturers to talk in a normal conversational voice while participants can hear without difficulty whether in a museum or on a main road.
M A RT I N R A N D A L L T R AV E L
Bulletin 2, 2018
Contents – London Days by date
Those with titles in italics fall on a Saturday April 2018
26: The Complete London Hogarth............. 12
9: Japanese Art in London.............................. 17
10: The Ever-Changing City Skyline................4
27: Robert Adam’s Country Houses............. 13
25: Ancient Greece at the British Museum................................................ 17
11: London’s Underground Railway................4
29: London’s Top Ten.......................................... 5
12: London’s Top Ten.......................................... 5
July 2018
18: Hawksmoor................................................... 5
3: The Ever-Changing City Skyline..................4
19: Great Railway Termini..................................6
10: The London Choral Day........................... 19
25: Seven Churches & a Synagogue...............6
12: The London South Bank Walk...................8
26: The London Backstreet Walk.....................7
17: Interwar Interiors....................................... 10
27: Caravaggio & Rembrandt...........................7
25: The London Backstreet Walk.....................7
May 2018
August 2018
8: London’s Top Ten............................................ 5
3: Ancient Egypt at the British Museum............................... 13
9: Hampstead in the 1930s..............................8 12: The London Squares Walk.............................8 16: The London Backstreet Walk.....................7 17: The London South Bank Walk...................8 18: Charles Dickens............................................ 9
14: Stained Glass.............................................. 14 21: Impressionism in London......................... 12 22: London Gardens Walk.............................. 11 24: The London South Bank Walk...................8
25: Arts & Crafts.................................................. 9
31: Charles Dickens............................................ 9
29: The Tudors.................................................. 10
September 2018
June 2018
3: The Tudors.................................................... 10
5: Seven Churches & a Synagogue.................6 6: London’s Underground Railway...................4 7: Caravaggio & Rembrandt..............................7 11: Interwar Interiors....................................... 10
4: Arts & Crafts.................................................... 9 19: Genius of Titian......................................... 14 20: The Complete London Hogarth............. 12 24: John Nash................................................... 15
12: Hawksmoor................................................... 5
25: Mediaeval Art in London......................... 15
14: The Italian Renaissance............................ 11
October 2018
19: London Gardens Walk.............................. 11
2: Wren in the City........................................... 16
19: The London Backstreet Walk.....................7
3: Hampstead in the 1930s..............................8
22: Impressionism in London......................... 12
5: Golden Age of British Painting................. 16
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26: Great Railway Termini..................................6 27: London Lecture Afternoon......................... 20 November 2018 6: Mediaeval Art in London............................ 15 8: The Italian Renaissance.............................. 11 15: Turner & Claude........................................ 18 16: Ancient Egypt at the British Museum............................... 13 21: Great Railway Termini..................................6 28: Islamic Art in London................................ 18 December 2018 4: Japanese Art in London.............................. 17 5: Ancient Greece at the British Museum................................................ 17 11: Golden Age of British Painting............... 16
‘A wonderful day, I feel like I have been royally entertained, educated and exercised!’ -participant on Charles Dickens, 2017 Illustrations. Above: The City of London, 20th-century reproduction of an engraving by S. & N. Buck, 1749. Front cover: London, St Paul’s Cathedral, early18th-century copper engraving. Right: A sketch of Westminster Abbey.
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Contents – General information Making a booking There is no booking form for London Days. You can book over the phone, or online at www.martinrandall.com. If booking by phone, we will need to know: •
Name and date of the London Day(s) you are booking.
•
Your name(s), as you would like it/ them to appear to other participants.
•
Your address, telephone number and email address (if you have one).
•
Any special dietary requirements and your contact details for the night prior to the day.
Payment. If by credit or debit card, give the card number, start date and expiry date (but for security not in an e-mail). There is no charge for using either a credit or debit card.
London Days vouchers: the perfect gift idea Since its inception in 2012 our London Days programme has opened doors and minds to the wonders of the capital, and has continued to grow in breadth and popularity. The launch of our London Days gift vouchers offers the opportunity to share the experience of a cultural day out in the capital and are an ideal gift for occasions, from birthdays to anniversaries. The gift voucher, a large postcard print depicting St Paul’s Cathedral, can be purchased to any value, or for a specified day. For further information or to purchase a London Days gift voucher, please contact us on: Martin Randall Travel: 020 8742 3355, or email info@martinrandall.co.uk Martin Randall Australasia: 1300 55 95 95, or email anz@martinrandall.com.au North America: 1 800 988 6168, or email usa@martinrandall.com
Confirmation will be sent to you upon receipt of payment. Further details including joining instructions will be sent about two weeks before the day. Cancellation. We will return the full amount if you notify us 22 or more days before the event. We will retain 50% if cancellation is made within three weeks and 100% if within three days. Please put your cancellation in writing to info@ martinrandall.co.uk. We advise taking out insurance in case of cancellation and recommend that overseas clients are also covered for possible medical and repatriation costs.
These are active, fulfilling days, often with a lot of walking and standing. Travel is mainly by Underground, sometimes taxi, occasionally by private coach or bus.
We also expect to run the following London Days. Please contact us to register your interest in any of them. Holborn & Clerkenwell new Thames to Highgate Walk new
Alternatively, contact us to receive our fortnightly e-mail updates on the latest range of London Days. Send an e-mail to info@martinrandall.co.uk, or call 020 8742 3355. Book online at www.martinrandall.com
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The Ever-Changing City Skyline Wren’s Cathedral to Rees’s Towers
Bulletin 2, 2018 Later start
Image: View from the Tate Modern viewing platform.
Broadgate is a fine example of a late 20thcentury business quarter with ground-scraper buildings accommodating large dealing floors for international banks and fine publicly-accessible spaces providing the social opportunities which are conducive to business activity. Only 25 years later, the development is being refurbished and some buildings replaced.
Tuesday 10 April 2018 (le 809) - Currently full Tuesday 3 July 2018 (le 945) - Currently full Lecturer: Professor Peter Rees CBE For twenty-eight years Peter Rees was the City of London’s chief planning officer, and since 2014 has been Professor of Places and City Planning at University College London. Charismatic, articulate and passionate about planning, he has done more to shape the City’s current appearance than any other single individual, and this is an exceptional opportunity to hear his story and to understand how and why London looks as it does.
Starting at St Paul’s, we see some of the planning challenges posed by the ‘reframing’ of the Cathedral over the last decades. Paternoster Square was redeveloped following a tortuous process of consultation, royal intervention and redesign. After a visit to the roof-top space at Jean Nouvel’s 1 New Change, there is a surreptitious stroll through The Royal Exchange, the City’s centre of gossip, and an exploration of the hidden alleyways between Cornhill and Lombard Street. Here banking was born, and City pubs still fulfil a vital business role.
Having grown outwards in the 80s and 90s, the City is now growing upwards, with a cluster of office towers sited to maximise their proximity to an abundance of public transport while minimising their impact upon the London skyline. A Gherkin sits alongside a CheeseGrater, and the Walkie-Talkie provides a high-level opportunity to contemplate the everchanging City below. Start: 10.30am, St Paul’s tube station. Finish: c. 7.00pm, The Walkie-Talkie, 20 Fenchurch Street EC3. Price: £220. This includes lunch, refreshments and one taxi journey. Fitness: most of the day is spent outside and on foot, both standing and walking. Group size: maximum 18 participants.
From the mid-1980s, and boosted by the ‘Big Bang’, the Square Mile became larger, swallowing parts of neighbouring boroughs.
Image: experimental first trip on the Underground, wood engraving c. 1880.
London’s Underground Railway A history and appreciation of the Tube
Wednesday 11 April 2018 (le 821) Wednesday 6 June 2018 (le 913) Lecturer: Andrew Martin Shanghai has more track, Paris and New York have more stations, but London has by a clear margin the oldest urban underground railway in the world: 2013 was its 150th anniversary. It is also by far the most complicated, having started messily as several independent and often competing enterprises; contrary to sensible practice, strategic planning by unitary municipal government came towards the end of the process, not in advance. Modern London was shaped by the Tube rather
than vice versa. Motivation and management has been various: commercial and philanthropic, entrepreneurial and Keynesian, expansionist and defeatist. The first ‘cut and cover’ lines, in trenches under existing roads, were vigorously promoted by a socialistic solicitor. The ‘deep level’ tube lines were pushed through by a maverick American, while the suburban extensions between the wars fulfilled the utopian ideals of a dour Yorkshireman who came bitterly to regret the urban sprawl they spawned. Now, after decades of relative neglect, investment and improvement are on an unprecedented scale.
Thames, mother of all modern tunnels, opened 1841; the subtle beauties of Leslie Green’s tiled stations of the early 20th century and the revered modernist architecture of the 1930s; and the architectural bravura of the 1990s Jubilee Line Extension. The day is not all spent below ground, and by special arrangement there is a visit to London Transport’s historic headquarters at 55 Broadway.
The day is led by Andrew Martin, journalist, novelist, historian and author of Underground Overground: a Passenger’s History of the Tube (2012). During the 1990s he was ‘Tube Talk’ columnist for the Evening Standard. He stresses that his approach will not be drily academic or technical but anecdotal and affectionate, highlighting the human stories, the architecture and design, the overlooked detail and the downright odd.
Fitness: participants need to be able to cope with busy trains and a considerable time on foot; standing or walking. There are a lot of station steps as well as a flight of 100 which are steep and narrow within 55 Broadway.
Among the places and themes examined are the first ever stations, still in use and little changed; the even earlier Brunel tunnel under the
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Start: 9.00am at Baker Street Station. Finish: c. 5.00pm at Southwark (a short walk to Waterloo station).
Price: £205. This includes all Tube travel, lunch and refreshments. Group size: maximum 15 participants. Combine the April day with: London’s Top Ten led by Martin Randall 12 April. Combine the June day with: Seven Churches and a Synagogue, 5 June. Te l e p h o n e 0 2 0 8 7 4 2 3 3 5 5
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London’s Top Ten Unveiling the famous sights
Thursday 8 May 2018 (le 843) Lecturer: Dr Steven Brindle Friday 29 June 2018 (le 937) Lecturer: Sophie Campbell Most of our London Days focus on a particular and sometimes arcane theme, and usually they provide access to the inaccessible and show you little-visited gems. ‘Top Ten’ takes the opposite tack in that it leads you to London’s most famous tourist sights. What justifies this apparent volte-face in the MRT repertoire? The lecturer’s discourse. You will hear information and explanation rarely imparted by ordinary guides and guidebooks and hear analyses and interpretations, often reflecting new scholarship, which go beyond the expectations of the majority of tourists. Monuments that have been familiar since childhood become difficult to appraise with one’s usual sensory and critical faculties; this tour aims to lift the veil and enable you to see and feel their deeper significance and beauty. By locating the sights in a broader architectural and historical context, and by placing them in
the history of London and in the history of the nation, the lecturers will change the way you see these world-famous places.
Image: Tower of London, etching
Thursday 12 April 2018 (le 822) Currently full Lecturer: Martin Randall
We’ve misled you slightly: each edition of the Day will include only only eight or nine places, selected by the lecturer for that day from this list of ten: Tower of London, Tower Bridge, the Shard (from a distance), St Paul’s Cathedral (entered), Trafalgar Square, Westminster Abbey (entered), Houses of Parliament, Piccadilly Circus, Downing Street, Buckingham Palace – enhanced of course by our leader’s commentary. Start: 9.15am, Tower Hill Underground Station. Finish: 4.50pm Green Park Underground Station. Fitness: The day involves two short journeys by Underground and one by taxi but is otherwise spent on foot. There is quite a lot of walking, up to half a mile at a time. Price: £195. This includes morning and afternoon refreshments, lunch, two admission charges and transport. Group size: maximum 18 participants. Combine the June day with: The Rhine Valley Music Festival 20-27 June 2018.
Hawksmoor The six London churches
Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661–1736) dropped from public consciousness while Wren and Vanbrugh did not. In so far as he was known before the 20th century he was reviled for just those qualities which lead to passionate attachment to his creations now – boldness, massiveness, Baroque vigour, dissident classicism and sculptural imagination. Yet he is probably an even greater architect than his documented buildings show; it is highly likely that he is the author of some of the finer parts of buildings long attributed to others. He was Wren’s assistant for over twenty years, and also collaborated with Vanbrugh. The Baroque flowering of Wren’s late works should probably be ascribed to Hawksmoor, while his professionalism and artistry were key to turning the soldier-playwright into a great architect.
extravagant ambition absorbed an undue proportion of the funds. Remarkably, they all survive, though one is a (well-preserved) shell after the Blitz. The journey by coach takes in St George’s Bloomsbury, St Mary Woolnoth, Christ Church Spitalfields, St George-in-theEast Stepney, St Anne’s Limehouse and St Alfege Greenwich. Thomas Archer’s contemporaneous St Paul’s Deptford is also included.
Image: Christ Church Spitalfields, copper engraving c. 1770.
Wednesday 18 April 2018 (le 802) Tuesday 12 June 2018 (le 903) Lecturer: Owen Hopkins
Start: 9.20am, Holborn tube station. Finish: c. 5.20pm, Greenwich; the ferry to Tower Hill, Embankment and Westminster (c. 35 minutes) is recommended. Price: £215. This includes travel by coach & ferry, lunch, refreshments and donations to the churches. Group size: maximum 20 participants. Combine the April day with: Great Railway Termini, 19 April.
Taken together, his greatest achievement remains the six London churches built in accordance with the 1711 Act of Parliament. This specified fifty new churches; only twelve were built, not least because Hawksmoor’s Book online at www.martinrandall.com
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Image: St Pancras Station, wood engraving (detail) c. 1880.
Great Railway Termini Paddington, King’s Cross and St Pancras stations Thursday 19 April 2018 (le 824) Lecturer: Dr Steven Brindle Friday 26 October 2018 (le 289) Wednesday 21 November 2018 (le 311) Lecturer: Anthony Lambert Two eyebrow-raising assertions: the railways were a Georgian invention, all the ingredients being in place before 1830; and the twenty-first century is witnessing a golden age of rail travel. The first is indisputable fact, if surprising to contemplate; the second is likely to provoke an unprintable retort from many a daily commuter. However, few would quibble with a statement that the greatest achievements of railway architecture and engineering are Victorian. But seeing and appreciating magnificent stations such as those studied today is to a large extent possible because of enlightened intervention in the last ten or twenty years. The adaptation and upgrading of ageing infrastructure to meet modern requirements has been a major achievement, but so has the restoration and cleaning of historic fabric. And the sensitive addition of new structures of the highest quality of design has been a triumph.
some ways the most appealing of London’s termini. King’s Cross has always been admired for the majesty of its unadorned functionality, but recent removal of twentieth-century clutter enables it to be better appreciated than for a century. And in 2012 the station acquired a magnificent new lattice steel foyer, the widest span in Europe apparently. The 240 ft span of the St Pancras train shed far surpassed any previous structure in the world and its conversion for use as the Eurostar terminus, completed 2007, created one of the most exciting sets of public spaces in Europe. The contiguous Midland Grand Hotel by Sir George Gilbert Scott is perhaps the best-known of all Victorian buildings. Start: 9.30am at Paddington Station. Finish: c. 4.45pm at St Pancras Station. Price: £195 This includes morning and afternoon refreshments, lunch, one journey by underground and special arrangements. Group size: maximum 16 participants. Combine the October departure with: The London Lecture Afternoon, 27 October.
Largely the creation of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Paddington is well preserved and in
Image: St Bartholomew the Great, from Some London Churches,publ. 1911.
Seven Churches & a Synagogue Some of London’s finest historic buildings Wednesday 25 April 2018 (le 837) Tuesday 5 June 2018 (le 899) Lecturer: Peter Howell As the most populous metropolis in the west until well into the twentieth century, and as capital of a nation notorious for its multitudinous shades of churchmanship, it is not surprising that London possesses the largest number of churches and the greatest variety of ecclesiastical architecture to be found in any single city. Subjectivity must play a role in selecting these seven, as do logistics, but it is fair to claim that they are among the best of their kind. This is an extraordinarily fascinating day, enriching aesthetically, historically and spiritually. There are two mediaeval buildings, the imposing Romanesque remnant of the abbey church of St Bartholomew the Great and the Knights Templars’ church. Wren’s ingenious domed church of St Stephen Walbrook, the faultless St Mary-le-Strand by Gibbs and St Mary Woolnoth by Hawksmoor are outstanding examples of the classical phase of architecture – as is the Bevis Marks Synagogue of 1699, one of the City’s little-known treasures. Butterfield’s All Saints Margaret Street is a seminal masterpiece of the Gothic Revival, of which the sublimely lovely Book online at www.martinrandall.com
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St Cyprian’s, Clarence Gate, by Sir John Ninian Comper, is one of the last great examples. The speaker concentrates on the essentials, highlighting what is distinctive and significant about the architecture and decoration and pointing out only the most distinguished artworks and furnishings. Time at each building does not allow for detail that is of merely local interest. Thus the day provides immersion in the beauty of greater things. Start: 9.15am, St-Bartholomew-the-Great in the City (tube station: Barbican). Finish: c. 5.45pm, Baker Street Station. Fitness: Travel is by a combination of tube and taxi journeys and there is quite a lot of walking. Price: £205. This includes lunch (at Middle Temple Hall, the finest Elizabethan interior in London), refreshments, one admission charge and a donation to each church. Group size: maximum 18 participants.
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The London Backstreet Walk From Hyde Park to The Tower
Wednesday 16 May 2018 (le 859) Wednesday 25 July 2018 (le 967) Lecturer: Barnaby Rogerson Tuesday 19 June 2018 (le 921) Lecturer: Dr Geoffrey Tyack This walk is predicated on two beliefs. The first, platitudinous if rarely put to the test, is that the centre of London is not so large that people of ordinary fitness couldn’t walk everywhere. The second would perhaps be greeted in some quarters with scepticism: that one can traverse the capital from Hyde Park Corner to the Tower of London without walking along main roads for more than a couple of hundred yards in total. This is London seen from parks, gardens, alleys, backstreets and pedestrian zones. As the crow flies, it is exactly 3⅓ miles, but as avoiding traffic requires some circuitous deviations the distance walked is 8 or 9 miles. The route – which is far from obvious, as may be understood – is laced with delights and surprises. Many famous buildings are passed or glimpsed, but largely the interest lies in unexpected clusters of pre-20th-century
architecture, picturesque vistas and intriguing alleys, patches of parkland and well-tended gardens, recent architectural behemoths and mediaeval street patterns. Some special arrangements have been made to enter a few buildings en route. Champagne at the Savoy and lunch in the grandest Elizabethan hall in England are among the treats. But the main point of the day is to provide the satisfaction of accomplishing a unique and fascinating journey through the heart of the most vibrant, varied and fascinating city in Europe. Start: 9.00am, Hyde Park Corner, Wellington Arch. Finish: c. 5.40pm at Tower Hill Station. Price: £205. This includes refreshments and lunch, admission charges and donations. Fitness: This is a serious hike, so please don’t attempt it unless you are able to walk at about 3 mph for at least an hour at a time and have the stamina for 9 miles (though there are 4 refreshment breaks). The terrain is fairly flat but there are steps (one flight has 57). Stout shoes are of course advisable – but no trainers please: they are specifically forbidden at the lunch venue. Group size: maximum 18 participants.
Caravaggio & Rembrandt A new naturalism
Few individuals have had such a revolutionary impact on the history of art as Caravaggio (1571–1610). His short life was violent and intermittently spent as a fugitive, but the impact of his artistic innovations was felt throughout Europe and through the whole course of the seventeenth century. The National Gallery has three paintings by Caravaggio (sometimes one is on loan elsewhere), but the emphasis of this day is on putting the artist and his achievements in his Italian context and on exploring his influence beyond the peninsula. Among the other artists studied, therefore, are Rubens, Velάzquez, and, above all, Rembrandt (1606–1669).
Later start
Image: ‘Self-portrait with Saskia’ 1636, after Rembrandt.
Friday 27 April 2018 (le 838) - Currently full Thursday 7 June 2018 (le 914) Lecturer: Dr Helen Langdon
Image: Lincoln’s Inn, watercolour. c. 1910.
Thursday 26 April 2018 (le 831)- Currently full Lecturer: Sophie Campbell
potential of chiaroscuro (contrasting light and shade) to dramatic effect, and the use of humble models and realism rather than idealism to tell religious stories in a new and moving way. Helen Langdon is author of what remains the best book on Caravaggio, and is one of MRT’s most admired lecturers. There are four sessions in the galleries of about an hour each. In between there are leisurely adjournments to The National Dining Rooms. Start: 10.15am, National Gallery, Sainsbury Wing. Finish: 5.15pm. Price: £195. This includes lunch at the National Restaurant and mid-morning and midafternoon refreshments. Group size: maximum 14 participants.
The NG has one of the best collections of Rembrandt paintings in the world – the Dutchman never fell from favour among collectors, in sharp contrast with Caravaggio, who was practically forgotten in the nineteenth century. But they shared much, principally exploitation of the expressive and naturalistic Book online at www.martinrandall.com
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Hampstead in the 1930s A walking tour and visits Later start Wednesday 9 May 2018 (le 849) Wednesday 3 October 2018 (lf 203) Lecturer: Monica Bohm-Duchen As the abundance of wall plaques in the area demonstrates, visual artists have been drawn to the physical and cultural attractions of Hampstead since the late eighteenth century. This London day, however, concentrates on artistic life in Hampstead in the 1930s, the period in which it occupied a unique place in the story of British art and architecture. This was in large measure due to the number of talented émigrés from Nazi-dominated Europe who found refuge here, and the British individuals who welcomed and worked alongside them. A private view of selected items from the era at Hampstead museum’s collection at Burgh House, and an introductory lecture, set the scene. It was during the 1930s that such residents as Paul Nash, Roland Penrose and Henry Moore made the area the hub of avantgarde activities in the UK. Both the abstract and surrealist camps were well represented and modernist architects Wells Coates and Maxwell Fry also lived here during this period. A walk through Frognal is testament to their influence and work, and there is a visit to Hungarian-born Erno Goldfinger’s pioneering home at nearby 2 Willow Road. By special arrangement, we visit the former garage of the Isokon building in Lawn Road which has been converted into a small gallery devoted to the colourful history of these flats whose tenants included Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, as well as Agatha Christie and a significant number of Communist spies. The Mall Studios were home to what Herbert Read described as a ‘gentle nest of artists’, among them Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. For a brief but significant spell, Piet Mondrian lived just around the corner. The day is led by lecturer, writer and curator specialising in 20th century art, Monica Bohm-Duchen who was born in Hampstead and has lived there most of her life. Start: 10.00am at Hampstead Underground Station Finish: c. 5.30pm in central Hampstead just a short walk from Hampstead Underground Station. Price: £215. This includes morning and afternoon refreshments, lunch, admission charges and donations, one taxi journey.
The London Squares Walk London’s greatest glory Saturday 12 May 2018 (le 857) Lecturer: Martin Randall The basic form of London’s squares – rows of similar houses around a regular open space – is neither unique nor original to the city, but their sheer profusion is quite unparalleled elsewhere. Together with circuses, crescents and associated streets and mews, squares constitute London’s most distinctive and pleasing architectural characteristic. While the uniformity of the enclosing terraces provides much of the delight, equally engaging are the subtle differences between one house and its neighbours, or between one whole side and another. Many of the squares on this walk have ‘palace fronts’, terraces which were planned as if they were a single, very grand building, with architectural emphasis on the centre and ends. The squares selected for this walk are almost entirely intact and in an excellent state of preservation – one amazing feature of the London square phenomenon generally. Most of the pioneers in Bloomsbury and the West End have been much rebuilt; this itinerary gives priority to completeness, condition and beauty, resulting in a study of the final, triumphant phase from very late Georgian to fairly late Victorian. During this period there was unprecedented variety and architectural quality, and economics and aesthetics aligned to achieve cityscape as fine as anywhere in the world. Not the least pleasing feature is the planting in the middle of the square, forming mature and well-tended landscaped gardens. The seemingly anachronistic system of ownership of tracts of London by aristocratic or charitable estates serves very well for upkeep. Start: Belgrave Square, 9.45am (nearest tube: Hyde Park Corner). Finish: Gloucester Road Station, c. 5.30pm. Price: £190. This includes morning and afternoon refreshments and lunch. Group size: maximum 18 participants. Fitness: The distance covered is c. 5½ miles, but you are on your feet for most of the day while looking and listening. Please don’t attempt it unless you are able to walk at about 3 mph for at least an hour at a time. Combine the day with: Walking the Cotswolds 14–21 May, or Walking Hadrian’s Wall 14–20 May
Fitness: there is a fair amount of walking on steep streets and you are on your feet most of the day at the sites visited. Group size: maximum 14 participants.
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The South Bank Walk Famous & forgotten sites Thursday 17 May 2018 (le 863) Friday 24 August 2018 (le 988) Lecturer: Sophie Campbell Thursday 12 July 2018 (le 958) Lecturer: Dr Jeffrey Miller The south side of the river between Westminster Bridge and Tower Bridge now plays host to some of London’s most prominent art museums, concert halls and theatres; restaurants, cafés, bars and food stalls are found in abundance; luxury apartments, starchitect office buildings and hotels proliferate. At times there is severe congestion on the Thameside walk. Even twenty years ago very few could have envisaged such a future for what was still a largely depressed and partly derelict strip of central London. Long after cultural colonisation commenced with the Royal Festival Hall (1951), generations of Jeremiahs warned against moving arts institutions to the South Bank. But the temptations of derelict land, abandoned industrial buildings and, in one striking instance, historical precedent (Shakespeare’s Globe) led to an arts quartier of world importance. A tipping point was reached: Southwark became one of Europe’s biggest citycentre regeneration projects. Some of this provides some of the interest of this day. Much of the walk’s fascination, however, lies in what has been untouched by this gentrification a few hundred yards inland, where there remain enthralling vistas of Victorian warehousing and industry, intersecting viaducts, strangely well-preserved Georgian terraces and outstanding items like Southwark Cathedral, the world’s oldest operating theatre, London’s first railway station and its most beautiful recent tube station. There are lively markets and the last of the great coaching inns, and a couple of the most famous of contemporary buildings, City Hall and The Shard, western Europe’s tallest building. At the end of the day the tour ascends to The Shard’s Viewing Gallery on the 68th-72nd floors to look down on the day’s itinerary, and hugely more besides. Start: 9.30am, Waterloo Station. Finish: London Bridge Station c. 6.30pm. Price: £220. This includes lunch and morning and afternoon refreshments, admission charges and donations. Group size: maximum 18 participants. Fitness: The distance covered is c. 5 miles, but you are on your feet for most of the day while looking and listening. Please don’t attempt it unless you are able to walk at about 3 mph for at least an hour at a time. Stout shoes are of course advisable.
Combine this day with: The London Squares Walk Saturday 12 May. Book online at www.martinrandall.com
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Charles Dickens Marshalsea, Chelsea, Westminster and Holborn
A Charles Dickens walk makes perfect sense in that Dickens was very much a peripatetic, restless man with a particularly acute sense of place and a superlative skill in depicting places in his writings, a skill he once described as being akin to that of a ‘fanciful photographer’. It is thus particularly rewarding to explore the relevant areas of London for his great novels (his knowledge of the city was described as being already ‘wonderful’ by one of his fellow clerks in the lawyer’s office where he began earning his living at the age of fifteen). His love/hate relationship with the great city and the myriad, often sensational, contrasts it offered, lasted the whole of his life and is central to all his work. At night the streets of London were for him what he called ‘a great magic lantern’ into which he needed to be able to look and he found it a struggle to write when deprived of this unfailing resource. The day begins at Southwark near the site of the now-demolished Marshalsea Prison. A visit by special arrangement to the home of Thomas Carlyle whose The French Revolution: A History inspired A Tale of Two Cities, followed by lunch at one of Dickens’s clubs, the Athenaeum, scene of his memorable reconciliation with Thackeray
after many years of estrangement. We explore the legal quarter around Lincoln’s Inn, one of the chief settings for Bleak House. The day ends at the Charles Dickens Museum in Doughty Street, Dickens’s only surviving London residence occupied by him during the crucial years 1837–1839 when he was rocketing to fame with the serial publication of Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby.
Image: Charles Dickens, wood engraving c. 1880
Friday 18 May 2018 (le 827) Friday 31 August 2018 (le 123) Lecturer: Professor Andrew Sanders
Start: 9.20am St George The Martyr, Southwark. Nearest Underground station: Borough (City branch of Northern Line). Finish: Charles Dickens Museum, Doughty Street at c. 5.00pm. Price: £245. This includes special entrances, lunch, morning and afternoon refreshments and journeys by taxi. Fitness: Although longer journeys are by taxi, there is a walk in the afternoon of c. 1½ miles. Stout shoes are advisable, but no trainers please as these are not allowed at the Athenaeum. Group size: maximum 16 participants. Combine the May day with: The London Backstreet Walk 16 May or The South Bank Walk 17 May.
Arts & Crafts Art, architecture and decoration from Bexleyheath to Chiswick
For a long while Arts & Crafts was the acceptable face of Victorian art. Sales of William Morris wallpaper boomed while many major Victorian buildings succumbed to the wrecker’s ball. Fortunately, loathing of all things Victorian has now largely evaporated, but creations which fit into the Arts & Crafts category – not so much a style as a basket of ideas and attitudes – still stand out as exceptionally appealing and intriguing. The day provides a splendid survey of this dissident and even subversive phenomenon, with excellent examples in many media. It begins with the 1859 Red House at Bexleyheath – as did the movement – designed by Philip Webb for the Morris family. Other places seen, inter alia, are a Chelsea church (Holy Trinity Sloane Street), a dining room in South Kensington (in the V&A, for which it was made) and a Hammersmith home (Emery Walker’s).
Start: 9.00am, at Tower Place East, London EC3. Finish: c. 6.00pm, Turnham Green Station, (District line).
For its instigators, the movement was as much about politics and economics as a matter of aesthetic preference. They championed craftsmanship and craftsmen and excoriated industrialisation and machine-made artefacts; most added a dollop of Utopian socialism though with varying degrees of commitment. A.W. Pugin was the precursor, Ruskin its prophet and Morris the high priest.
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Price: £240 This includes transport by coach and tube, lunch at the V&A, morning and afternoon refreshments. Fitness: Travel is by private coach but there is some standing and walking and one tube journey across central London. Group size: maximum 15 participants. Combine the September day with: The Tudors, 4 September.
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Image: Pen Drawing of illuminated letter by William Morris, by Joseph Pennell 1889.
Arts & Crafts emancipated the designer to the status of artist, strove to give everyone access to beauty and, despite a persistent and rose-tinted view of the Middle Ages, achieved liberation from historic styles while incorporating exotic influences. Along the way it entwined with Art Nouveau, held hands with the Aesthetic Movement and, according to a view which superficially seems perverse, gave birth to international modernism.
Friday 25 May 2018 (le 877) - Currently full Tuesday 4 September 2018 (le 120) Lecturer: Paul Atterbury
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Image: Hampton Court, Ann Boleyn’s Gateway, watercolour by E.W. Haslehurst, publ. c. 1910.
The Tudors Hampton Court, tombs & portraits Monday 29 May 2018 (le 853) Monday 3 September 2018 (lf 118) Lecturer: Dr Neil Younger Tudor architecture, culture and politics are studied through two of the finest buildings of the era, and Tudor people through the two best assemblies of images. The day begins at Westminster Abbey in the Henry VII Chapel, not only the most glorious ecclesiastical Tudor building but burial place of most of the Tudor monarchs. The theme of commemoration continues at the National Portrait Gallery, broadening to include courtiers.
Start: 9.25am, Westminster Abbey (west door). Finish: c. 6.30pm at Waterloo Station. Price: £215. This includes lunch, morning refreshments, admission charges and transport. Transport: taxis within London, return national rail between Waterloo Station and Hampton Court. Fitness: there are walks of up to 20 minutes between station and palace at Hampton Court, and a lot of standing in galleries and buildings. Group size: maximum 18 participants.
Hampton Court began as the country palace of Cardinal Wolsey, one of the richest and most powerful individuals in Europe, before being sequestered by Henry VIII. Partially rebuilt and extended for William and Mary, it nevertheless retains some outstanding 16th-century interiors and works of art – great hall, chapel, private apartments, kitchens, tapestries and paintings. The lecturer Dr Neil Younger is a specialist in Tudor politics, government and court culture. He is the author of War and Politics in the Elizabethan Counties and is currently working on a biography of the Elizabethan courtier Sir Christopher Hatton.
Image: Eltham Palace
Interwar Interiors Modernist, Traditional, & Art Deco Monday 11 June 2018 (le 922) Tuesday 17 July 2018 (le 963) Lecturer: Paul Atterbury There were only twenty years between the First and the Second World Wars, and several of those were blighted by post-war scarcity and financial calamity. And then came the Blitz, followed by decades of indifference and demolition. Nevertheless, some fine examples of architecture and interior design of the time survive, of which perhaps the most striking feature is the great variety of styles employed. Art Deco is commonly seen as the defining style of the time, though fully-fledged schemes were rare. The day starts with the most extensive to survive, the Courtauld mansion at Eltham Palace, which has been progressively restored and opened up in recent years. Admission to most of the premises visited today is by special arrangement, and some cannot confirm until nearer the time. Hence no complete list here. The Edwardian and New Georgian era saw a surge of rebuilding in London but events intervened, and many buildings completed in the 1920s were designed before the 1914–18 War. So Traditionalism was the norm, Classical Book online at www.martinrandall.com
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to varying degrees, though one extraordinary set of interiors is Tudor in style. Thoroughbred International Modernism is practically non-existent, though the surviving bits of the 1937 refurbishment of the German Embassy come close. The day ends with the Art Deco interiors of the Park Lane Hotel and tea in the Palm Court. Start: 9.00am, at Victoria mainline station. Finish: c. 5.30pm, at the Park Lane Hotel, Piccadilly. Price: £215. This includes lunch, refreshments, travel by train and taxi, an admission charge and donations. Fitness: participants need to be able to cope with busy trains and a considerable time on foot; standing or walking. Group size: maximum 18 participants. Combine the June day with: Hawksmoor, 12 June.
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The Italian Renaissance at the National Gallery
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Image: The National Gallery, engraving c. 1850.
Thursday 14 June 2018 (le 907) Thursday 8 November 2018 (lf 308) Lecturer: Dr Antonia Whitley London’s National Gallery possesses the finest collection of Italian Renaissance paintings outside Italy. Unlike most other national collections in Europe, it was formed (over nearly 200 years) by connoisseurs and art historians rather than princes and nobles whose less discerning eyes allowed the admission of a proportion of second- and third-raters. There’s no dross on show in Trafalgar Square. There are four sessions in the galleries of approximately an hour each. While most paintings commissioned then were of a religious nature, the call for portraits and mythologies speak of the burgeoning humanistic interests of patrons. Meaning, context, scale and innovation and what it was that marked out images by the great masters in this period will all be considered. Between the sessions there are leisurely adjournments to The National Dining Rooms. With no more than fourteen in the group, radio guides to eliminate problems of audibility, and the presence of an MRT staffer to oversee the arrangements, this should be a highly agreeable and efficacious way to enhance your knowledge and appreciation of Renaissance painting.
Start: 10.15am, National Gallery, Sainsbury Wing. Finish: 5.15pm, National Gallery. Price: £195. This includes lunch, mid-morning and mid-afternoon refreshments at the National Dining Rooms. Group size: maximum 14 participants. Combine the November day with: Music in Bologna 1-6 November 2018.
London Gardens Walk The City & its borders
It may surprise people to learn that London is one of the greenest cities in Europe. Forty percent of its area is dedicated to readily accessible parks and public spaces, and while the great parks are known and loved by Londoners and visitors alike, few people know of the many small and remarkable spaces that are dotted through the city. With a history spanning five centuries, this walk encompasses old and new gardens and public spaces, some by special arrangement, to see the best of this small pocket of London’s lesserknown gems. Several of these have been created in the bombed-out remains of Wren churches, including the award-winning St Dunstan’s in the East whose dramatic ruins have been engulfed in a wide range of wall shrubs and climbers to create a beautiful garden with a haunting atmosphere. Postman’s Park, beloved as a lunchtime venue for City workers is another small space with a story; the newly re-opened Salters’ Hall gardens and Barber Surgeon’s also lie on our path. Lunch is at the former Carthusian monastery,
The Charterhouse with its country garden just beyond the City boundary.
Image: London, Charterhouse, wood engraving c. 1880 in Old & New LondonVol.II
Tuesday 19 June 2018 (le 912) Wednesday 22 August 2018 (le 986) Lecturer: Louisa Allen
In contrast, the dramatic Brutalist architecture of the Barbican housing estate has been updated with an innovative planting scheme developed by Professor Nigel Dunnett, following the success of his landscaping around the Olympic Park. And renowned Dutch plantsman Piet Oudolf has been responsible for a new park on the South Bank at Potter’s Field which abuts one of the finest pieces of landscape architecture undertaken in London in recent years. Start: City Hall, SE1 2AA, 9.15am, (nearest Underground station is London Bridge). Finish: Nomura International, EC4R 3AB at approximately 6.00pm, (nearest Underground station is Monument). Price: £215. This includes special entrances, lunch, morning and afternoon refreshments and one Underground journey. Fitness: The distance covered is c. 5 miles and you are on your feet for most of the day while looking and listening. Please don’t attempt it unless you are able to walk at about 3 mph for at least an hour at a time. Stout shoes are of course advisable. Group size: maximum 18 participants.
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Impressionism in London at the Courtauld & the National Gallery Friday 22 June 2018 (le 927) Lecturer: Dr Frances Fowle Tuesday 21st August 2018 (le 991) Lecturer: Patrick Bade
He also founded, in 1930, the Courtauld Institute of Art, to which he bequeathed most of his paintings – now on show in the grand eighteenth-century surroundings of Somerset House – and left a bequest to the National Gallery to assist with the purchase of Impressionists. So here in Trafalgar Square, at the other end of Strand, there is now an excellent group of Impressionists, the result of private bequests, long-term loans and occasional
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purchase. In June: More than seventy-five paintings spanning Monet’s long career are exhibited in the National Gallery’s summer exhibition, Monet and Architecture. Bringing together paintings from private and public collections, the exhibition focuses upon the artist’s treatment of architecture, how he used it to explore modernity and allude to specific locations, or simply to enliven a canvas.
August, mid-morning and mid-afternoon refreshments, lunch at the National Dining Rooms and travel by taxi between the venues. Combine the August Day with: The London Gardens Walk 22 August. Image: Etching by Renoir.
British collectors were much slower than their French, Russian and American counterparts to perceive the beauty and greatness of Impressionism. Textile magnate Samuel Courtauld was an exception: his enthusiasm for Manet, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and Sisley, as well as Degas, Gaugin and Cézanne, led to the formation of one of the greatest collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings in the world.
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In August: Artists working in Britain such as Whistler, Sargent, Sickert and Steer also engaged with aspects of the Impressionist movement. In 1889 Steer and Sickert even staged an exhibition entitled London Impressionists. The final session of the day will be at Tate Britain where several works by these and other artists are displayed. Group size: maximum 14 participants. Start: 10.15am at the Courtauld Gallery. Finish: c. 5.30pm at The National Gallery in June and c. 5.30pm at Tate Britain in August. Price: £205 in June £190 in August. This includes entry to the Courtauld and the exhibition for the June date, donations in
Image: Hogarth’s house in Chiswick, wood engraving c .1880.
The Complete London Hogarth from the City to Chiswick Tuesday 26 June 2018 (le 938) Thursday 20 September 2018 (lf 168) Lecturer: Dr Lars Tharp William Hogarth (1697–1764) is, after JMW Turner, perhaps the British painter most admired in Europe, though ironically he satirised the craze for Continental styles of art and tirelessly proselytised on behalf of native talent. Best known as a satirist and social commentator, it is easy to lose sight of the reality that he is a first-rate artist of international standing. Hogarth was a Londoner, and most of his best works remain in the city of his birth and death. This unusually intense but enthralling journey enables participants to see nearly all the paintings which remain in the city. The day begins at St Bartholomew’s Hospital with Hogarth’s only essays in large-scale history painting, the dominant tradition from which he emerged. The Pool of Bethesda and The Good Samaritan with over-life-size figures remain in their original site. The extraordinary Sir John Soane’s Museum possesses A Rake’s Progress (8 scenes) and Election (4 scenes), and the itinerary continues to the Foundling Museum to meet its founder, Captain Coram, one of the finest of all British portraits. The National Gallery has a third moralising series, Marriage à la Mode (6 scenes), and the Book online at www.martinrandall.com
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enchanting Graham Children. Here we have lunch. Tate Britain possesses several genre, history, satirical scenes and portraits including Calais Gate, Self-portrait with Pug and scene from The Beggar’s Opera. His mortal remains reside below an elaborate tomb in a churchyard beside the Thames at Chiswick. The day finishes a few minutes away with an out-of-hours visit to his country retreat which displays a selection of his engravings, a hugely influential and popular portion of his output. For the art lover this is either one of the most frustrating days in London ever devised – several world-class museums are entered and most of their contents ignored – or it ranks as one of the most pleasurable and illuminating. The speaker, Lars Tharp, is well known as a lecturer, broadcaster and writer and was Hogarth Curator at the Foundling Museum, having been its director. Start: 9.15am at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, Smithfield. Finish: c. 6.30pm at Hammersmith Station (District, Piccadilly, and Hammersmith and City Lines, buses and taxis). Price: £230, including lunch and refreshments, travel by private coach, entrances and special arrangements. Group size: Maximum 15 participants.
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Robert Adam’s Country Houses Kenwood, Osterley, Syon
Robert Adam started his career with two advantages unusual among professional architects of his time. He had considerable personal wealth, inherited from his father, who had not only been Scotland’s leading architect but also an entrepreneur in the construction and allied industries, and he had a university education. He was able to undertake a three-year Grand Tour in some luxury, to hire drawing teachers and antiquarians and, equally important, to consort with British and Italian aristocrats in Rome and elsewhere on terms of near equality. He was also fiercely ambitious. In 1758 he settled in London and set about cultivating patrons. In this he was very successful, and the majority of his English country houses date from the 1760s. His architectural skills had a lot to do with it, of course, and he was indeed a designer of genius and originality; 250 years later many people who could not name another eighteenth-century architect can recognise the Adam style. Adam started work on Osterley, Syon and Kenwood in 1761, 1762 and 1767 respectively.
A feature of the age was that wealth was not so immense and liquid as in other periods, and many of Adam’s works therefore are adaptations of existing houses, and were added to piecemeal over several years. This is worth mentioning not only because it explains much about his creations but also to plead that this day is not as completely mad as it might at first seem to be. Visiting these three houses on a single day is entirely feasible and rational if the focus is solely on Adam’s contributions, and other aspects and contents are ignored.
Image: Syon House, drawing by Hugh Thomson, publ. 1909.
Wednesday 27 June 2018 (le 934) Lecturer: Dr Geoffrey Tyack
The result is the richest imaginable immersion in eighteenth-century architecture and design of the highest quality. Start: 9.25am King’s Cross, York Way. Finish: c. 5.40pm Boston Manor Underground Station. Fitness: travel is by private coach, but there is some walking and standing. Price: £175. This includes morning and afternoon refreshments, travel by coach and admission charges. Lunch: lunch is independent at Osterley Park. Group size: maximum 22 participants.
Ancient Egypt at the British Museum Belief and society
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Ancient Egypt is perhaps best known for its mummies and pharaonic splendour, its monumental architecture and colossal statuary. One of the world’s most important collections of these antiquities is housed in London, at the British Museum. Its display of pharaonic might is second to none – Ramesses II casts his eyes downwards, a gaze which inspired Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’. The tours of the Egyptian galleries during this late-afternoon visit focus on the beliefs and lives of the ordinary people. The itinerary takes advantage of the lesscrowded Friday ‘late’ at the British Museum and starts by exploring the formation of the Egyptian state around 3100 BC, and the changes this brought to the ancient people living in the Nile Valley. The material culture of this early period in Egypt’s history helps us understand the cultural, technological and political developments which changed Egypt forever; the social history of the Ancient Egyptian people, the transition from chiefdoms to a country united under one ruler.
Time is spent in the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery, to wander between the statues of pharaohs and gods. Here is a treasure-trove of evidence for private religion and daily life, lesser-known aspects of the ancient Egyptian civilisation. And in the Nebamun gallery fragments of painted plaster from the tomb of the 15th Century BC temple accountant, as fine as any known examples of ancient Egyptian art, are found displayed alongside an array of objects of daily use. Art and artifacts complement each other to create the fullest picture of ancient Egyptian society. Sessions are interspersed with refreshments in the Great Court restaurant.
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Start: 3.15pm at the British Museum. Finish: c. 8.15pm at the British Museum. Price: £185. This includes refreshments and a donation to the museum. Group size: maximum 14 participants.
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Image: Fragment of a wall painting from ‘Egyptian Pictures’ by Revd Samuel Manning c. 1875.
Friday 9 March 2018 (le 769) Friday 3 August 2018 (le 973) Friday 16 November (lf 314) Lecturer: Lucia Gahlin
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Stained Glass Glorious illumination Tuesday 14 August 2018 (le 984) Lecturer: Peter Cormack Post-mediaeval stained glass is the most unfairly neglected of the pictorial arts in Britain. Few people give it a second glance, even fewer invest the time necessary to allow a window to reveal its meaning and its full beauty. Yet some examples in the medium made between the middle of the nineteenth century and the First World War are among the finest works of art of the time. Present in nearly every church in the land, the very ubiquity of stained glass windows militates against attention, especially as the majority, as with any art form, scarcely merit close attention. The choice for this day is determined by artistic quality, by variety of type and authorship and, though this hardly seems a rational criterion, proximity to the District Line. Fortuitously, this does not compromise the other two criteria at all. This is a glorious day of iridescent beauty, in five churches between Putney Bridge and Monument Stations. There is one fine sixteenthcentury window and several from the later twentieth century but late Victorian and Edwardian work predominates. This period witnessed a peak of technical accomplishment and artistic – and chromatic – brilliance.
Image: copper engraving 1787 by J. L. Delignon, after Titian’s ‘Perseus & Andromeda’ (detail).
The Genius of Titian National Gallery and Wallace Collection
The lecturer is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and a Vice-President and Honorary Fellow of the British Society of Master GlassPainters. His book Arts & Crafts Stained Glass was written while he was a Research Fellow at the V&A Museum. Start: 9.15am at Westminster Underground station. Finish: c. 5.45pm at Southwark Cathedral (nearest underground stations Monument or London Bridge). Price: £205. This includes refreshments and lunch, travel by Underground railway and donations to the churches visited. Fitness: There is a considerable amount of walking between stations and churches. Travel throughout is by Underground which can be busy. Group size: maximum 18 participants.
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Wednesday 19 September 2018 (le 171) Lecturer: Lucy Whitaker Titian’s genius was recognised early in his career, and by the time of his death in his eighties (1576) the esteem in which he was held probably exceeded that attaching to any other living artist in previous history. Moreover, his star has never waned since, contrary to the usual pattern which sees even ‘great’ artists cast into the shadows for a while by the capricious wheel of taste. Such was his prestige that in his maturity rarely did even the grandest of Venetian nobility manage to commission a picture from him, even though Venice was his only long-term place of residence as an adult. Only the greatest elsewhere in Italy were so honoured – the Dukes of Ferrara and Urbino, and the Pope – and, beyond the peninsula, the most powerful rulers in Europe, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and his son Philip II of Spain. It follows that subsequently paintings by Titian were to be found only in the most illustrious princely collections or, when the balance of financial power shifted towards the mercantile and manufacturing nations, in the national galleries only of the most prosperous powers.
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Stained glass was rarely in the vanguard of artistic development. Much of its allure lies in its post-Pre-Raphaelite sweetness and poignancy, Aesthetic Movement yearning and graceful naturalism, innocent of the visceral primitivism beginning to be introduced by leading Continental painters, though later the medium proved to be very well suited to abstraction.
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Even leaving aside the 3 or 4 which are disputed, London’s National Gallery has 15 unquestioned Titians, a total exceeded only by the Prado in Madrid and the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna. There is another on public display in London, Perseus & Andromeda in the Wallace Collection. The day is led by Lucy Whitaker, Senior Curator of Paintings and Head of Research for the Royal Collection Trust in London. Start: Wallace Collection, c. 10.30am (nearest underground stations Bond Street or Marble Arch). Finish: The National Gallery, c.5.00pm. Price: £195, including morning and afternoon refreshments and lunch, donations to both collections and a taxi journey. Group size: maximum 14 participants Combine the Day with: The Complete London Hogarth 20 September.
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John Nash the man who transformed London Monday 24 September 2018 (lf 166) Lecturer: Dr Geoffrey Tyack
It is no coincidence that the monarch most widely despised by his subjects since 1688 was the one who encouraged the greatest episode of town planning and large-scale beautification in the history of London, George IV, Regent from 1811 – the year the leases of Regent’s Park fell in. But the person most responsible for the park’s incomparable architectural rim, and for the great sequence of thoroughfares leading south to Whitehall, was John Nash. Nash’s star is now in the ascendant again, but for much of the last two hundred years his detractors predominated, with mutterings about his shady dealings as a developer, his (or rather his wife’s) improper relationship with his royal
Fitness: this is a full day walking and participants need to be able to cope with considerable time on foot, and with catching a busy London bus. Group size: maximum 18 participants. Image: Buckingham Palace, by Joseph Pennell from ‘A London Reverie’1928
While London at the beginning of the 19th century was the largest and most prosperous city in the world, it fell far behind many other capitals in the magnificence of its government buildings and the grandeur of its street layout. This was a direct outcome of the limits put on British monarchical authority – and spending power – after the Glorious Revolution, and the concomitant resistance to central authority of any kind.
patron, his sloppiness as a designer and the shoddiness of his stucco-wrapped buildings. As an architect he was sometimes somewhat broadbrush, but he was master of effects both grand and picturesque. Simply turning his Regent Street masterplan into reality in only ten years was an extraordinary achievement. Nearly all his surviving buildings, urban improvements and park landscaping in central London are seen on this day, beginning with Regent’s Park and finishing with his Buckingham palace interiors, unquestionably the most regal in the realm. Dr Tyack is an architectural historian whose book John Nash: Architect of the Picturesque was published in 2013. Start: 9.30am, Camden Town Underground Station. Finish: c. 5.45pm, Buckingham Palace. Price: £195. This includes lunch, refreshments, one bus journey, an admission charge and a donation. The visit to Buckingham Palace is by no means exclusive and clients should be warned that access requires some queuing and that the rooms will be busy.
Mediaeval Art in London the principal museum collections
Most traces of mediaeval London have been erased by iconoclasm, bombardment, conflagration and, last but not least, three hundred years of outfitting the city for its role as the world’s leading commercial centre. But that is to reckon without the presence of some of the best museums in the world – and the role of luck in ensuring unexpected survivals. This day is concerned with what is now considered to be art, not with archaeology or architecture, and allows a view of most of the best European artworks which survive from around 500 to 1500 AD (Renaissance items excepted). The new Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Galleries enables visitors to Westminster Abbey to ascend above the 13th-century ambulatory, affording both an elevated view of the abbey interior and a new display space for the Abbey’s museum. Among objects seen are the magnificent Romanesque ‘Judgement of Solomon’ capital from the former cloister and the Westminster Retable, the Abbey’s former high altarpiece.
The Mediaeval and Renaissance Galleries in the Victoria & Albert Museum provide a brilliant display of a range of artefacts which makes it one of the best mediaeval museums anywhere. All techniques and materials are represented: sculpture in stone and ivory; gold, silver and iron; textiles and tapestries; glass, pottery, enamel, paint.
Image: Westminster Abbey.
Tuesday 25 September 2018 (lf 179) Tuesday 6 November 2018 (lf 305) John McNeill
Though smaller, the mediaeval holdings at the British Museum have also benefited from careful curation. Outstanding are the objects uncovered from the Sutton Hoo ship burial, the Lewis Chessmen, painted fragments from Westminster Palace and the celestially exquisite Royal Gold Cup. The National Gallery houses a collection of early Sienese paintings, the fascinating Wilton Diptych and some early Netherlandish panel painting. Start: 9.45am Westminster Abbey, Great West door. Finish: c. 5.30pm at the National Gallery. Price: £210. This includes two journeys by underground railway and one by taxi; admission charges; lunch and morning and afternoon refreshments. Group size: maximum 16 participants.
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Image: Plan of St Paul’s Cathedral
‘Wren’ in the City Parish churches and St Paul’s Tuesday 2 October 2018 (lf 209) Lecturer: Dr Geoffrey Tyack Before the Great Fire of 1666 there were 107 parish churches in the City of London. Only 22 survived; 23 were not rebuilt; 52 were rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren. This is a major achievement, one without parallel. Given that very few churches were built in England after the Henrician Reformation, and that pure Classicism was still a rare accomplishment in these isles, it fell to Wren virtually to invent the post-mediaeval English church. Wren was England’s greatest architect; that was the orthodox verdict for much of the twentieth century. Recently scholars have shown his role as architect of the City churches to have ranged from dominant to nothing at all. Of the six parish churches entered on this walk, only two were definitely designed in their entirety by Wren himself, while two are certainly by others. Nevertheless, his management of the rebuilding project, and his undeniable contribution of ingenuity, inventiveness and beauty, leaves his genius little diminished, and the subject of the City churches even more interesting.
authenticity and atmosphere determine the selection for this walk. Oh, and Wren did a cathedral. This was also a heroic struggle against parsimony, prejudice and hostility, but nevertheless within forty years there arose one of the world’s great ecclesiastical buildings, and Britain’s finest classical construction. The day incorporates some special arrangements including ascent to the triforium (141 steps) and a view of the Great Model. Start: 9.20am, Blackfriars Underground station. Finish: c. 5.15pm, Bank Underground station. Price: £205. This includes lunch, morning and afternoon refreshments, admission charges and donations. Fitness: There is approximately two miles of walking during the course of the day as well as the 141 steps to the Triforium level at St Paul’s Cathedral. Group size: maximum 18 participants.
Only 23 ‘Wren’ churches survive, and most of those are considerably changed. Intact survival,
Image: ‘The Honourable Mrs Graham’, engraving after Thomas Gainsborough.
The Golden Age of British Painting Hogarth to the Pre-Raphaelites
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Friday 5 October 2018 (lf 219) Tuesday 11 December 2018 (lf 360) Lecturer: Patrick Bade The Reformation dealt a deadly blow to the visual arts in Britain by removing ecclesiastical patronage and severing access to sources of new artistic trends in continental Europe. The aristocracy avidly collected the work of dead foreign artists but failed to nurture living British artists. During the early eighteenth century debate abounded around the relationship between British artists and their contemporaries and forerunners across the Channel. Hogarth represented truculent insularity, whilst Reynolds stood for a stance of patrician internationalism and a hope that influence could flow in both directions. However, both artists were united in their longing to establish a native school of painting that could rival the great Continental schools.
Scottish contingent of Allan Ramsay and Henry Raeburn or the Irish James Barry and the Welsh Richard Wilson. Stylistically the day moves from the Rococo, through Neo-Classicism and Romanticism, to the meticulous truth to nature of the early Pre-Raphaelites. The day’s four sessions, three at Tate Britain and one at the National Gallery, offer a survey and exploration of this fascinating and rewarding period of British painting. The day takes in a selection of the greatest masterpieces of English painting in the collections at the National Gallery and Tate Britain. Start: 10.15am, at the National Gallery. Finish: c. 5.30pm, at Tate Britain. Price: £195. This includes lunch, refreshments, one taxi journey and donations to the galleries. Group size: maximum 14 participants.
They succeeded, and between 1730 and 1850 English painting was unsurpassed in its richness and diversity with a list of great names that includes Stubbs, Joseph Wright of Derby, Blake, Constable, Turner, Samuel Palmer and the PreRaphaelite brotherhood. Not to mention the Book online at www.martinrandall.com
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Japanese Art in London at the V&A and the British Museum
The day begins at the V&A which holds one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of Japanese works of art and design. Highlights of The Toshiba Gallery of Japanese Art are the diverse objects of the Edo period (1615-1868), including arms, armour, kimono, lacquerware, tea ceramics and woodblock prints as well as artefacts and crafts dating from the Meiji era (1868-1912). The visit to the British Museum explores the recently refurbished and reopened Mitsubishi Corporation Japanese Galleries. Japanese art has formed an integral part of the collection at the British Museum since its founding in 1753. Objects are studied dating from Ancient Japan to the Modern period, showcasing the outstanding craftsmanship and artistic creativity of the arts of courtiers, samurai and townspeople.
Later start
Start: 10.15am, V&A museum.
Image: Japanese warrior fromLe Tour du Monde1866
Tuesday 9 October 2018 (lf 232) Tuesday 4 December 2018 (lf 353) Lecturer: Dr Monika Hinkel
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Finish: c.5.30pm, British Museum Price: £195. This includes mid-morning refreshments and lunch in the William Morris room at the V&A, mid-afternoon refreshments at the Great Court Restaurant, donations, and one tube journey. Fitness: There is one tube journey as well as some walking and standing. Group size: maximum 14 participants. Combine the December day with: Ancient Greece at the British Museum 5 December.
The day is led by Dr Monika Hinkel, lecturer of Japanese art and specialist in Japanese woodblock prints.
Ancient Greece at the British Museum
A product of the Renaissance and of the Enlightenment, it is appropriate that the British Museum should be housed in a building modelled on Ancient Greek architecture – indeed, it is the grandest example of the Greek Revival in the country. It is equally appropriate that it houses one of the greatest collections of Greek art and artefacts outside Greece, given that the Classical world was the first and for long the primary object of antiquarian study and literary exegesis in Europe. It is the case that Britain had a special if controversial role in the creation of modern Greece. The exceptionally wide range of its holdings enables the day to begin two millennia before the Classical period and to finish with Roman copies of Greek sculpture made hundreds of years after the originals. The day consists of four sessions in the galleries of approximately an hour each, with relatively leisurely refreshment breaks.
extinction of the earlier civilisations. The second session is largely devoted to the peerless sculptures from the Parthenon in Athens, the so-called Elgin Marbles, famously – infamously – the highlight of the collection, and among the most fascinating and beautiful creations in western art.
Image: section of the Parthenon Frieze, wood engraving c. 1880.
Thursday 8 February 2018 (le 751) Thursday 25 October 2018 (lf 277) Wednesday 5 December 2018 (lf 354) Lecturer: Professor Antony Spawforth
Later start
Lunch is at the Great Court restaurant, after which there is a little back-tracking to look at the development of pottery from the Archaic to the Classical periods, almost the only evidence of the glories of Greek painting that remains. Finally comes the Hellenistic period, Alexander the Great and after, especially the remarkable monuments from Lycia, the Nereid Monument and the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. Start: 10.15am, British Museum. Finish: by 5.15pm. Price: £195. This includes lunch and morning and afternoon refreshments at the Great Court Restaurant. Group size: maximum 14 participants.
The first session looks at Minoan and Mycenaean Greece, and at the Geometric and Archaic periods which saw Greek civilisation emerge to greatness again after the mysterious Book online at www.martinrandall.com
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Image: Steel engraving c. 1850 after John Constable’s ‘The Cornfield’ (1826).
Turner & Claude The Poetic Landscape Thursday 15 November 2018 (lf 313) Lecturer: Dr Helen Langdon J.M.W. Turner, on seeing a landscape by Claude Lorrain, burst into tears and exclaimed ‘I shall never be able to paint anything like that’. This day explores how the greatest of British Romantic landscape painters, Constable and Turner, strove to outdo the poetic visions, and magical effects of light, of 17th-century landscapists, among them Claude and Poussin. The National Gallery in London has the finest collection of 17th-century landscape in the world, while Tate Britain displays the largest collection of Turner. The day opens with the former, where we shall explore Claude’s creation of an intensely imagined poetical world, rich in effects of sunlight and melting distances, and touching in his response to classical myth. Here, too, are Poussin’s graver, sublime landscapes, and works by ‘savage’ Rosa which evoke fear and horror.
Arcadian Italy, and of the overwhelming forces of nature, of storm, mist and deluge. Turner, in his will, directed that two of his works should be hung side by side with two by Claude. His wish has been honoured, and perhaps, at the end of the day, we shall each be able to form a view on whether his initial tears of despair were justified. Start: National Gallery, Sainsbury Wing 10.00am. Finish: Tate Britain c. 5.15pm. Price: £195. This includes lunch at the National Dining Rooms, mid-morning and midafternoon refreshments and one taxi journey. Group size: maximum 14 participants.
After time in the galleries of British landscape painting, among them Turners and Constables, the afternoon is spent at Tate Britain to appreciate afresh the creative impact of these Old Masters on Constable’s naturalistic scenes, and on Turner’s evocations of a mythical,
Image: Mural Decoration, Print c.1870 from The Art Journal
Islamic Art in London The V&A & the British Museum
Later start
Wednesday 28 November 2018 (le 324) Lecturer: Professor James Allan Two of Britain’s greatest museums provide a London treasure-house of Islamic works of art. The first is the V&A. One of its original aims, in 1852, was to inspire British designers and manufacturers. And its Islamic collections did just that, one of its most notable recipients being William de Morgan (1839-1917), the great lustre ceramicist. Today, the Islamic gallery, focused on the famous Ardabil carpet, houses an awesome assemblage of Islamic works of art, including ceramics, tilework, metalwork, woodwork, glass, rock crystal, textiles and carpets. It also has a valuable educational group of cases which display the four elements so common in Islamic art – calligraphy, geometry, the arabesque (‘inspired by plants’), and figural art (‘images and poetry’). The day will start with these to form an initial understanding of Islamic art and what aesthetic or religious principles have helped to fashion it. Moving through the gallery, art and design are put into their Islamic cultural context, while enjoying the different designs displayed, particularly on carpets and textiles, as well as learning about individual pieces.
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The British Museum offers the visitor an incredibly rich collection of Islamic ceramics and metalwork, as well as some works of art on paper. The development of Islamic art in the different media is traced and the techniques explored which enabled them to evolve and develop, and to have such an impact on Italian Renaissance ceramics and design. The visit will include the major redisplay in the new Albukhary Foundation Galleries of the Islamic world opening in October 2018. Start: 10.15am at the V&A. Finish: approximately 5.15pm at the British Museum. Price: £205. This includes morning and afternoon refreshments and lunch in the William Morris room at the V&A, donations and one journey by Underground. Fitness: travel is by Underground and there is some walking and standing during the day. Group size: maximum 14 participants.
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London Choral Day
Three choirs & three churches in Chelsea
Our London Choral Days showcase outstanding choral ensembles in a selection of the most beautiful buildings in and around the capital. They take the form of a day-long sequence of performances, refreshments and talks in venues which are within walking distance of each other. The day has been conceived not as three discrete concerts but as an integrated sequence, a single great musical experience in which the individual parts illumine and enlarge upon what has gone before. Moreover, there is some connection between the venues and the music performed in them. This may be chronological – music of the same period as the building – or associational, a specific historical link between music and church. Before being engulfed by ‘the Great Wen’ in the nineteenth century, Chelsea was one of the more substantial of the largely agricultural communities a few miles from the capital. Half London’s fruit and vegetables used to come from Chelsea. Throughout the nineteenth century, however, market gardens and pleasure gardens were steadily covered by terraces ranging from artisan cottages to vast houses by Richard Norman Shaw. Chelsea remains one of the most attractive areas of inner London.
Chelsea Old Church The parish church, dedicated to All Saints but generally known as Chelsea Old Church, developed over several centuries and was largely mediaeval and 17th-century until it took a direct hit in 1941. Painstaking restoration results in visitors assuming it had suffered damage without realising the extent of destruction. Its additive, irregular fabric and accretion of monuments and furnishings make it a rarity in the metropolitan area for its retention of the appearance and atmosphere of a country parish church. Some of England’s earliest Renaissance detailing can be found in the chapel built for Thomas More (Sir or St according to taste), though the Tower of London came to be his final resting place. We are delighted to welcome back the Orlando Consort, internationally known for their ground-breaking performances and recordings of mediaeval and Renaissance music. Their programme of late 15th and early 16th-century music focuses on two Chelsea connections: Thomas More and gardens. In his book Utopia, More describes the Renaissance style of ‘Musica Reservata’, seeing it as a return to the ancient ideal of music in which text takes precedence, eschewing complex counterpoint and structure. The programme includes floral
the Arts & Crafts movement’. It is a place of staggering beauty, so it beggars belief that in the 1970s it was closed and scheduled for demolition (it now regularly achieves a threefigure Sunday congregation). Begun in 1888 and consecrated in 1892, though embellishment continued well into the next century, it was paid for by Earl Cadogan, the landlord of much of this part of Chelsea, and designed by John Dando Sedding. Many of the leading artists and craftsmen of the time, including William Morris and Edward BurneJones, contributed a diverse range of artworks. madrigals by Sermisy, Arcadelt, Crecquillon and Lupi, together with Robert Fayrfax’s beautiful benedicite, What Dreamed I, a piece known to be directly connected to More himself.
Royal Hospital Chelsea The Royal Hospital in Chelsea was founded by Charles II for retired soldiers – a function it retains to the present day as home to the Chelsea Pensioners. Sir Christopher Wren was the architect, and the red brick ranges around grassed courts and grounds which reach down to the Thames form one of the most appealing of London’s historic precincts. The scale is regal, but the architecture restrained to the point of being almost domestic in feel. Capacious, serene and filled with light, and ornamented with a light dusting of carved wood and stucco, the chapel is perhaps the noblest of Wren’s churches, St Paul’s aside. It is embellished with one of the finest (if least seen) paintings in London, The Resurrection by Sebastiano Ricci in the apse vault. The short life of Henry Purcell, England’s greatest native composer (and a Londoner), overlapped with that of the chapel (consecrated 1692) by three years. Strangely little is known of his life, but it is inconceivable that he did not visit Chelsea Hospital and hear some of his works here. The other composers in today’s programme are English contemporaries of Purcell or from earlier in the century – Tomkins, Gibbons, William Croft and Pelham Humfrey. The chapel’s superb professional choir has taken wing under the directorship of the multitalented William Vann, who conducts today’s concert.
Holy Trinity Sloane Square A Gesamtkunstwerk of architecture, sculpture, metalwork, painting and stained glass – and, for you, music – John Betjemen dubbed the church of Holy Trinity ‘the Cathedral of
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Holy Trinity Choir is the church’s professional ensemble directed by Oliver Lallemant. John Ireland, organist c. 1897, described the church as having the ‘reputation of the best musical service in London’. This programme is conceived as a celebration of this great church, a musical transition through the old and new, combining the temporal with the secular, woven around select movements from two masses by Tomás Luis de Victoria and Vaughan Williams. Other composers are John Wilbye (1574–1638), Robert Lucas Pearsall (1795–1856), William Harris (1883–1973), Holst, Ireland, Parry and Grainger.
Practicalities Start: 11.30am at Chelsea Old Church, SW3 5DQ. Doors open at 11.20am, though the adjacent church hall will be serving refreshments from 10.45am. At the junction of Cheyne Walk beside the Thames and Old Church Street, it is about 20 minutes on foot from Sloane Square Station (District and Circle Lines) and a little more from South Kensington Station (District, Circle and Piccadilly Lines). Black cabs should be plentiful. Finish: c. 6.00pm, Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, SW1X 9BZ. Sloane Square Station is 2–3 minutes away. Walking: For those who do not choose the vehicular option, there are walks at a leisurely pace of, at most 20 minutes, (waiting at pedestrian crossings included). There is the option of signing up in advance for taxis to avoid the two longer walks at a cost of £20 per person. Price: £195, £215 with transport by taxi as specified above. This includes lunch and morning and afternoon refreshments as well as exclusive admission to the three concerts . Lunch and refreshments: Lunch in good neighbourhood restaurants; the audience is split into three. Refreshments are served on arrival at Chelsea Old Church in the church hall, and in the afternoon between the concerts. Audience size: c. 100–160.
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Image: Royal Hospital Chelsea, engraving
Tuesday 10 July 2018 (le 957) Price: from £195
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London Lecture Afternoon at the Royal Society
Image: ©Royal Society
Saturday 27th October 2018 (le 291) The Royal Society, London Price: £75 per person
From Andean Civilisation to English country houses, and from Mozart’s first piano lessons to interwar Paris, the 2018 London lecture afternoon promises a broad range of talks from MRT’s distinguished pool of speakers. This year’s venue is the Royal Society on Carlton House Terrace which provides a fully-equipped lecture theatre and adjoining rooms with wonderful views overlooking St James’s Park.
The Talks: Dr David Beresford-Jones, Why the Andes? The place of Andean Civilisation in the Human Story Anthony Lambert, Visiting country houses from a historical perspective Dr Alexandra Gajewski, In pursuit of empty tombs and rotten bones: pilgrimage in the late mediaeval West Patrick Bade, Les Années Folles: art and design in Paris between the Wars Elizabeth Roberts, The Black Hand: the long road to Sarajevo Professor John Irving, Mozart learns to play the piano: 6 weeks in autumn 1777
The Venue Our venue this year is the Royal Society at 6–9 Carlton House Terrace, a Grade I building overlooking the Mall. The lectures take place in the Wellcome Trust Lecture Hall, a fullyequipped lecture theatre, with an interval for refreshments and a drinks reception with canapés after the lectures in the adjoining City of London rooms, with wonderful views of St James’s Park.
Practicalities Price: Tickets cost £75 per person, and the afternoon includes a tea break and canapé reception. Start: The first lecture begins at 2.00pm, with the drinks reception commencing at 5.30pm. Finish: The event will end between 7pm and 7.30pm. Please contact us to book or visit www.martinrandall.com/londonlecture-afternoon.
Dr David Beresford-Jones Fellow of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge University. His research interests include the ancient south coast of Peru, the origins of agriculture, Pre-Colombian textiles and the synthesis of archaeology and historical linguistics, particularly in the Andes.
Dr Alexandra Gajewski Architectural historian and lecturer specialising in the mediaeval. She obtained her PhD from the Courtauld and has lectured there and at Birkbeck College. She is currently in Madrid researching ‘The Roles of Women as Makers of Medieval Art and Architecture’.
Anthony Lambert Historian, journalist and travel writer. He has worked for the National Trust for almost 30 years. His books include Victorian & Edwardian Country House Life and he writes regularly for the Historic Houses Association magazine. He has written numerous travel and guide books, including over twenty on railway history and travel.
John Irving Musicologist, pianist and harpsichordist. He is Professor of Performance Practice at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music & Dance, and previously taught at the Universities of London and Bristol. He has written six books on Mozart, including the award-winning The Mozart Project, and has made numerous recordings.
Patrick Bade Historian, writer and broadcaster. He studied at UCL and the Courtauld and was senior lecturer at Christies Education for many years. He has worked for the Art Fund, Royal Opera House, National Gallery and V&A. He has published on 19th- and early 20thcentury painting and on historical vocal recordings. His latest book is Music Wars: 1937–1945.
Elizabeth Roberts Historian, writer and lecturer. Elizabeth studied at the University of Sydney. Former lecturer in Balkan history and politics at University College Dublin, and expert witness for the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee on Kosovo and Montenegro. Her books include Realm of the Black Mountain: A History of Montenegro and (ed. with David Madden and Othon Anastasakis) Balkan Legacies of the Great War: The Past is Never Dead.
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