BREEZING INTO BRACKNELL

Point Royal

St Joseph's handy for the shops

 BREEZING INTO BRACKNELL

 

It was a lovely sunny afternoon in mid September as Rosie and I entered the Borough of Bracknell. Our specific purpose was to visit Point Royal.

 

Our destination lay just outside the town centre in area called Easthampstead.

 

And there it was on a rising piece of open ground, flanked by trees. Bathed in sunlight it looked like a pagoda. 

Designed by Arup Associates, 1960 – 4, Point Royal comprises 17 stories of concrete loveliness and painted cream providing 102 flats. It sits in a shallow bowl of concrete, underneath this is parking for cars.

 

Nikolaus Pevsner (Buildings of England: Berkshire published 1966) described Point Royal as ”one outstanding job” adding “It calls for four or five more of an identical design”. Odds on that if four or five more had been built it would have attracted the attention of 1980’s demolition teams and guardians of prettiness and picturesque.

 

Rosie and I eventually made our way into the town centre. We got shhu’d out of the shopping precinct in Princess Square however the girls in Starbucks welcomed Rosie (and I). We sat outside with my drink; across the street (Stanley Road) was an ecclesiastical flight of fancy. We looked out onto the Church of St Joseph the Worker.

 

Built in 1961 – 2 with an A-shaped west end. In the churchyard to the right is a free-standing openwork steel cross twenty two feet high, made in London and transported to the site in one piece. Architectsfor this lovely church were  Clifford Culpin and Partners.

 

Shop for God; St Joseph’s is a wholesome example of church-building ideas around 1960 and was influenced by the architect’s visit to Scandinavia in 1956.

 

Full story of the church is told wonderfully right here 

https://taking-stock.org.uk/building/bracknell-st-joseph/

BRUTAL BRUNSWICK

A tale of brave design and regeneration

One of the key stops on any tour of Brutalist architecture in London has to be the Brunswick Centre. This is another tale of brave design, prejudice against concrete, disrepair and regeneration (New Labour’s favourite hobby).

The place’s original design and layout is still largely intact and good to explore and appreciate. From its east side, on Brunswick Square, it peers through a warm veil of London plane trees, a cataract of concrete tumbling down to the street.

 

BRUNSWICK BASICS

·      Located close to Russell Square Bloomsbury London.

·      Mixed use – residential and commercial

·      Mid 1960’s Building started in 1967 and finished in 1972.

·      Architect Patrick Hodgkinson, replacing run-down Georgian terrace Housing. 

·      The residential part of the scheme leased to Camden Borough

·      Widely disliked it was listed Grade II in 2000.

·      Shop premises remained unoccupied, renovation plans blocked by residents’ committees

·      November 2002 a £22m renovation project began. 

·      Council finally starts work on refurbishing the housing in 2005

 

Now called The Brunswick, and a plaza, It comprises five hundred flats, and all the usual retail corporates including Ann Summers, Boots, New Look, Revital (tag line ‘thinking of your health’) Holland & Barrett, Superdrug. Lead billing goes to Waitrose whose reassuring signage makes it appear as lead sponsor.

 

 

*(Note the capitalisation of the ‘T’ – very popular today as in ‘The Science’ and ‘The Church’).

AVENUE METHODIST CHURCH – THE DRIVE THROUGH CHURCH

High up on one of High Wycombe’s hills, before Castlefield slithers down into Cressex runs Rutland Avenue. Elbowing its way out onto this road is the Avenue Methodist Church, busy, popular and with a food hygiene rating of 5.

 

This House of God is on a road prone to mishaps, illustrated by this story, four years back:

A 20-year-old man has been charged by in connection with a collision, which occurred at 4.50am on Saturday 30th January. *

 

And a year before that:

… Black Vauxhall Omega collided with a lamppost and church gates and wall. 

A man was injured when a car struck a wall at The Avenue Methodist Church. *

 

And last year a very sad mishap?

On Sunday 31st March 2019, at around 10.50pm, the Buckinghamshire Fire & Rescue Service alerted officers from Thames Valley Police to a fire at The Avenue Methodist Church in Rutland Avenue, Police believe it is likely the fire was started several hours before the emergency services were called and that the fire was likely to have been started deliberately. *

 

It was very peaceful as I sat quite close to the road’s edge to make this drawing in the series ‘The Modern Church’ an impromptu survey of post WW2 war churches in High Wycombe. Perhaps if I had read these stories (all from Wycombe Today) I might not have been quite so audacious.

 

*Articles copyright Wycombe Today

PANGS OF NEW YORK: PARK AVENUE LOOKING UP

 

LEVER HOUSE - now home to Kitty and Miffy

 

One of my favourite views in New York was looking down Park Avenue from the MetLife Building – oh lucky man. My NY correspondent, PJ Leher took a photograph looking up Park, with The Lever House building prominent. Out came my paint brush.

 

Lever House built for the Lever Soap built in the International style. It made its presence felt in 1948, completed in 1952. All glass and steel, its appearance caused a rumpus amongst its neighbours in their fine residential masonry! 

 

Sadly 30 year later its brilliant blue glass had deteriorated due to the harsh New York weather and some of the steel began to rust. The building expanded and contracted and popped; by the mid-1990's only one per cent of its original glass remained.

 

Towards the end of the 1990's enter a team of real estate magnates, lawyers and $25 million dollars to do the place up. New technology and energy codes made the building tip top and shiny-new again.

Oh and they shelled out on marble benches, adding Isamu Noguchi sculpture garden to the building's plaza.  

 

Result, blue loveliness again and its plaza and lobby have been used as a gallery for the Lever House art  collection which includes a Damien Hirst. Tom Sach’s Hello Kitty and Miffy sculptures are also displayed in the plaza, which presumably attached PJ to visit in the first place. 

BENNY HILL SPOTTED IN UXBRIDGE

 

High seriousness was buried beneath an avalanche of toytown rustication

 

Boots, Sports Direct, Superdrug, Pret A Manger (closed) a second Pret A Manger (also closed) Costa, Boots, Piazza Express, another Costa: It was all here at Pavilion Shopping Centre all here to enjoy.

 

On a sunny Saturday afternoon people are milling around, mothers barely controlling pushchairs, the tune from of an out of tune busker floats comes across the square.

 

Outside Boots four guys in black T-shirts with the slogan “Jesus loves you” are busy preaching into a microphone. Their words of hope are quickly carried away in the fresh breeze.

 

This is Uxbridge town in Middlesex and the administrative headquarters of the London Borough of Hillingdon a mere fifteen miles west-northwest of Charing Cross.

 

The real reason for being here was to seek out was has been described as ‘the architectural equivalent of Benny Hill or Sid James: course, matey, blokeish, undemanding, unthreatening, and accessible’. *

 

We found it. Hillingdon Civic Centre, lots of red brick that seems to rear up at you as if bumped into by accident. The whole thing is rather gloomy even in the sunshine. The building, which was designed by Andrew Derbyshire, was applauded as one of the most famous buildings in the British neo-vernacular style.

 

My current crush, Jonathan Meades, described the civic centre thus. 

 

‘Here in the wilds of suburban Middlesex was a suburban town hall composed apparently of several dozen suburban villas suburban bungalows which had through their keys into the centre of the room and which were now conjoined in cosily elephantine abandon.

 

Like any suburban orgy (think South Ruislip) it was more comical thank sexy it broke so many rules and way so wholly divergent from the precepts of canonical modernernism that it was revolutionary – in the snuggest homeliest most carpet- slippers way.  It was the architectural equivalent of Benny Hill or Sid James: course, matey, blokeish, undemanding, unthreatening, and accessible.  

 

High seriousness was buried beneath an avalanche of toytown rustication, inverted Diocletian windows and distended columns.’ 

 

*From Museum without Walls   Jonathan Meads Published by Unbound Books 2014, the book is a compulsive read for anyone who is fascinated by the ordinary and sees most places as extraordinary. For any topophilic a real treat

WORLDS FAIR - WORLD’S STAGE

 

A flight of fancy?

 

There was something space age about the photographs my friend PJ Leher took when visiting what was left of the New York State’s exhibit of the 1964 World’s Fair. It was just one of over 140 pavilions and 110 restaurants; 80 nations took part. It opened on April 22 that year.

 

PJ wrote up her impressions on seeing what was left of the New York State’s pavilion in 2015, great photographs accompanied her short meaningful narrative; Link to her post. 

 

And she returned earlier this year and took a stunning series pictures here

 

What really attracted me to these pictures and want to tackle one in paint was the optimism of the age. The Beatles hit the number 1 spot in the US charts with I want to hold your hand, Clay beat Sonny Liston, the Civil Rights Act 1964 was signed by Lyndon Johnson. Martin Luther King Jr., became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

 

It was also the year when at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco, U.S. presidential nominee Barry Goldwater declares that "extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice", and "moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue". Johnson was re-elected that November.

It seems a prescient declaration by Goldwater given we are now so close to the 3rd November 2020.

GOD, IT’S BEEN A WHILE

Welcoming and filled with grace

A couple of Sunday’s ago I received Holy Communion for the first time in almost six months. I went to St. Anne’s Dropmore a delightful church. Vicar and congregation were so welcoming and all the pandemic procedures were observed with good grace. 

 

As the Prayer of Preparation filled the church I was in tears: largely guilt, as I had been raging (to family and friends) against the Archbishops of Canterbury and York on their stoic mishandling of opening our churches in the summer. Ikea and Sainsburys had figured it out.

 

It was a special moment and this church had formed an important part of my life in this lock-down. It was the first place to which I cycled once the measures were announced on March 21.  Most Fridays across the Summer I’d meet up with cycling chum, Judge Ricardo, and we’d catch up over our homemade sandwiches, sitting in the porch of the church, the gap was almost two meters apart.

 

The history of this lovely church is here link