St Barnabas in Soho
Sep. 6th, 2004 08:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
liadnanWith my morning hearing having started remarkably promptly and having taken something under four minutes to resolve (hurrah for no-nonsense circuit judges) I decided I couldn't, after all, face spending the next four hours in a gloomy north-west London county court or its grimy environs and headed back into central London and my favourite Soho café.
When that excitement palled. and mindful of the injunction I've issued againt myself to prevent me crossing the doorstep of Foyles (or indeed any bookshop) before my birthday, I was aimlessly wondering up Greek St when I noticed the House of St Barnabas in Soho was having an open day. These occur sporadically, and erratically, when the Warden has a mind to have them (otherwise by appointment only), and I'd had a vague intention of going to one when it was next convenient, as the chapel, which can be seen from the side street running alongside Foyles, has long intrigued me. So I pressed the buzzer as instructed.
The first words of the glorious lady, in her sixties perhaps, who promptly shot out to show me round were "Have you ever heard of the University of the Third Age? No? Well, let me tell you, they're a bunch of morons". That settled, she embarked on the history of the house.
Built as a speculative development on what was then the fast growing edge of the posh side of the City in 1764, it's the only house of its period surviving in the area. Shirtly afterwards, a lease was taken on the house by R. Beckford. William, his brother, was then living just round the corner, roughly next to where St Patrick's Soho now stands. (At the time I assumed she meant the famous William Beckford of Fonthill author of gothic novels and dreamer of utterly bonkers gothic architecture, but on reflection and with a bit of googling she must have meant his father, a onetime Lord Mayor of the City.) William's main contribution seems to have been to lend his brother his stable of craftsmen, particularly plaster workers, and the results are astounding. I have never seen such amazing plasterwork, all of it undercut so heavily one can almost grab it. The shell was fitted out between October and Christmas, and the whole, from door to staircase balustrade, is still sturdily in place.
Upstars is the drawing room (almost all original), the silk-lined withdrawing room, and the master bedroom, all still with the glorious plasterwork. The owner appears to have nicked his brother's entitlement to the City Dragons... but only in removeable papier-maché, not plasterwork, in case some visitor aware of the rules of the College of Heralds raised an eyebrow, presumably. The other bedrooms are, curiously, reached from a completely separate back staircase from the ground floor, obviously not for public eyes as it's fairly bare, but the crinoline balustrade survives (ie the balustrade is bowed out from the staircase to allow the passage of crinolines - not on the stairs down to the basement, of course).
In time, the house ended up with one of the great heroes of modern London, Balzagette, who used it not only as home but also as office: the great sewers of London were planned from the drawing room. My indefatigable guide told me that members of the family had recently attended a meeting of the Soho Historical Society there with his private archives, and how she had had the wondrous sight of "several notable Soho bottoms" kneeling on the floor looking at the spread out plans. In passing, incidentally, she told me that Westminster is becoming concerned at the need to revisit his work in the next few years, the tunnels need work, apparently. This intrigued me, as Primrose Hill is currently full of holes as our Victorian sewers (so my letter from Camden tells me) need redoing, but I'm unsure whether Balzagette's work reached this far. I suppose it could have done, as the Crown Commissioners made their great land swap with Eton in 1841 and began to develop the area thereafter (hence the surfeit of street names such as Fellows Rd, King Henry's Rd, and my own Oppidans Rd).
The final stage in the house's history took place when a mixture of eminent liberals (led by Gladstone) and Oxford Movement types bought the house and turned it into a refuge for the homeless run by the Diocese of London: with the slight change that it is now only for homeless women it remains so to this day. (Somewhere along the line Dickens slipped the garden, with its ancient plane tree, into A Tale of Two Cities by the way).That was why the glorious gem of a chapel was built, in true Oxford Movement style: mosaics, stained glass (replaced after bomb damage in art deco style) and the rest. I sat there and talked to my guide about her attempts to track down missing archives, until it was time to go.
I recommend a visit, if it happens to be open. They need a bit of cash too: the building needs work, and has just had a small fire, and the work they do is worthwhile, not only giving temporary accomodation to homeless women but also arranging counselling and the like (many of them have been beaten and thrown out by abusive partners, though there are asylum seekers and others) and classes. Anyway, my guide then told me I had a lovely smile (you what?), that the third age university people never smiled, and showed me out to the Foyles sidestreet. Whereupon I breached my injunction and went in for a browse.
(It will probably be of (mild) interest to only A..J.Hall, Clanwilliam, Tabouli, and Frankie to know that Foyles has on its shelves a copy of the GGB edition of Antonia Forest's Falconer's Lure. First time I've ever seen that in a bookshop, though a few places I know stocked the penguin editions of the school stories until relatively recently.)
This has nothing to do with any of the above, but I just had occasion to look something up in Molesworth. No matter how many times I read it, I still crack up. Particularly the gerund cartoons: "The gerund atacks some peaceful pronouns", "Kennedy discovers the gerund and leads it back into captivity", the terribly sad "A gerund shut out. No place for it in one of my sentences", and, best of all "social snobbery: a gerund 'cuts' a gerundive." None of which helped with my quest for the formal title of a grammatical construction of which I appear to be inordinately fond.
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Date: 2004-09-06 01:38 pm (UTC)Ooo, Falconer's Lure!
Date: 2004-09-07 05:37 am (UTC)Re: Ooo, Falconer's Lure!
Date: 2004-09-07 05:53 am (UTC)Re: Ooo, Falconer's Lure!
Date: 2004-09-07 07:21 am (UTC)Re: Ooo, Falconer's Lure!
Date: 2004-09-07 07:42 am (UTC)Re: Ooo, Falconer's Lure!
Date: 2004-09-07 07:48 am (UTC)