Dartington Ways With Words Festival: Edward Burne-Jones and Angela Carter

The Dartington Ways With Words literary festival came to the end of its packed two week programme last weekend, and I went along on the Saturday to see two speakers: Fiona MacCarthy talking about the Victorian artist Edward Burne-Jones, about whom she has written in her most recent biography, and his friendship with William Morris, the subject of one of her previous biographies; and Susannah Clapp talking about her friend Angela Carter, for whom she acted as literary executor, and about whom she wrote the recent memoir A Card From Angela Carter. MacCarthy spoke in the medieval Great Hall of the Dartington estate, and commented upon how appropriate the setting was for her subject. She said that she’d always been interested in utopian artistic movements, having written about William Morris and his attempts to revive a tradition of noble artisanship in the face of industrialisation and mass production, and about Eric Gill and his attempts at communal living based around spiritual and artistic practices on Ditchling Common and later at Capel y Ffin. She thus felt an affinity with the Dartington experiment, set up by Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst in 1926 with the intention of fostering a thriving and fulfilling local rural culture, with arts, education and agricultural labour all interlinked.

Burne-Jones and Morris n 1874 - Frederick Hollyer

MacCarthy began by highlighting the unlikely nature of Burne-Jones and Morris’ friendship, given that, in so many respects, they possessed entirely opposing qualities. Burne-Jones was tall and gangly and often in poor health, whereas Morris was short and squat and always bursting with boundless energy. Burne-Jones came from a fairly humble Birmingham background, his father a picture framer, whereas Morris was from the prosperous Southern counties, the son of a very wealthy family. His father was a bill-broker in the City, the kind of capitalist he would later affect to despise when he turned to radical Socialist politics. Morris was outgoing and a natural leader, whereas Burne-Jones could be withdrawn and lugubriously melancholic. MacCarthy made it clear, however, that he could quite suddenly ‘switch on’ and become the epitome of solicitous charm and the most engaging of company. Morris was very outward-looking, always concerned with the state of the world and the effect his work could have upon it. Burne-Jones’ art tended to drift off into interior dream worlds, full of personal symbolism and suffused with a languid, sensuous atmosphere. But despite (or perhaps partly thanks to) all of these differences they were close and inseparable friends for many years. MacCartney suggested that the names Morris and Burne-Jones were akin to those of the conjoined pairings of the great Victorian department stores such as Marshall and Snelgrove or Debenham and Freebody – forever associated with one another. Given their contrasting stature, Laurel and Hardy might also be an appropriate comparison. She portrayed the friendship as a romance, with intense feelings expressed in correspondence from both sides, although she hastened to add that there was no sexual component to the relationship.

They met at Exeter College, Oxford University in 1853, where they quickly discovered a shared fascination for romantic literature and medievalism, both of which were refracted through the poetry of Tennyson, who would prove an abiding influence. They were initially both intent on becoming clergymen, and enjoyed passionate discussions about the nature of religion. But a trip through northern France in 1855, during which Morris was awed by the Gothic architecture, and Burne-Jones by the Renaissance and Medieval art in the Parisian galleries, affirmed them both in a life dedicated to art – albeit art pursued with a religious devotion and sense of the sacred. MacCarthy related an incident which took place in the Louvre, in which Morris got Burne-Jones to close his eyes and guided him to a position immediately before Fra Angelico’s painting the Coronation of the Virgin. He then bade him open his eyes, and Burne-Jones was duly overwhelmed by the sudden revelation of the painting in all its vivid colour and splendour.

The Oxford Union with murals restored

MacCarthy commented on the lightness and frivolity with which Burne-Jones and Morris and their circle would often address each other. It was part of the foolish and tenderly sentimental side of the Victorian character which is often subsumed by the perceived sobriety of the age. Burne-Jones was Ned, and Morris Topsy, after his unruly mop of curly hair. They would also dress in colourful, bohemian clothing, playing the part of the artist to the hilt. MacCarthy commented on the portrayal of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, of whom Morris and Burne-Jones would become a peripheral and late arriving part, as raffish, rebellious rogues in the TV series Desperate Romantics, lamenting the fact that it failed to capture their essential seriousness, their dedication to their art and the philosophies which underlay it. In 1857 Burne-Jones and Morris, along with their new London friends Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Swinburne and a few others, managed to gain a commission to paint murals on the ceiling of the debating room of the Oxford Union. The summer they spent doing this was one of those magical periods of lightness and effortless gaiety soundtracked, as MacCarthy pointed out with her sense for the telling detail which brings the scene alive, by the popping of soda bottle corks. There was plenty of larking about, with the shambling, bearlike Morris often bearing the brunt of the humour. MacCarthy related an incident in which he became trapped in the medieval helmet from the suit of armour he’d had designed for himself, and stumbled back and forth roaring to be released. The decoration of the Oxford Union firmly sealed the friendship of Morris, Burne-Jones, Rossetti and Swinburne. It scarcely seemed to matter that the paint almost immediately began to flake away, the murals swiftly fading into spectral shadows.

Self-parody - William Morris Reading Poetry to Burne-Jones

MacCarthy highlighted Burne-Jones’ mastery of caricatures, which he produced regularly throughout his artistic life. It was a side of his art which was diametrically opposed to the ethereal dreaminess and solemnity of his paintings. This was suggestive of a personality with many different and divergent facets, which were also reflected in the wide range of artistic directions and media he explored. These included the design of stained glass, tapestries and interior furnishings and designs. He worked on the Green Dining Room at the South Kensington Museum for the firm of Morris and Co., painting the panels with the signs of the zodiac and creating the stained glass for the windows. You can still eat there today, in what is now the Victoria and Albert Museum, as indeed I did a couple of weeks ago, enjoying a tasty fruit scone and a refreshing cup of Darjeeling tea underneath one of Ned’s panels. MacCarthy noted that he even had some suggestions for a more pleasing design of piano. Burne-Jones’ caricatures were often of the friends he’d worked with on the Oxford murals, with Morris frequently portrayed in an affectionate but far from flattering light as a comical bumbler. MacCarthy pointed to an underlying element of cruelty and hurtful mockery in these caricatures, which hinted at a certain rivalry between the two friends. Perhaps this was inevitable in two who were so close and who had dedicated themselves so completely to the pursuit of their art. Each wished the other success, but not to a degree wholly incommensurate with their own. Burne-Jones was himself a perfect subject for caricaturists, especially after he’d achieved widespread renown. His thin, languorously drooping figure and doleful mien made for an ideal contrast with Morris’ rounded form. Burne-Jones also shared or inherited Rossetti’s fondness for wombats, and his cartoons of the rotund marsupials often bore an undeniable resemblance to Morris.

Georgiana MacDonald

In 1857, Burne-Jones and Rossetti went to a small theatre in Oxford and met a young woman named Jane Burden. Actually they spotted her in a theatre box, and later bumped into her in the street, and at some stage asked her to model for them. She would go on to become the ultimate model and muse for the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetics, and the object of chivalric, self-punishing devotion for Rossetti after she’d married Morris in 1859. After their marriage, Morris had his ideal of a romantic, late medieval home, the Red House, built in Bexleyheath, now a distinctly unromantic London suburb, but then a fairly undeveloped part of North Kent. It was designed by Philip Webb and decorated and furnished by Morris, Burne-Jones and Rossetti, all of whom would go on to be the core of Morris and Co., the design and manufacturing company which defined the style of the arts and crafts movement. Burne-Jones married Georgiana MacDonald in 1860, having first met her at her house in Handsworth back in 1852 when he was still living in Birmingham. They would visit the Morrises at the Red House for weekends or lengthier stays, with other friends also sometimes in residence. The place took on the pleasurable and convivial familial commune, with friends always welcome. It was from this stable base that Morris planned the business which was to revive the ideal of quality handcraftsmanship in the applied arts. This was in reaction to the rapid growth of industrialised mass production, which Morris opposed so vehemently as representing a cheapening of life, both in the nature of the goods and the means of their manufacture. Burne-Jones was to be his key partner throughout at Morris and Co., specialising particularly in the design of stained glass. MacCarthy recalled that she had visited countless churches across Britain in order to view his work close-up and at first-hand. Such peregrinations are a sure indication of a dedicated biographer.

Family days at the Red House - The Morrises and Burne-Jones photographed by Frederick Hollyer

The Burne-Joneses moved into their own ideal house in 1867, The Grange in Fulham, and Morris regularly came round for Sunday breakfasts and lunches, where current projects would be discussed and news and views exchanged. It was during the years at the Grange that Burne-Jones began his own romantic folly, an affair with Maria Zambaco, the daughter of wealthy Greek family living in London. It would last until she left the country in 1872, during which time she provided his ideal model of feminine beauty and dangerous allure; his Venus and Nimue. At the same time, he rather hypocritically disapproved of Rossetti’s infatuation with Jane Morris, which put a strain on their friendship. Georgiana (or Georgie, as she was known to Ned) somehow managed to stoically turn a blind eye to her husband’s affair, just as Morris affected to ignore his wife Jane’s intense romantic friendship with Rossetti. Burne-Jones would later use his daughter Margaret, with whom he was very close, as a model, although MacCarthy assured us that there was no incestuous element to their intimacy – a relief to hear from the biographer of Eric Gill. He would also go on to have many close but platonic friendships with younger women. As MacCarthy comments, ‘he was never not in love’. To his credit, he was one of the few who stood by the artist Simeon Solomon, who had been part of the Rossetti and Swinburne circle, after he’d been arrested for soliciting in a public toilet and charged with the crime of sodomy, and event which started him on the long descent into destitution and alcoholism, ending in early death.

Portrait of Maria Zambaco, 1870

The Grange would become one of the centres of the Aesthetic Movement, a place which attracted visitors such as Oscar Wilde and Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as Georgie’s nephew, a small boy called Rudyard Kipling. Burne-Jones was considered a key member of the Aesthetic Movement after the triumph of the opening show at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, which attracted a huge amount of publicity, and in which several of his major paintings were on display. The attracted widespread acclaim and also caught the public fancy, and he was soon well known beyond the usual artistic enclaves. His success launched him on a swift upwardly mobile trajectory which culminated in his earning a baronetcy, which he accepted despite previously expressed republican views. At the same time, Morris was becoming increasingly involved in radical politics, joining the Socialist Democratic Party in 1883 and subsequently breaking away to form his own Socialist League in 1884 (leftist politics was then, as now, rife with divisions). The ever-solicitous Ned was worried that the socialists might be taking advantage of his friend’s naivety and idealism, and more particularly, of his wealth. He talked about him having crossed the ‘river of fire’ into revolutionary politics, suggesting that there was now a significant and unbridgeable divide between them. Morris, for his part, was deliberately turning his back on the kind of wealthy patrons (and often artistic subjects) of the Aesthetic Movement. These were exactly the sorts of people whose company Burne-Jones was new enjoying. Morris held the Aesthetic Movement, with its art for art’s sake credo, in contempt, now believing that, on the contrary, art should have a definite social purpose. He decried ‘an art cultivated professedly by a few and for a few, who would consider it necessary – a duty if they could admit to duties – to despise the common herd, to hold themselves aloof from all that the world has been struggling for from the first, to guard carefully every approach to their palace of art’.

Morris and Burne-Jones never stopped meeting one another, or thought of putting an end to their friendship and professional partnership (Morris and Co. would outlive them both). But a definite rift grew between them as they drifted into entirely separate and mutually exclusive worlds. MacCarthy recounted this with real sadness, telling us how hard it had been to write the chapter detailing this split. It was like the end of a great romance, a falling out of love after so many years of passionate intimacy. She clearly has a great deal of affection for both of her subjects, Burne-Jones and Morris, Ned and Topsy, and has grown to know them almost as friends herself in the writing of her books. She ended by noting that Burne-Jones died only a few years after his great lifelong friend and boon companion, the one in 1896 and the other in 1898, as if neither was wholly at home in the world without the balancing and contrasting force of the other.

In The Barn, across the courtyard from the Great Hall, Susannah Clapp gave a talk about Angela Carter in this, the 20th year since her death at the terribly early age of 51. Clapp has written a short memoir of Carter, a reflection on her life and work using a series of postcards sent to her during the 80s as cues, triggers for personal reminiscences and insights. She was one of the founders of the London Review of Books, and commissioned a number of articles and reviews for it from Carter. She noted, possibly with the benefit of rueful experience, that Carter was a terrible one for meeting deadlines, once commenting that ‘the only time I ever iron the sheets or make meringues is when there is an absolutely urgent deadline in the offing’. Clapp was also appointed as Carter’s literary executor, and she recalled her first foray into her study in her house in Clapham (the latter half of the postcode, 0NR, given Carter’s topical mnemonic Oliver North Reagan) after her death. It was a fairly spartan, sparely furnished room, and she dreamt of discovering some unpublished masterpiece, a great novel or the odd short-story or two stashed away for future use or revision. But Carter, for all her occasional air of disorder, was a pragmatic writer who was intent on getting her work out into the market as soon as possible. She did find some stage and screenplays which had gone un-performed or filmed, however. Her 1988 filmscript The Christchurch Murders took as its subject the true story of the intense, self-absorbed adolescent friendship of two girls in 1950s New Zealand, who lose themselves in a closed-off world of their own creation. When this world is threatened by their enforced and potentially permanent separation, they murder the mother of one of them. It was a story which later formed the basis of Peter Jackson’s 1994 film Heavenly Creatures. Her theatrical script Lulu, also from 1988 and also unproduced (it was clearly a frustrating year), was adapted from Frank Wedekind’s plays about the doomed femme fatale for a potential production by Richard Eyre at the National Theatre. She was not happy when the National eventually turned it down, which may have been a contributory factor in her dislike of the theatre in general, which Clapp mentioned. Lulu was a character who fascinated Carter, not least because she loved Louise Brooks, who had portrayed her in GW Pabst’s film of Pandora’s Box. She said that if she ever had a daughter, she’s call her Lulu. There was also a 1980 libretto for an operatic adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s time travelling and gender shifting novel Orlando, which was to have been scored by Michael Berkeley, and which she suggested might be performed in an old Victorian department store (the same Marshall and Snelgrove mentioned earlier by Fiona MacCarthy). All of these unrealised scripts were eventually published in 1996 (alongside several others which did see the light of day) in The Curious Room, which gathered together Carter’s Collected Dramatic Works, and which has an introduction by Clapp. Also in the study were a pile of journals which Carter had kept since the 60s, writing in exercise books covered in cut-out pictures and doodled designs. These included a number of poems which she’d written in her 20s, and which anticipated some of the fantastical and fairy tale themes she would go on to explore.

There was, in a sense, a great lost novel in the form of an outline for a story titled Adela: A Romance. It’s protagonist was to have been a character taken from Jane Eyre, who had lived under Mr Rochester’s guardianship, but who turns out to be his daughter, a fact which she discovers after having ended up in his bed. She escapes to 1820s France and finds her mother, has various adventures and becomes a heroine of the Paris Commune in the process. Carter’s casual shifting of the time frame of Jane Eyre (which is set in the time of its publication, the 1840s), is indicative of her disdain for the limiting dictates of realism. This put her outside of the literary mainstream, and Clapp draws a comparison with JG Ballard, who was also something of an outside whilst his works were published as science fiction. Ballard was accepted into the literary fold once he’d written his relatively conventional autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun, which was set in a recognisable historical context. Adela was Carter’s tongue in cheek bid for similar respectability, the Shakespearean allusions of Wise Children having apparently proved insufficient to woo the Booker judges. She was in fact never nominated for the Booker Prize (for those who think this matters), and when she herself sat as one of the judges in 1983, went unrecognised by Selina Scott as she glided around interviewing the attendees for the TV coverage of the event. Clapp could also have mentioned Michael Moorcock, with whose modern day harlequinades and transformative collisions of generic materials her work had a great affinity. She would have fitted in well with the style and outlook of Moorcock’s New Worlds in the 60s and 70s, an SF magazine in the loosest sense of the term, with Ballard and his literary hero William Burroughs as its figureheads. Serialisations of Heroes and Villains or The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffmann would certainly have been at home within its pages. Carter did publish a couple of stories in the early issues of the SF magazine Interzone (The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe and Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream), initially an inheritor of the New Worlds spirit in the early 80s.

Clapp talked about Carter’s abiding love of fairy tales, and her well-known and loved recasting of these malleable stories to bring out the strength of their often passive or secondary female characters. She made real heroines of them, suitably resourceful models for young girls to replace the standard insipid and vain ‘princesses’. It was through the fairy tales, Clapp suggested, that Carter best expressed her feminism. Although when questioned about which she considered more important, her feminism or her socialism, she opted for the latter, the greater social equality envisaged by the one ultimately encompassing and including the demands of the other. She was once challenged in a TV interview about her comments on the lack of women as central characters in fairy tales, the interviewer pointing out that Sleeping Beauty had her own story. Carter paused (and Clapp observed that the Carter pause was a particular conversational characteristic) before remarking that yes, this was so, but Sleeping Beauty wasn’t exactly ‘a figure full of get up and go’.

Clapp asked Carter about her own literary tastes in 1991, when Wise Children was about to be published. Evidently in a seriously minded mood at the time, she cited Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, all of Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, which she felt put properly drawn working class characters centre stage, and the 17th century poet Andrew Marvell, who combined social and political satire with frankly horny, if beautifully phrased, expressions of lust, particularly in To His Coy Mistress, perhaps the most exquisite come on in the English language. It also seems to be a poem with a particular appeal to writers of the fantastic, having provided titles for stories by Ursula le Guin (Ursula le Guin), Peter Beagle (A Fine and Private Place) and Joe Haldeman (Worlds Enough and Time). Dickens, contrary to expectation, was not someone she particularly liked. Chaucer was always a particular favourite, coming as he did from a pre-novelistic age still rooted in the oral tradition, in which tale-telling could encompass the romantic and the bawdy, the tragic and the comic, the fantastic and allegorical and the mundane. Just as long as it held the attention of the listener. She was also a huge film fan, ever since her childhood days when her father used to take her to the resplendent Granada cinema in Tooting. She loved both the lush romanticism of classic Hollywood and the self-consciously cinematic films of the 60s and 70s new waves. She uses a quote from Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville to preface her 1969 post-apocalyptic science fiction novel Heroes and Villains which is appropriate for her work in general: ‘There are times when reality becomes too complex for Oral Communication. But legend gives it a form by which it pervades the whole world’. It sits on the title page just above lines from Andrew Marvell’s poem The Unfortunate Lover.

Clapp is also very enthusiastic about Carter’s journalism, which she fells includes some of her finest writing. She pointed to her use of the personal pronoun ‘I’, an inclusion of herself in her pieces which drew on personal experience and were not chary of openly putting forward a subjective viewpoint. She talked admiringly about how Carter could write about almost any subject and find something interesting, insightful and engaging to say about it. Her articles and reviews ranged from literature, film and TV through travel, fashion, and popular culture, to politics, philosophy, art and animals. She also wrote about food, which could prove controversial, especially when she suggested that the new vogue for gourmet cooking and culinary indulgence was immoral at a time when famine was rife in Ethiopia. This prompted some angry and very personal responses to the London Review of Books where the piece in question was published. Clapp made it clear that food was important to Carter, however. She could often be found in the kitchen at home, preparing a meal for friends with one of her cats (either Ponce or Female) on her lap. The book which she chose to take for the Desert Island Discs which she never in the end got to record was the Larousse Gastronomique encyclopaedia, whish she described as ‘a good read’. Clapp pointed out that Carter had suffered from anorexia as a teenager, partly a response to her mother’s imposition of her own ambitions on her daughter. She was pushing Angela when she was still at school to aim for Oxford or Cambridge or nothing at all, and told her she’d move up with her if she went to Oxford. She went to neither, and said she stopped bothering with her studies, as well as with proper eating. The results stayed with her for many years, both physically and psychologically. Clapp described the young Angela as being ‘faun-like’, having been quite a healthily plump child (and ‘a lot of people’s second best friend at school’). She remarked on the ‘shape-shifting’ nature of the way women try to take control of their bodies and thereby their selves. Carter herself felt she looked a bit like Byron.

Carter’s memorial service reflected her passions, pleasures and amusements, as well as her wry sense of humour and the absurd. These included cinema going and the South London life, so it was held in the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton. The fabulous Granada in Tooting, a real old cinema palace full of extravagant Moorish and medieval architectural fancies, which her father had regularly taken her to as a child, wasn’t available as it was now in use as a bingo hall (an occupation which might not seem ideal for the film-lover, but which may well have saved the building from destruction). Hopefully it might be open again during this year’s London Open House weekend. If so, go and have a look. It’s quite astonishing, and it’s easy to see how Carter would have been enchanted by its gaudily fake theatricality. The memorial evening was based around Angela’s Desert Island Discs choices, with a number of friends invited to hold forth. The designs for the invitation cards (reproduced in the flyleaves of A Card From Angela Carter) and the screen which stood at the back of the stage were designed and drawn by Corinna Sargood, a good friend since Angela’s time in Bristol in the 60s who also provided the illustrations for the Virago Book of Fairy Tales which Carter edited. When it came to the end of the evening, her desert island luxury was revealed, her partner Mark and son Alexander turning the screen around to reveal…a zebra. A zebra on a desert island. It offers a picture of fantastic, absurd and slightly sad incongruity which sums up Angela Carter’s writing and the vibrant imagination, energy and engagement which led her to live life so fully, and gather so many friends along the way. Clapp made it clear what a privilege and a pleasure it was to be drawn into her welcoming orbit. She wouldn’t be pinned down as to what was her favourite of Carter’s books, but she did say that one of her favourite things about her was her lengthy, enjoyably rambling phone calls and her loquacious nature in general. One of her rhetorical mannerisms was to say ‘may I digress?’ It was not so much a request as a statement of intent. Clapp’s book follows this discursive, free-flowing associative approach, as did the talk, offering a series of intimate, revealing and surprising insights in the life and character of a writer who continues to speak directly and personally to so many.

The Cult of Beauty at the V&A

PART ONE

As you walk into the entrance lobby of the dimly-lit galleries in which the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Cult of Beauty exhibition is housed you are immediately faced with an arrangement of objects which serve to conjure the spirit of the Aesthetic Movement of the mid to late 19th century which is its subject. There is a glazed dish with a peacock design made by William de Morgan, an employee of William Morris’ Arts and Crafts firm who had branched out on his own and opened his own ceramics workshops in the 1870s. The peacock’s feathers fan out to fill the left hand of the plate, following the curve of its edge, and seem to glimmer with an almost metallic sheen. There is a lengthwise photograph of a bowl of lilies by Frederick Hollyer, and a pair of andirons for the fire designed by Thomas Jeckyll in the form of sunflowers. All of these had symbolic import for the artists and followers of the Aesthetic Movement, Peacock feathers embodied a self-justificatory glorying in display and the favouring of jewelled colours. They stood for art for art’s sake, as Whistler put it. There was also something of the Byzantine mosaic quality to the feathers, which seemed designed to catch the light of the dying sun, or the decadant fade of empire towards the fin de siecle. If the peacock represented empty splendour, the lily symbolised the eternal soul, its white flowers suggested an unblemished purity, and was, for those who sported it, an indication of heightened sensitivity and attunement to spiritual rather than material values. It was the Aesthetic accessory par excellence, and was carried with a mixture of earnestness, irony and defiance in the face of Victorian convention. Its long, sinuous stem and pallid petals, which seem to droop under their own weight, also served as an analogue of the Aesthete’s ideal figure: tall, willowy and prone to draping itself decorously over the nearest piece of exquisite furniture. It was an absolute gift for the satirists and caricaturists of the day. If the lily suggested moonlight and nighttime, then the sunflower was its opposite. The flower of the summer day, it burned with bright, Apollonian light, the illumination of creation and artistic inspiration. Its yellow became one of the key colours in the Aesthetic palette. Whilst it was incorporated into various designs and paintings and was regularly carried about by Oscar Wilde, it was the lily which became the dominant symbol of Aestheticism. It was cool and distanced and a touch aloof.

There is also a bronze statue in this opening arrangement, The Sluggard by Frederick Leighton. It stands as the perfect representation of the Aesthetic figure – languid, listless and stretched into an artful disposition of limb and torso. Its modesty is minimally preserved by a miniscule fig-leaf, and is a bold indication the Aesthetic Movement looked back to the Classical world in embracing male as well as female beauty. This sometimes manifested itself in the expression of homosexual desire, and such open display of sensuality was to attract strong opprobrium and lead to a disastrous end for several of the movement’s figures, both prominent and lesser known. The intermixing of fine and applied art objects in this introductory display, the prelude to the exhibition proper, with materials ranging from bronze and wood to ceramics and iron, also indicates the wide reach of the Aesthetic Movement. More than merely visual art, it was a lifestyle, an interior design look, a fashion, a literary style and, perhaps above all, an elegantly struck pose.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The exhibition’s trail through the later decades of the nineteenth century England begins with a series of paintings which depict the search for a new ideal of feminine beauty. Some of the principal figures of the Aesthetic Movement are introduced, divided into separate groups. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and James McNeill Whistler, and Frederick (later Lord) Leighton and George Frederic Watts. Broadly speaking, they can be said to represent the Romantic and Classical divisions of Aestheticism, although such distinctions are largely academic. Watts and Leighton remained firmly ensconced within the Royal Academy establishment, at the heart of the recognised art world (as indicated by Leighton’s ennoblement). Those gathered around Rossetti’s circle, and later launching themselves beyond his orbit, tended on the other hand to stand in opposition to the Academy’s dictates, whether through necessity or design. Leighton and Watts were the leading figures of a group sometimes known as the Olympians, partly due to the colossal scale of their works, which frequently extended to the monumental size of the pictures themselves. Leigton’s Pavonia, a portrait of a dark-haired figure glancing back over her shoulder, her hair haloed with a fan of peacock feathers, has been used for the V&A’s exhibition poster. It’s very effective as such, Pavonia seeming to turn to look directly at the viewer, who finds themselves standing in for some imaginary interlocutor. The name Pavonia is a paradoxical feminine version of the Latin word pavonius, which means peacock. Leighton’s classicism tended to veer towards exotica, as can be seen in his frieze-like painting The Syracusan Bride, in which a parade of female supplicants of varying ethnicity make their way along a path leading to a temple. This wedding party includes women leading tamed lions, tigers and leopards. Such classical fantasies also provided an excuse to expose a good deal of flesh, the temporal and geographical distance and air of literariness lending such displays an air of semi-respectability. Whilst Rosetti and his circle generated a significant amount of moral outrage over their supposed debasement of noble artistic values, the likes of Leighton and Alma-Tadema didn’t raise an eyebrow with their bathing scenes and sleeping beauties.

Frederick Sandys - Gentle Spring

Frederick Sandys’ Gentle Spring typifies the Aesthtic’s presentation of the female subject as symbolic figure. His English variant of Botticelli’s Primavera is a pagan embodiment of the turning season, a verdant Goddess surrounded by blossoming life, a rainbow promise arcing above her head, flowers bursting into colourful life in her footsteps. Female figures are often bordered or laurelled with flowers in Aesthetic paintings, usually with traditional folk or literary import intended. Fruits of similarly symbolic weight also hang pendant, or are clutched or laid on tables, half-eaten. Sandys’ picture of Vivien (complete with fruit, flower and peacock feather array), the sorceress sometimes identified with the Lady of the Lake, also indicates the importance of Arthurian mythology to the movement, and of a dream of medieval life in general. This is particularly apparent in the work of Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, although Rossetti, who had gone through his medieval period with the Pre-Raphaelites, tended now to look elsewhere for inspiration. Sandys was a follower of Rossetti’s who had produced an amusing satirical representation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood called A Nightmare in 1857. In this pastiche of John Everett Millais’ Sir Isumbras at the Ford, the armoured Millais rides a rather baleful and ragged mule identified as the critic John Ruskin (a champion of the PRB at a time when others were deriding it), with Rossetti sitting on his knee in a dress, and a tiny William Holman Hunt clinging on to Millais behind. William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel’s brother, describes in his writings about the artistic milieu of the time how Sandys fell out with Rossetti. He felt that Sandys was cleaving rather too closely to his subject matter and style. Such borrowing was literally the case with his picture Medea of 1868 which, like Vivien, used his gypsy lover Keomi Gray as a model, and in which he borrowed the red bead necklace which Rossetti had used in his famous portrait Monna Vanna two years earlier. Sandys understandably took exception to such a view, bordering as it did on accusations of plagiarism.

Rossetti’s Monna Vanna (1866), not included here, is one of his third length portraits of women (or Goddesses) from mythology or Medieval and Classical literature. They are much more solid and physically present than the pale, ethereal and wispily evanescent women of his Pre-Raphaelite years. Those figures were largely modelled on Elizabeth (or Lizzie) Siddall, his partner and latterly his wife, who died in 1862 after years of debilitating illness and opium addiction. She stood in for the tragic, doomed heroine, the favoured female subject (or, more accurately, object) of the Pre-Raphaelites. There was a definite sense of continuity between Pre-Raphaelite painting and the Aesthetics, but there was also a shift in emphasis. Only Rossetti, of the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, can really be said to have become a significant (and indeed leading) part of the Aesthetic Movement, and his work distinctly altered in its nature. The Pre-Raphaelites placed great emphasis on realism, both in terms of the representation of the world, in the accuracy of every detail, and in fidelity to historical setting. This is one of the factors which initially attracted such vociferous criticism, particularly when it came to their representation of religious subject matter. They also allowed for a degree of social and moral commentary, particularly when it concerned that abiding Victorian preoccupation, the fallen woman. The Aesthetic Movement tended to turn away from such outward concerns and occupied itself solely with the creation of dreamworlds and sensual surface appearances. The Aesthetic generally favoured interiors, as opposed to the finely observed landscapes of the Pre-Raphaelites, in which every blade of grass was scrupulously reproduced. This retreat indoors was an indication of an increasingly inward-looking nature. There was still an interest in fallen women, but now they were brought back into the studio to pose as models, and not for morally uplifting or instructive tableaux. They often ended up staying.

Bocca Bacciata - Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Rossetti’s Bocca Bacciata (1859), which is included here and painted while Lizzie was still alive, is a portrait of Fanny Cornforth, one of the women whom he picked up off the street. She was what he referred to as a ‘stunner’, a word which he frequently used to describe anyone or anything whose beauty hit him with a dazing blow. Fanny as Bocca is a picture of ruddy health, sturdy and full of face, with the rosy apple by her side echoing the bloom of her cheek. She is bedecked in fine jewellery, the flowers of her necklace reproducing the corona of marigolds arrayed behind her head. The marigolds in this case stand in (in reduced form) for sunflowers. The dark, ivy-coloured green of her bodice jacket and the yellowish tinge to the flesh show two of the signature colours of the Aesthetic Movement, often used in combination. Gilbert and Sullivan would later satirize the preoccupation with these colours in their opera Patience as greenery yallery (also a punning take off of the Grosvenor Gallery, the centre for Aesthetic art exhibitions). Fanny also features in Rossetti’s Fair Rosamund, her cheek now in suggestively full flush. The bottle-glass windows behind her again provide a murky green background. The poet Algernon Swinburne, friend and sometime housemate of Rossetti, remarked of Fanny, in the context of Bocca Bacciata, that she was ‘more stunning than can be decently expressed’. Although, given his reputation for uninhibited speech, it was likely that he felt free to express his feelings in all their ripe indecency. Her free flowing hair in both the portraits betrays another of Rossetti’s obsessions. Elizabeth Gaskell commented that ‘it did not signify what we were talking about or how agreeable I was, if a particular kind of reddish brown, crepe-wavy hair came in, he was away in a moment…He is not mad as a March hare, but hair-mad’. Fanny was given free run of the house, coming and going as she pleased whilst ostensibly holding the position of housekeeper. Many of Rossetti’s friends blamed her for the regular disappearance of household items and money, but he didn’t seem unduly concerned. The muse must, after all, claim her due, the wages of inspiration.

Algernon Swinburne by William Bell Scott

Turning right, we come across objects relating to the early years of the arts and crafts movement, and the close-knit group of Rossetti, William Morris, Jane Burden (who became Jane, or ‘Janey’ Morris), Edward Burne-Jones and Algernon Swinburne. Rossetti, Morris and Burne-Jones had cheerfully collaborated on the ill-starred (because ill-prepared) creation of a mural for the Oxford Union, an endeavour which might have failed artistically but which brought them all closer together. They were joined there by Swinburne, an Oxford undergraduate at the time and already a rebelliously inclined poet who, like Morris, was somewhat in awe of Rossetti (as much as a poet as an artist). A dramatic portrait of Swinburne by William Bell Scott depicts him standing before a Romantic seascape, a small compact figure with a wild mane of red hair, which somehow looks too big for his head, sculpted by the wind. It’s one of the pictures which provides the inspiration for Elizabeth Hand’s novel Mortal Love, which brings one of Rossetti’s ‘Goddesses’ to life, both in the fin de siecle period and in the modern day. The cover features a detail from Rossetti’s La Ghirlandata (The Garlanded), one of his portraits of Alexa Wilding (another woman Rossetti invited in from the streets), who in this case is playing a highly ornate harp watched over by two angels. Swinburne appears as a character, and Hand gives squeaking, high pitched voice to his eloquent profanity. It is a marvellous meditation on the destructive potential of pursuing artistic inspiration, of being consumed by the burning, mesmeric gaze of the muse, and serves as the ideal reflection on the Aesthetic and Decadant period and its subsequent influence (not least on the kind of literary fantasy which Hand writes).

The Red House - Philip Webb

The desire to create objects which combined functionality with beauty and which were produced in a craftsmanlike fashion was a reaction to a perceived ugliness manifested in the mass-produced products of the industrial revolution. The entire Aesthetic Movement, with its emphasis on refinement and highly cultivated taste, can be seen as a recoiling from the influence of industrialised production and the uniformity which it fostered. Its favouring of fey fragility and anti-athleticism countered the brute force and thunderous noise of the factories which powered the industrial revolution. They were retreating from the birth of the modern world into a golden age fantasy of their own dreaming. The extension of the artistic outlook to the decoration of the home is exemplified by The Red House in Bexleyheath, now an oasis amongst barren acres of dull suburbia (I should know, I grew up nearby). It was built for William and Jane Morris by Philip Webb, who also created some of the interior furnishings, alongside Rossetti and Burne-Jones, who painted wooden panels and helped design hangings and stained glass. It became a regular meeting place in what was something of an Edenic period for the group. It is represented here by two of Webb’s bronze candlesticks and a wooden bureau decorated with murals by Rossetti, and there are also examples of Burne-Jones’ stained glass near at hand.

The Aesthetic Movement always tended to be dominated by forceful and charismatic personalities, from Rossetti and Morris to Whistler and Wilde. Rossetti’s brother William Michael was a much more restrained personality, his unostentatious christened names seeming to predestine him for a more prosaic and steady life than the impulsive and temperamental Dante Gabriel. He maintained a 49 year career with the Inland Revenue, reaching distinguished high office, something which allowed him to support the less stable fortunes of his artistic friends and acquaintances when needed. Although he was one of the original seven members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, he never produced any significant artistic work. But he was a sensitive and perceptive editor, critic and biographer, and has left us with some insightful first hand literary portraits of the artists he knew so well, written with a generosity which nevertheless allows for a certain amount of reading between the lines. Of Morris, he notes that ‘he was turbulent, restless, noisy (with a deep and rather gruff voice), brusque in his movements, addicted to stumbling over doorsteps, breaking down solid-looking chairs the moment he took his seat in them, and doing scores of things inconsistent with the nerves of the nervous’. As for Algernon Swinburne, William discreetly observes that ‘no man has a more vigorous command of the powers of invective, to which his ingenuity of mind, and consummate mastery of literary resource, lend a lash of the most cutting and immedicable keenness’. He remarks of Burne-Jones, on the other hand, that ‘his manner was very gentle, and utterly alien from any vaunting self-assertion. He was never in strong health, yet to call him an invalid might be going too far’.

Weeping for a Wombat

William shared a house with his brother for a while, along with Swinburne and the poet George Meredith. The Tudor House on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, alongside the Thames embankment, was one of a series of exemplary Aesthetic houses, although from all reports it was often in something of a state. William comments on his brother’s notorious habit of accumulating a menagerie of strange and diverse pets which roamed his garden. Amongst those he enumerates are ‘a barn-owl named Jessie…dormice, hedgehogs, two successive wombats, a Canadian marmot or woodchuck, armadillos, kangaroos, wallabies, a deer…a mole…Virginian owls, Chinese horned owls…a raven, chameleons, green lizards and Japanese salamanders’. He passes over the Brahmin bull, which even Rossetti swiftly realised was an impractical proposition. Naturally, he also acquired a peacock or two, which were a particular pest for the neighbours. Apparently, they caused such resentment that a clause was added to future tenancy agreements to the effect that peacocks were not allowed on the premises. Rossetti wasn’t the most attentive pet owner, and most of his creatures were sadly short-lived. He was particularly devastated by the death of his wombats, creatures for which he seems to have had a particular fondness. They appear in many sketches, and on the frontspiece for the edition of his sister Christina’s lengthy poem Goblin Market which he illustrated (an exquisite page of which is on display here). He drew a rather touching ‘Self-Portrait of the Artist weeping at the Wombat’s Tomb’, in which the wee beasty lies on its back, paws curled up on its round belly. A noble classical tomb in the background reads 6th November 1869.

Morris was initially keen to follow in Rossetti’s footsteps, but like any emulating protégé, he soon found his own means of expression, which was directed towards design and writing rather than painting. He was, in fact, best known during his own lifetime as a poet. The shop with ‘The Firm’ of Morris, Marshall and Faulkner and Co. set up in Oxford Street to display their wares – chairs, tiles, cabinets, porcelain, stained-glass and tapestries – did much to inspire the idea of the beautifully decorated home. This was furthered by the opening of Liberty’s home furnishings and costume store in 1883 (unsurprisingly, it is one of the sponsors of the exhibition), which offered relatively affordable style (partly due to the fact that many of its goods were machine-made). The handmade ideal was always destined to be impractical, particularly if Morris’ desire that his goods were to be affordable by the ordinary worker was ever to be realised (it wasn’t). Once his business grew, he too adopted elements of machine production. Some degree of compromise was inevitable if this was to be a lasting proposition, and he could use the machinery of the industrial age on a human scale, and for noble ends.

Veronica Veronese - Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The perfection of interior design was indicative of a general turn inward. Aesthetic painting largely avoided landscape, with portraits, historical, mythological or real, tending to be located inside. When it did venture outside, space was often filled with dense thickets and tangles of branch and vine, which gave the feeling of enclosure. The heavy green draperies of Rossetti’s Veronica Veronese and the dark wood of the furnishings give the room a shadowed, self-enclosed feel, the outside world completely blocked out. Veronica is left to sit idly caressing the strings of the violin on the wall, lost in some inner reverie. Nature, when it appears, is confined to vases or cages, as with the nasturtiums and canary here. As Whistler put it one of the more direct of his carefully sculpted epigrams, ‘nature is usually wrong’. It had to be extracted and re-arranged in order to form the perfect compostion. The yellows of the marigold and canaryoffset the predominantly tones of the curtains and the velvet green dress which Veronica wears. Whilst the model here is Alexa Wilding, the dress belonged to Jane Morris, whom Rossetti would later paint in countless guises, and with whom he would share an intimate and passionate friendship. Rossetti’s own room at Tudor House, Cheyne Walk is partially reproduced here, glimpsed through vertical peep-show slots to lend an authentic sense of voyeurism. Blue china plates are arrayed on shelves above the fireplace. Rossetti and Whistler vied with each other in their obsessive collection of blue china, and the craze spread to become one of the defining and most widely taken up elements of the Aesthetic repertoire. Oscar Wilde, whilst at Oxford, also amassed a fair few examples, and admitted ‘I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china’. An offhand and amusing quip, but also an insightful one. The Aesthete defined him or herself through their objects, until the objects began to control them. There’s a certain irony in the fact that Aesthetes sought to distance themselves from the commercialism of burgeoning mass-production, but accumulated fashionable objects with an enthusiasm which anticipated the consumer age whose seeds were being sown around them.

At home with Rossetti - Cheyne Walk interior. Painting by Henry Treffry Dunton

Rather more ominously, there are a couple of phials secreted amongst the blue china and brass plates, placed within easy reach. These might perhaps have contained the opiate drug chloral, to which Rossetti increasingly became addicted, and which, in combination with the whisky with which he washed it down, helped to wreck his health and lead to his early death. There is a chaise longue or sofa, upholstered in green velvet on one side of the fireplace across which to drape oneself (characters in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray are always flinging themselves onto sofas upon entering a room). On the other side is a rectilinear Chinese chair with a moon design, a lute casually laid against it. It is illustrative of the pervasive influence of the Far East on Aesthetic taste. There are also heavy tapestried drapes to add an additional layer of medieval ambience to the diverse assemblage, and to shut out any external light or sound which might intrude on this artificially created tableau. This is the living space as artistic installation and by extension, life as art.

the Bride, Bridegroom and Sad Love - Simeon Solomon

Rossetti and his circle were dealt a glancing blow by a well-publicized attack published in the Contemporary Review in 1871, pseudonymously penned by the poet Robert Buchanan. He accused Swinburne and Rossetti in particular of perpetrating what he called a ‘fleshly school’ of poetry and art, which displayed ‘morbid deviation from healthy forms of life’ and lacked what he deemed the necessary qualities of virility and tenderness which characterised ennobling art. These were the first signs of the negative and even actively hostile attentions which the Aesthetic Movement would increasingly attract; the accusations that it revelled in deviant, immoral sensuality. Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Morris and Swinburne began to go their own ways. Morris even seemed to be in partial agreement with Buchanan, although for different reasons. He later opined, in an 1888 essay ‘The Revival of Handicraft’, that the Aesthetic Movement had retreated from any social engagement and indulgently lost itself in a passive contemplation of beauty, whether in its art or in the mirror. Another victim of stern Victorian censure was Simeon Solomon, the young Jewish artist shoes franky homoerotic illustrations and paintings aroused the displeasure of the critical and moral establishment, and who was arrested in 1873 and imprisoned for homosexual practises. Shamefully, his friends, including Rossetti and (in particular) Swinburne, who had encouraged him in the free expression of his sexuality, shunned him after his arrest, not wishing to be seen with someone who could damage their own artistic careers with the taint of association. His fate was a precursor of the Wilde’s martyrdom towards the end of the century, which also saw him shunned by many of his ‘friends’, and which effectively brought the Aesthetic Movement to an end. But Solomon didn’t share Wilde’s elegant and relatively swift decline, cushioned in a haze of absinthe and advocaat in the Hotel D’Alsace in Paris. He died alone and broken in the workhouse in 1905 (five years after Wilde’s exquisitely timed passing at the end of the century whose later years he had done so much to define) after years of poverty and alcoholism. His line drawing The Bride, Bridegroom and Sad Love (1885), included here, contains all the tenderness Buchanan might wish for, but not in a form of which he would approve.

London Open City

O Lucky Man! Travis joins the establishment in the Reform Club

The programme is now out for this year’s London Open House weekend, which takes place on the 18th and 19th September. This always offers a great opportunity to have a look around buildings not generally open to the public, and enjoy free tours of those that are which often incorporate hidden and inaccessible corners. There are many locations which have associations with film and literature, considerations which tend to influence my choice of where to go. Last year we went to the Reform Club, which is also in the programme this year, although I suspect it’s pre-book only tours are full up by now. It is most famously the point from which Phileas Fogg sets out on his travels in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, and is also used in the 1956 film of the novel with David Niven giving the archetypal unruffleable Englishman performance which he settled into later in his career. It represents a solid establishment backdrop in Quantum of Solace and the recent Sherlock Holmes film, and rather more surprisingly crops up in Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man, Malcolm McDowell briefly gaining access to its privileged halls in the course of his picaresque rise and fall. The Reform Club is considered one of the more progressive of its breed (it used to be aligned with the Liberal Party) and proudly declares that it was the first such club to admit women on equal terms with men – in 1981!

Lucifer over London - Pete and Dud atop the PO Tower

The BT tower is also open, operating tours through a very sensible booking lottery draw, open from 16th August. I still like to think of it as the Post Office Tower, the pre-privatised name under which it became a symbol of the modernist aspirations of the mid-60s. As such, it became a popular location for films trying to capture (or cash in on) the swinging tenor of the times. In the George Melly scripted Smashing Time, Rita Tushingham and Lynn Redgrave cause chaos by setting the revolving restaurant at the top spinning out of control. Peter Cook’s devil takes Dudley Moore out onto the balcony in Bedazzled, from where he sends pigeons off to do their business on a businessman’s head, and points out the Garden of Eden, a ‘boggy swamp just south of Croydon’. In the 1966 Doctor Who serial The War Machines, the Post Office Tower is the headquarters from which a supercomputer known with sinister acronymity as WOTAN develops a mind to take over the world, and releases crap robots into the back streets of Fitzrovia in order to achieve this ambition. It’s thwarted by William Hartnell with the aid of a couple of new companions he picks up along the way; dolly bird Polly and with it geezer Ben, a couple of mildly groovy types who hang out at the Inferno night club and give the series a bit of swinging sixties sheen. On the other side of the bisecting torrent of Oxford Street, you can climb up the tower of St Anne’s in Soho and look down on the warren of streets and alleyways surrounding St Anne’s Court, perhaps imagining them deluged by some catastrophic flood and turned into a grubbier cousin of the canals of Venice, as Chris Petit does at the end of his novel Robinson.

The Gothic screen - The Granada Cinema, Tooting

There are some fine old 20s and 30s cinemas to see, most of which have been saved from the post war wrecking ball through being converted to other uses. Many others were casually demolished, dream palaces razed to make way for the banal functionality of characterless rows of shops or the arid spaces of car parks. Those that remain are now listed to save them from a similar fate. The Muswell Hill Odeon is happily still in use as a cinema, and tours are limited in order to fit in around their programme. It retains the streamlined art deco interior so redolent of its time. The Forest Hill Cinema was part of the ABC chain and also put on variety shows on its stage. It’s now one of the Wetherspoon pubs which make use of historical buildings, and is known as the Capitol. The former Gaumont Palace in Wood Green has become, like several other grand old cinema auditoria, a place for evangelical gatherings. God has re-entered the house (apparently) for perhaps the first time since Charlton Heston fetched his widescreen tablets in The Ten Commandments. But perhaps the finest of them all (and the first cinema building to receive a grade 1 listing) is the Granada Cinema at Tooting Broadway, now a Gala Bingo Hall. And in case we’re tempted to sniff at such an appropriation, there is every likelihood that the building would not be here at all today had its usage not been continued through such humble entertainments. The entrance lobby is suitably palatial, with balconies from which the occasional visiting star (Sinatra played here) could wave down at the gathered masses in regal fashion. Indeed such a scene is depicted in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, in which Geoffrey Rush, playing Sellers, rains down caustic comments about his latest Pink Panther movie and its director Blake Edwards. The auditorium is approached via a corridor of mirrors, colonnaded with painted wooden columns. It’s a walk whose endlessly multiplied images invites glamorous self-regard, and which acts as a prelude to the entry into the realm of the unreal. If memory serves, it was used to such ends in The Golden Compass, the adaptation of Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights. The auditorium itself is a mock gothic fantasia, with fake windows on the side walls which make you feel like you are in a cathedral or fairy tale castle if you’re willing to suspend your sense of disbelief a little (and if you’re not, why would you be going to the cinema in the first place?). It would be a fantastic place to see some of the classic gothic horror films, the Karloff Frankensteins or Hammer Draculas. The tour I went on some years ago included a look inside the projection room, and the sheer distance to the screen below was amazing, and caused some logistical difficulties. The old organ lies somewhere beneath the bingo tables, and has recently undergone restoration (although sadly was damaged once more in recent floods). It is still poised on its elevator, and you can imagine it erupting amongst the startled players intent on their bingo sheets, bursting forth with a triumphant blast. Perhaps some of the more elderly amongst the bingo regulars remember the cinema in its heyday and still perceive the dying echoes of pictures seen in its (and their) golden age. Where once people packed these palaces to share fantastic communal dreams, they now offer booze, gambling and god. Ah well.

The Sands Film Studios, which have adapted an old Thameside warehouse at Rotherhithe, are opening their doors. They’ve lent their production facilities to Terence Davies’ The Long Day Closes, amongst other films. Their cinema club also looks excellent, offering a selection of classic art movies such as The Gospel According to St Matthew, La Grande Illusion, Intolerance and a selection of Humphrey Jennings films. Alexandra Palace is also well worth a visit, although the main interior, which once hosted the countercultural summer of love showpiece the 24 Hour Technicolor Dream, is now rather shabby. But it does house the studios from which the BBC first broadcast, and where The Quatermass Experiment was filmed (live, of course). There’s also a hidden and rather ghostly theatre, disused since the 30s, the walls of its expansive hall covered with the flaking gilt and dark red paint of bygone days. The Palace and its transmitting tower were used in the Doctor Who episode The Idiot’s Lantern, effectively writer Mark Gatiss’ tribute to the early days of television broadcasting. A variety of theatres are open, with tours including glimpses into the backstage world. These range across the temporal spectrum, from the music hall galleries of Hoxton Hall through the gilded variety palace of the Hackney Empire to the brutalist functionality of Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre on the South Bank. No Wilton’s Music Hall this year, although you can easily go and visit now that it’s a working venue once more. The rather more forgiving South Bank modernism of the recently renovated Royal Festival Hall is also offering an architectural tour of one of the few permanent remnants of the 1951 Festival of Britain (excellent footage of which can be found on the BFI’s COI Design For Today dvd).

Son et lumiere over Derry and Toms roof garden

Buildings with literary and artistic pedigree are also included in the programme. You can ascend to the shady oasis, the roof gardens and Babylon Restaurant atop what used to be Derry and Toms department store, which is cloistered from the surrounding noise and bustle of Kensington High Street. This features as Jerry Cornelius’ retreat at the start of the second of Michael Moorcock’s Cornelius Quartet, A Cure for Cancer, where the gentile tranquillity of tea time is soon disrupted by a strafing chopper. Moorcock’s 1971 novel describes the atmosphere of the place, pre-helicopter attack, thus: ‘The time might be July 31st 1970. London, England. Cool traffic circulates. A quiet, hot day: somewhere in the distance – a bass tone.
In High Street Kensington, where the trees of Hyde Park creep out among the buildings, stands the age-old structure of the Derry and Toms department store. Tier upon impressive tier, it is proud among its peers.
On the roof of the store, in a lot of rich earth, grow shrubs and trees and flowers, and there are little streams and ponds with goldfish and ducks.’ He goes on to use a 1966 guidebook to describe the Old English garden, Tudor courts and flower beds and the Spanish garden with Moorish pergolas and the court of fountains. They’ve all been recently refurbished, but Jerry would still feel at home.

Victorian decadence - Lord Leighton's house

Just over the road, Victorian artist Frederick Lord Leighton’s house is a fabulously gaudy fantasy palace, a monument to his ideal of art as a recreation of classical dream worlds. It’s certainly a very opulent setting within which to entertain such lefty friends as William Morris and Walter Crane, and the Arabic hall, with its arts and crafts tiling and indoor fountain and pool immediately sweeps you away from its Holland Park surroundings to a storybook version of orientalist fantasy. Morris’ own Hammersmith riverside home at Kelmscott House is also open (or at least the coach house owned by the Morris society). George MacDonald was resident before him, and wrote At the Back of the North Wind and The Princess and the Goblin whilst he was living there. If you want to pursue the radical artist connection, then you can go to St Pancras Old Church, whose grounds house the grave of the pioneer of women’s rights Mary Wollstonecraft. She was also the mother of Mary Shelley. Mary’s father William Godwin, for all of his espousal of radical ideas, disapproved of her relationship with the impecunious poet Shelley. With a sense of atmosphere appropriate for someone who would go on to re-invent the gothic novel for the Romantic era (and provide a template for its modern revival) she made secret assignations with him over her mother’s grave. Also buried in the graveyard is Sir John Soane, whose remarkable house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields is also open for the Open House weekend (although it always is anyway), and which includes his gothic ‘theme’ basement, with its fictional ‘mad monk’ in the style of Matthew Lewis’ unhinged 18th century character from his novel, titled with admirable simplicity The Monk. You can go and see children’s writer and illustrator Kate Greenaway’s arts and crafts house in Frognal, Hampstead.

Hampstead modernism - Maxwell Fry's Sun House

Frognal, a road too posh to have the word Street appended, is a fascinating conglomeration of architectural styles, with many a controversial incursion of modernism into its leafy surrounds. A modernist house now provides a discreet neighbour for Greenaway’s, and you can see number 66 as you pass, a house built along le Corbusier lines which caused a bit of a to do when it was built in 1938. A short sidetrack up Frognal Way will reveal more modernist houses, none of them taking part in the Open House programme alas, but you might as well have a nose whilst you’re there. These include architect Maxwell Fry’s Sun House of 1936, the first modernist concrete house to be built in London. There’s a triumvirate of post war modernist buildings designed by Erno Goldfinger, the only architect to lend his name to a James Bond supervillain. This dubious privilege came about due to Ian Fleming’s displeasure at the plans for what became Goldfinger’s own home at Willow Road in the writer’s Hampstead backyard. The Willow Road flats now have the official National Trust seal of approval, but you can get in free over the Open House weekend, and as an incidental pleasure, get to see some of Goldfinger’s in situ art collection (modern, of course). Goldfinger’s two signature London buildings are both included in the programme, the Trellick Tower in the West, and the Balfron Tower, its smaller twin (Baby Godzilla to the Trellick’s full monster). The Trellick is unsurprisingly already fully booked (you have to get in pretty quick for a lot of these pre-booked tours) but the Balfron is open on a first come basis. There are also tours Alton West Estate, including the grey parkside blocks of the le Corbusier inspired Highcliffe flats. These provided a suitably cold dystopian backdrop for the opening of Francois Truffaut’s 1966 adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451.

Learning pod - Peckham Library

As a counter to that film’s book burning premise, there are several libraries included in the programme. The London Library in St James Square transferred there in 1845 and remains the country’s largest private library, a Victorian treasury of knowledge cradled in wrought iron and available to the gentleman scholar for a modest subscription. The Herbarium library at Kew amasses and catalogues knowledge in a different form, with plant specimens instead of books, but still with Victorian wrought iron, and spiral staircases too. The Marx Memorial Library on the edge of the radical hotspot of Clerkenwell Green offers the rebellious autodidact food for thought. The socialist Twentieth Century Press was located here from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth century, having been guaranteed by William Morris, and Lenin worked on his journal Iskra (or The Spark) here from April 1902 to May 1903. The fifteenth century tunnels which run underneath, and which were only rediscovered in 1986, sound irresistibly mysterious, and hopefully we’ll be allowed a glimpse. The Bishopsgate Institute, situated on the faultline of the City and the East End (the former metastasizing ever further outwards, as 201 Bishopsgate and the Broadgate Tower in the programme testify) is another leftward leaning library and cultural centre which has been included in previous years, but not this. It is open to the public anyway. It featured in the recent updating of Sherlock Holmes by Stephen Moffatt and Mark Gatiss, the latter of whom clearly has a good sense for an atmospheric London location. Peckham Library represents new ideas for open city learning, and its bright, inviting and imaginative building won the RIBA Stirling prize for the best British building of the year in 2000, a real sign of hope for the future. This year’s shortlist for the prize has one building in the Open House programme: 22 & 23 Bateman’s Row, which married architects Patrick Theis and Soraya Khan built for themselves in Shoreditch to both live and work in, mixing office and residential space. The queues are bound to be long for this one, so get there early.

Mona Lisa - Bob Hoskins tries to get some service at the Park Lane Hotel

For my part, we shall enjoy being ushered around the art deco splendour of the Park Lane Hotel (actually in Picadilly), undoubtedly the only way I’ll ever get to see its plush interiors. Its bar is apparently particularly fine, and is used in films such as Mona Lisa (where Bob Hoskins orders a cup of tea – not Earl Gray, not Darjeeling, just tea) and The Golden Compass (again – for all its faults, this is a film rich in English locations). It also stands in for the interior of a transatlantic liner in Brideshead Revisited (the 2008 film). So, it’s time to dust off the old A-Z and plan a tactical route, plotting intersections of the coloured veins of the tube map and tracing a path across the centuries of London’s architectural strata of wood, stone, brick, concrete, steel, glass, grass and straw.