Survey of London

An intriguing array of events about macabre London in October -

London Month of the Dead

Many of you may remember the interactive map we created for Histories of Whitechapel - https://surveyoflondon.org It was created for us by Dr Duncan Hay, and was used as the prototype for several other projects that link memory to place, such City of Women - https://cityofwomenlondon.org - and a Memory Map of the Jewish East End - https://jewisheastendmemorymap.org Duncan has been developing a user-friendly version of his software called Memory Mapper so people without his techie skills can use it for their projects, and we’re having an evening get-together at the Bartlett of people who might like to use it, to find out more - for us and for you. Do come along if you think it might work for you and your project - https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/memory-mapper-digital-mapping-for-heritage-projects-tickets-872409880437?aff=oddtdtcreator

Memory Mapper: Digital Mapping for Heritage Projects An informal information-sharing workshop about using digital maps for history and heritage projects.

Do you have an architectural discovery you'd like to share? Entries are invited for this year's Stephen Croad Prize, awarded by Historic Buildings and Places (the former Ancient Monuments Society)... no age restriction!

2024 Stephen Croad Prize - Historic Buildings & Places Historic Buildings & Places are now inviting submissions for the 2024 Stephen Croad Prize. The deadline is 2nd August 2024.

The drawing room at 7 Hammersmith Terrace

Something for International Women’s Day… Hammersmith was one of the earliest Survey of London parish volumes, published in 1915 when the printer Emery Walker (1851-1933), a great friend of William Morris, was living in 7 Hammersmith Terrace overlooking the Thames. His house, with furnishing and decoration from the thirty years when he lived there, is open for tours twice a week. This years talks include, on 20 March, Helen Elletson, research curator, on three women artists, friends of and collaborators with Walker

Art Tickets

Currently the Survey is working on SW Marylebone, which mostly comes under the Portman Estate, whose archive we have been making much use of. Courtesy of the estate we had a visit last week to 19-21 Portman Square, now a private members’ club. No 20 was the home of the Courtauld Institute of Art from 1932 to 1989, but is most notable for its spectacular Robert Adam interiors, including the staircase, which he inserted into the house which had been begun to the designs of James Wyatt. Several of the oldies on the Survey (Colin Thom, our director, Philip Temple, who has just retired, and Aileen Reid) also know No 21 of old, when it was the home of the RIBA Drawings Collection - now looking very different.

Today we celebrate International Women’s Day and it seems appropriate to do so with this news of a new Blue Plaque to Ada Salter from English Heritage. Today we on the Survey have more women working with us than at any point in our history, and we’re looking forward to starting work later in the year in Bermondsey and Rotherhithe, where Ada Salter made such a difference to everyone’s lives in the area.

UCL, which has been the Survey of London's home since 2013, has expanded way beyond its Bloomsbury base over the past few years. Yesterday part of the Survey team visited our colleagues at the UCL Urban Room at One Pool Street on the Olympic Park, part of https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-east/, to talk about areas of common interest and see their exhibition on community activism in Southwark in the 1970s and 1980s.

The Survey was honoured last night to receive a commendation for its recent project on Whitechapel from the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain. The event took place in the recently and beautifully restored Great Chamber of the Charterhouse, the very room where we launched our monograph on that building in 2010. The winner of the Colvin medal was Mark Girouard's A Biographical Dictionary of English Architecture, a work of exemplary historical detective work, and the first time the award has been made posthumously. We were secretly rather pleased to hear from Blanche Girouard, accepting the award on behalf of her father, that the project had first been suggested to him in 1956, which makes our own stately progress of production seem quite accelerated.

The full commendation from the SAHGB for Whitechapel acknowldged the way the project sought to extend the way both that we gather information, and from whom, and the way it is disseminated:

Survey of London, Vols 54 & 55: Whitechapel (Peter Guillery, ed.)

“This publication continues the world-renowned scholarly output of the Bartlett’s Survey of London team, while also adding an important update in using a crowd-sourced website to draw upon the local community’s knowledge and memory of Whitechapel’s architecture. This fresh research tool works superbly when set against the rigorous archival research for which the Survey of London has become so rightly admired. In recognition of its excellent and exhaustive contribution to knowledge the judges agreed unanimously to award this entry a Commendation, noting that it follows in the wake of the Survey of London team having previously won the Colvin Prize in 2018”.

Charterhouse Great Chamber 2020 - 3D model by artfletch - Sketchfab The newly rennovated Great Chamber at The Charterhouse, London. The Great Chamber was created as a grand second floor space by Sir Edward North in the mid 16th Century. Queen Elizabeth I stayed at The Charterhouse for five days in 1558 and the early meetings of her Privy Council were almost certainl...

As ever, the Londonist has its finger on the capital's pulse. Every London enthusiast will be interested in this, I'm sure... a rooftop in Holborn with marvellous views all around, and free as well. True aficionados might like to consult the Survey of London volumes which cover the areas you can see - St Giles in the Fields, part 2 (1914), St James's, Westminster: North of Piccadilly (1963), St Anne's, Soho (1966), South East Marylebone (2017), and St Pancras, Part 3: Tottenham Court Road (1939) for an idea of what you're looking at, and what has disappeared in the past century - https://londonist.com/london/free-and-cheap/visit-this-free-roof-garden-on-holborn-s-post-building?fbclid=IwAR2eeTCKDYShJpMw2oVJgKM8C31TMVx-LA3VLpy-mOJOjubvhvAYJd4lUnM

Visit This Free Roof Garden On Holborn's Post Building Get a unique view of the British Museum.

The Survey is saddened to hear of the death last week, aged 90, of Mark Girouard, one of the greats of English architectural writers. As the Survey has aspired to in recent decades, he always wrote about architecture as human and social, though always with an acute eye for the visual and material. Londoners have reason to be grateful to him for standing - and, indeed, squatting - with Dan Cruickshank and others to help save Spitalfields from the wrecking ball in the 1970s. Only a fornight before his death he was in conversation with Jeremy Musson about the early days of the Victorian Society, of which he was a founder - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubehYeosv60. On a personal note, one of the first books on architecture that this Surveyor bought, 40 years ago, was his Life in the English Country House, and one of the most recent was his Biographical Dictionary of English Architecture, 1540-1640, published last year.

Come and join us! The Survey of London is recruiting for two maternity-cover posts to work on our current projects on South West Marylebone and Bermondsey and Rotherhithe. If you have a PhD in architectural history and some teaching experience, it might be right for you -

WCN ATS