Context 156 - September 2018

C O N T E X T 1 5 6 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 55 extensions to the farmstead at Ditchling. They show how, by using traditional materials and forms, modern design can be unassertive, delightful and appropriate. The book contrasts this approach with Zaha Hadid’s extension at St Anthony’s College Oxford, which crashes into the side of a pleasant (but, fortunately enough, not distinguished) row of Victorian houses.We need to be prepared to be critical and to explain what is tactful, sensitive and delightful, while also being able to identify schemes that fail. The book shows several examples of the work of the Churches Conservation Trust, ranging from the superb little addition to Holy Trinity Goodramgate inYork by simmonsherriff to the intrusive work in All Souls Bolton. Here, by contrast, the work seems to be modern for its own sake, and the form of the internal pod and its placing in the church shows no understanding of the building’s history or significance; rather it is seen as a shell to be played with. I hope it is reversible. That major interventions in historic churches can be sympathetic and stimulating is clear and well-illustrated by Dow Jones Architects at the Garden Museum. Here the spaces remain largely undivided, but are subtly remodelled to provide exhibition, shop and cafe spaces. At all times it is clear that this is an ancient building ‘hallowed by prayer’, and that the architects and curators have understood this and worked with the building rather than against it. The furniture maker Nicholas Hobbs sets out an approach for those working with historic buildings. ‘You’re never starting cold, you’re coming in at a certain point in history.’ This book encourages readers to understand both history and traditional crafts, and to make our own distinct and appropriate contribution. It also stimulates discussion, and will no doubt be referenced for many years to come, to justify or criticise new design in old buildings. Jane Kennedy, partner of Purcell Post-war portfolio The East End in Colour, 1960–1980 David Granick, Hoxton Mini Press, 2018, 144 pages, 97 colour plates, hardback, ISBN 978 1 910566 31 2, £16.95 This collection of recently discovered photographs is the work of David Granick (1912– 1980), a person hitherto quite unknown in the annals of serious photography. This small volume of his pictures and the exhibition that accompanies the publication will place him among the greats. The two decades during which he put together this memorial to his native east end of London coincided with the last phase of LS Lowry’s much longer life (1887-1976). By producing stark images of the industrial areas they inhabited, both artists broke new ground, bringing the drab scenery and harshness of life in these completely unfashionable areas into the realm of serious art. In the aftermath of the bombing and rocket attacks of the second world war, much of London’s east end was reduced to rubble or to buildings scarred beyond reach of reconstruction.When Granick began his records in 1960 some of these ruins still lay abandoned in the side streets, and the first class of his photographs includes a number of these scenes. The post-war era saw a huge loss of population as the Cockneys moved out to new areas being provided in places such as Stevenage and Harlow. The second class of pictures consists of an endless and painful record of boarded-up rows of late- Georgian or Victorian shops, pubs and houses. For viewers of these pages who do not know the story from London’s recent past, the sets of images here are both graphic and highly informative. Not all is desolation and decay. The photographs, as in Lowry’s work, also show individuals or crowds going about their daily business: shopping at a market stall, hanging around outside the doors of the pubs that were still in business, drinking tea at a cabbies’ shelter outside a bank or catching red buses, including the fondly remembered Routemasters. Vehicles, fewer then, line the streets or wait in queues or at traffic lights. The car-spotter will have a field day with the Ford Populars and Morris Minors seen here. A more poignant mood still is struck later.Working, one suspects, in the quietness of Sundays, Granick shows the docks and their barges or steamers in impressionistic scenes of tranquillity, with the soft light reflected in the still water of the Pool of London. Tower Bridge is seen in the first photograph in the book and, looking beyond it to the west, the City’s first skyscrapers make their debut almost timidly on the horizon. In the time since Granick’s death in 1980 this City skyline has been transformed. Elsewhere in the book, the modern tower blocks of housing are seen rising above the zones of clearances or looking over the shoulders of an early-19th-century terrace in the Commercial Road in 1970. The architectural historian will value the colour recording of the condition of such celebrated streets as those around Spitalfields Market in the 1960s, when still playing host to such businesses as ‘Sydney Young, Furrier’. How many furriers do we still have? Gentrification has come to the rescue of some of this heritage but, for the most part, this small volume is an elegy for a segment of London north of the Thames, and its inhabitants, in its final days. Graham Tite, conservation officer