As part of the London Design Festival, I’m exhibiting with London Potters at In Design@Battersea, in Battersea Power Station. Part of the riverside, where we are, has already been transformed, elsewhere it’s one of the largest building sites in London.
Grosvenor Arch, Circus West Village, Battersea Power Station, London SW1 8AH. Underground: Sloane Square. Easy pedestrian access from Chelsea Bridge.
We went to the Aylesford Friars to see Adam Kossowski’s ceramic reliefs in the chapels, not expecting to find that he had also designed stained glass. The Carmelites returned to Aylesford in 1949 and his windows, made in the 1950s, are abstract, complementing his narrative ceramics and not distracting from their story with representation.
On the way back from the Kent coast we stopped at the Aylesford Friars to see the ceramics of Adam Kossowski, whom I discovered by chance a few years ago when I passed his ceramic mural on the old Peckham Town Hall depicting the History of the Old Kent Road. I wrote about him here.
I knew that he had done work for the Carmelite friars at Aylesford, so I was keen to see his ceramics in the chapels there, which were far more extensive than I had imagined, complemented by paintings on canvas, murals, sgraffito, large metal lanterns and stunningly beautiful modern stained glass.
Kossowski was born and studied in Poland, went east to escape the Nazis and found himself in a Russian gulag for several years. There he made a promise that if he ever escaped that hell he would devote himself to the service of God, and his promise was realised in the work he did for the Friars over a period of twenty years.
As Christian art it is anonymous and Kossowski was not a man to push himself forward. Even his secular “Old Kent Road” is unsigned, and there is only a brief mention of him at Aylesford. His work is outstanding, but here I have illustrated only his “Rosary Way”, his first foray into ceramics, which he was asked to do by the Carmelite Abbot, Father Malachy, who responded to his modest demurral by insisting that he was sent to do this work and that God would enable him to do it. He developed greater mastery of the technique in his later ceramic reliefs (for example, the Fallen Christ in the Relic Chapel, below), but his Rosary Way is an artistic triumph, showing his typical boldness of form, direct modelling and sensitivity to colour.
The Friars explain, “The Rosary Way is a place of prayer and peace, where you will see the first ever ceramics created by the Polish artist, Adam Kossowski. The Rosary Way was laid out between 1950 and 1951 with images of the Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious Mysteries. …
“The Joyful Mysteries reflect upon the Annunciation of the Birth of Jesus and include the early life of Jesus up to the finding of him as a boy in the Temple.
“Mysteries of Light focus on the public ministry of Jesus, from his Baptism by St. John the Baptist to the Last Supper.
“Sorrowful Mysteries ponder the glorious moments of Jesus and Mary from the Resurrection of Jesus to the Coronation of Mary as the Queen of Heaven.”
I last went to Margate twenty years ago on August bank holiday, when I saw one man on the beach walking his dog. So when we went to visit Turner Contemporary the other day, I thought things may have changed for the better. They haven’t.
The Turner is a bubble surrounded by poverty, squalor and deprivation, despite the fact that it has free entry and there were a group of very old ladies and their carers in the vegan-inspired café when we were there.
My parents took us to Margate in the fifties, before we could afford to go to Italy, when we jostled to find a space on its lovely sandy beaches. Now it’s the ultimate in left-behind, not only losing its principal industry, tourism, but having been used as a dumping ground for homeless families for a generation. Cliftonville, which Baedeker described as the most fashionable part of the town, now has the most social deprivation and is one of the poorest parts of Britain. The the poorest and most desperate congregate in the neglected 70s College Square shopping centre.
I have to admire the vision of the Thanet councillor who stuck with the idea of Turner Contemporary for twenty years until it was realised, but having worked in economic regeneration for a long time, I can say with confidence that it contributes nothing to the lives of the people I saw in College Square.
The most cost-effective economic development in my experience is targeted basic skills training. For £1,000 you can transform someone’s life. But that’s not visible and trainees are not glamorous. Politicians prefer large, expensive buildings that they can be photographed in front of with important people. Turner Contemporary was opened by the Queen.
A walk from Deal to St Margaret’s Bay, via Kingsdown and St Margaret’s-at-Cliffe, took in a variety of building styles, vernacular and polite.
Flint and brick is characteristic.
I liked the fretted fascia on this house.
Oldestairs House in Oldstairs Road, Kingsdown. Red-brick, roughcast and tile hanging. Large, Edwardian and intrusive.
Kingsdown Cottage, one of a pair of Arts-and-Crafts houses on the outskirts of St-Margaret’s-at-Cliffe, with its roughcast walls, high chimneys and steep-pitched roof, recalls Voysey’s High Gaut in the same village (which we didn’t get to see), but I couldn’t find out anything about it.
Tin shacks pop up everywhere for chapels and clubs. I thought the St Margaret’s Bowls Club looked homely.
Portal House, a Kent County Council special school, is well described by its architects, KSS: “The double pitched roof concept for the new building draws on the local Kent vernacular, and the use of humble traditional materials with simple modern detailing gives the building a quiet but distinct contemporary identity.”
The star of our walk was Ness Point, a bold, orginal design by Tonkin Liu, with curving white walls that echo the White Cliffs. There are plans and more photos, including interior photos, at Design Curial.
We stayed a few days in Deal, which is contributing to the revival of the Kent and Sussex seaside. It’s a sober resort with a couple of little galleries, a maritime museum and a modernist pier built in the 1950s. Norman Wisdom spent a miserable childhood in Deal and Charles Hawtrey a miserable retirement.
We were attracted to The Rose Hotel, which descended from family and commercial house to roughest pub in town. Then it was reinvented as boutique hotel with London chef. Restaurant open Wednesday to Sunday. (We stayed Sunday to Tuesday.) There’s nice attention to detail, such as the room numbers painted by a sign writer.
Next door is St George’s Church, neo-classical with 19th and 20th century additions and 21st century subtractions: its happy-clappy vicar has taken out the furniture for pop-music services. Gravestones are stacked against the wall to make a park for dog-walkers and joggers, lovely in the early-morning mist.
The foreshore, as you walk to Kingsdown, is part of a site of special scientific interest, unfortunately without an information board. Wild fennel grows in the shingle and in the gardens. Soon the chalk rises to form the famous White Cliffs.
A flat in this 1920s coastguard house (now a café) is on sale for £1.25m. There’s a bunker underneath it, excavated in the war as part of the Channel defences. Seeing the coast of France 18 miles away made me wonder how we stopped the German invasion. An exhibit at St Margaret’s Bay, evacuated for use by the armed forces, helps to explain.
You can keep your Kews, Wisleys, Munsteads and Great Dixters. My favourite garden is at the end of my street.
It belongs to an elderly neighbour who has tended it and loved it for years, without design manuals, Homes and Gardens magazine or TV makeover programmes. It’s his own, personal, DIY garden, made without spending much money, just as he likes it, with any old bits and pieces that came to hand. He can’t get around so well now, but he still potters and keeps it tidy. It’s unique and wonderful.
Borders are kept in check by bits of Dexion and cement walls studded with pebbles. A few tiles he found were made into a short length of paving. Concrete animals, gnomes and caryatids live under shrubs. A bit of irrigation has been built into his own Manneken Pis.
The fig tree is the statement plant. Windfall apples are too many to be picked up and pattern the path like stars. A shady bench under the trees reminds me of an Italian courtyard garden.
Of course, this is all too posh and high flown. It’s just one man’s private garden. But as it’s on a corner, it’s also public, and I stop and admire it every time I go by.
