A terrible default is born

Congratulations to Ireland on electing a new puppet Government. The election will not reduce the interest rate on its €80bn bailout by a quarter of a percentage point; it will not diminish the burden of the deficit by so much as an old Irish Punt (the pre-euro currency which rhymed with Bank Manager). It will hang around the necks of the Irish for decades, and rest upon the shoulders of their children and their children’s children. If Gaddafi Adams is the answer then what is the question? The HUGE mistake was to guarantee not just deposits but ALL the liabilities of Irish Banks. The Hedge Fund Bondholders have been in LMAO mode ever since. Alas I had anticipated years ago that a monetary policy designed for Germany and France would make the PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain) squeal and so it has come to pass;

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2007/09/euro-opportunity-or-threat-for-britain.html



Welcome to Dublin!


Fine Gael have been swept to power on the back of a promise to renegotiate the terms of Ireland’s €80bn bailout by the European Union and International Monetary Fund. But Enda Kenny (a leader so impressive his own party tried to give him the heave 8 months ago) like all the other “believe my promises" Irish Politicos has no real power, Ireland’s sovereignty has been removed. The greatest joy is that the Greens have been totally stuffed, losing all their six seats. It's funny how it works that way. They do alright until they get a bit of power – then people realise how absolutely crap they are, and they never get another look in.



As for the Labour Party well I’ve always voted Labour in any country I’ve lived in and I know and like Eamonn Gilmore since we were both involved in the Union of Students in Ireland in the 70’s. However their economic policy has not moved much beyond the “increase taxes to eliminate poverty era.”


We'll always have Riverdance!


Lack of democratic accountability means the same austerity measures will still be imposed, exactly as they are across the euro zone. The impotence of Ireland to influence its own future will lead to bitterness and alienation. This in turn will lead to continuing dishonesty and delusion among a population for whom the “stroke” is a National Religion – this is the only country where a €78 million Euro lottery winner was found to be on benefits and working, claiming “Single Mother’s Allowance” when with a partner and having a holiday home in Turkey and was feted as a “character.” This is a country with the same population as Greater Manchester which still supports 340 Quangos full of self important, self serving popinjays getting in the way of reality. This is a country which when it became wealthy spent its money on buying itself in a huge property bubble.


You can't go wrong with land - sure they are not making any more of it!

But let us consider the nature of the Bailout and the preceding speculative Bubble and the issue of Ireland’s default becomes a “when”, not an “if.” Before the property bubble Ireland had the highest level of home ownership in the EU, at 62% way ahead of Germany, France and the Netherlands. Indeed the nearest is its near neighbour the U.K. where the “love of property” has really really been a “love of inflation.” So where does this leave property values in the short term as we enter a low inflation or possibly deflationary scenario? In the UK when residential property crashed in 1990 the average house price was 11 times average earnings. When reality hit Ireland in 2007 the average house price was an astounding 23 times average earnings. There are estimated to be 230,000 unsold new homes of which 110,000 are “holiday” homes. Add to the zombie estates, the zombie hotels built for tax breaks and without customers and the zombie developments then there are so many walking dead in the Irish property world that nobody can reliably predict future asset values or ascertain the reality of security behind current borrowings.



The Irish Independent reports today that there are 44,508 mortgages more than 3 months in arrears totalling €8.6 Bn, making each non-performing mortgage worth around € 193,000. Take the € 80 Bn Bailout Ireland has received. Ireland has a labour force of 2.2 million of which around 430,000 are currently claiming unemployment benefit of some sort. Abstract also the estimated 300,000 Public Sector workers this leaves a generous 1,470,000 workers (including those working in zombie hotels) in the wealth producing sectors of the economy. So the € 80 Bn Bailout equates to roundly € 55,000 for every productive worker. Add to this annual interest servicing costs of € 4,960 per annum and you get the scale of the problem, Ireland’s public and private debt is simply unsustainable. Most reconstructions, Bankruptcy and liquidations, involve substantial debt reduction, a write off of debt before you begin a fresh start. Ireland is in unrealistic denial about being able to service its Public and private debt making the hard stop of debt default inevitable sooner rather than later.


Fecked!

Of course the election is not all bad news - but at least we don't have to look at Cowen any more ... until he turns up again with a nice little earner, courtesy of the "colleagues". The inevitable default in the next two years will alienate a whole generation. The puppets may have changed but the same puppet master is still pulling the strings. Congratulations to Jean Claude Trichet of the European Central Bank on his election win. IMF/ECB still rules! Simples!



For an insight into the high quality leadership which has brought Ireland to such a happy place see;

Bertie Ahern and poverty in Ireland;

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2007/12/bertie-ahern-and-poverty-in-ireland.html

The Naked Taoiseach

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2009/03/naked-taoiseach.html

St. Pancras Reborn Part II

After a long dormant spell, George Gilbert Scott's magnificent Midland Grand Hotel is about to be re-opened - the jewel in the crown of the St Pancras railway redevelopment which has already seen the relocation of the Eurostar terminal. A triumph of neo-Gothic splendour, the red brick Grade I listed hotel has been painstakingly restored by architect Geoff Mann who worked with English Heritage to preserve as many of the original features as possible. Many of these date back to 1876 when the hotel first opened - making it the last and most extravagant of the great Victorian railway hotels. Grand and imposing though it was, the Midland Hotel was soon redundant - its fate doomed by the end of the railway boom and the lack of bathrooms (it had just eight bathrooms 300 rooms; an army of servants did the rest). It closed just 59 years after it opened. This magnificent high Gothic revival building was designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott, the High Priest of Victorian Architecture, (he also designed the Foreign Office and the Albert Memorial) in 1865. It was purpose built as the Midland Grand Hotel, the rear joining Barlow's equally splendid single-span train shed.


St Pancras Midland Grand Hotel

Back in the early 1960s, high Victorian architecture was widely considered to be hideous, fit only for demolition. Many key buildings were lost. Next in line, the highest of high Victorian, were the smoke-blackened, sinister turrets of underused St Pancras, right next to dour old King’s Cross. With the railways long since nationalised and passenger numbers falling, what need for such duplication? So, in 1966, a merged station was mooted; the wrecking ball was readied.


St Pancras Chambers as British Rail's catering headquarters in the 1960's


By then, however, the tide was turning. The Beatles and the Kinks loved Victoriana, as did the cuddly poet and conservationist John Betjeman. St Pancras was duly listed as a Grade I building, on a par with the Tower of London. But, having saved it, nobody knew what to do with it. Whilst Betjeman’s name is associated with saving St. Pancras and he certainly was a supporter the campaigning and successful lobbying was done by Jane Fowler of the Victorian Society and the great Architectural Historian, Sir Nicholas Pevsner. Sir John was more heavily involved in trying to save Euston from the Philistines.

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2009/09/euston-arch.html

When St. Pancras train station opened in 1868 there was no finer railway terminus anywhere in the world. The view down Pentonville Road towards the great gothic facade of the Midland Hotel at St. Pancras was one of the archetypal views of London.





Outside it spoke of the confidence of the Victorians and it was designed to make the public accept the new fangled rail travel as the way to go by associating it with images of past greatness. The Train Sheds were the Victorian’s cathedrals, stunning the public with their scale and the beauty of the engineering and frequently suffocating them with their sulphurous interiors! St Pancras Station is a celebration of Victorian architecture and engineering featuring two contrasting, exceptional Victorian structures, the train shed by W H Barlow & R M Ordish (1863-5) and the magnificent Midland Grand Hotel by Sir George Gilbert Scott (1868-74).

For the story of the rebirth of St. Pancras see;


http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2007/11/st-pancras-reborn.html

After nearly two decades of having only bats, rats and the occasional tramp as inhabitants, the former Midland Grand Hotel beside London’s St Pancras station is at last about to open its doors to paying guests in May, re-christened the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel London. The restoration of the grand Victorian-Gothic structure cost more than £150 million, but by all accounts it was money well spent. It is one of London’s most high profile restoration projects, and created within the former St. Pancras Chambers 67 residential apartments, a penthouse and a 244-bedroom Five Star Marriott Renaissance Hotel.







The Midland Grand Hotel, the salmon-coloured Gothic fantasia that introduces St Pancras station to London, should not by rights exist. It has spent more of its 127-year life as a problem, a failing building ill-suited to the purposes it was supposed to serve.


The hotel lounge 1907


Even at conception, its existence was rackety and perilous. As the author Simon Bradley recounted in his book on St Pancras, it was the last and most extravagant of the great Victorian railway hotels, costing 14 times more than its nearby rival the Great Northern. It opened when the railway boom was turning to bust, the 19th century's equivalent of the bursting of the dotcom bubble. A floor was shaved off the proposals in an effort to cut costs, and the lavish ornament cheapened. Oak was substituted with cheaper deal. For the completion of its interiors, its celebrated and workaholic architect Sir George Gilbert Scott was replaced with a more malleable practice.




The Dining Room 1907 and 2005

The Midland Grand still managed to be one of the most spectacular Gothic Revival buildings anywhere and, for a decade or two, the epitome of luxury. It represented industrial wealth in medieval form. Sanctified with the style of cathedrals, it was an exotic bloom grown out of the muck and coal of the industrial Midlands. Indeed the structure was fashioned from an amazing six million red bricks made from the clay of the Midlands of England and transported to London by rail. No doubt this fantasy in brick delighted the bones of one of Britain’s greatest architects and son of a bricklayer Sir John Soane who is interred in St Pancras Churchyard behind the station. Indeed the grandson of the architect George Gilbert Scott was Giles Gilbert Scott who designed the famous red telephone box based on Sir John Soane’s mausoleum and went on to design many famous buildings in red brick including Battersea and Bankside Power Stations (the latter now the Tate Modern) and the Guinness Brewery at Park Royal. We are not quiet finished with architectural trivia here for as an apprentice architect the writer Thomas Hardy was involved in the controversial clearing of part of the churchyard to build the railway tracks into St. Pancras.

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2011/02/sir-john-soanes-museum_16.html

But the hotel business moved on and it faded from fashion - not least because its handsome rooms came without bathrooms. It closed in 1935, after which it became offices for the railway company. After the coming of British Rail, it became the base of the company's catering division, from which crimes against gastronomy were plotted for buffets across the land. Partitions, suspended ceilings and fluorescent lights sliced mercilessly through the hotel's florid detail.


Ceiling in main stairway



What at its opening was called “the most perfect in every possible respect in the world”, would be called “completely obsolete and hopeless” by one chairman of the railway company. Not even architectural historians liked it – they mostly thought it too flashy and vulgar, and could not forgive the way it obscured the more innovative steel structure of the station roof behind. They preferred simpler, more chaste stations, like King's Cross.

There were open attempts to demolish it, until a Grade I listing in 1967 meant it had to stay. In 1988, the office workers moved out, after the building was declared unsafe. In 1993-5, £9 million of public money was spent on restoring the exterior but the building remained unused.


Former booking office


Now, 75 years since it closed as a hotel, the arduous, expensive struggle to find it a prosperous future is nearly over. The conversion of one half of it into 67 apartments is now complete and this week the rest of it, together with a new rear extension, will open as a 245-bedroom Marriott Renaissance hotel, designed by the architects RHWL and Richard Griffiths. By any measure of value engineering, or cost-benefit analysis, it should not be there. The fact that it is can be attributed to the power of fantasy — a power whose effects can be measured in hundreds of millions of pounds.

I toured 'St Pancras Chambers' as the empty hotel had recently been known, during the Open London Weekend in 2005 and was deeply impressed not to say stunned by its musty grandeur. Important features we saw included the curved Dining Hall, the wonderful Grand Staircase, and the drawing room which is built across the West Front. The full richness of the interior will become apparent now the hotel is completed. The delightful staircases, curving dining rooms, and riotous stencilling and plasterwork will become visible. It is, however, already possible to see that, in the sheer fact of this building finally returning to active use, something extraordinary has happened.

In the years when the hotel was threatened, Sir John Betjeman said that the Midland Grand Hotel was “too beautiful and too romantic to survive”. He was wrong: it has survived for precisely these reasons. Beauty and romance will make people pay more for flats and hotel rooms, and have inspired huge efforts over decades on the building's behalf.





The building is also a rebuke to all those who wanted to demolish it in the name of efficiency and modernity. Fifty years ago they were many, but the idea now seems inconceivable. There are currently similar mutterings about a work of George Gilbert Scott's grandson Giles, Battersea Power Station. Anyone who doubts the wisdom of preserving the latter should go to St Pancras and see what an awkward pile of old bricks can do. If I was to single out one visionary responsible for this rebirth of the Grandest Dame amongst London Hotels it is Harry Handelsman of Manhattan Loft Corporation who was originally involved in 2005 in a joint venture to build the apartments but who ended up taking over nearly the entire project. His, and English Heritage’s, insistence in recreating the Victorian craftsmanship of the original has resulted in a truly stunning reincarnation. Welcome back St. Pancras. Welcome back to the Midland Grand Hotel. Welcome back the Golden Age of Railways.



For more on how the railways changed London (and then the world!) see;


http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/01/great-circle-line-journey.html


CGI of the interior of the new Marriott Renaissance hotel

As vague as a Hague

British Foreign Secretary, William Hague


Poor William Hague was never going to have it easy. Looking like a Klingon and sounding like a Dalek from Yorkshire was never a happy combination. Then there were the optics gone wrong; looking so trendy not with a baseball cap at the Notting Hill carnival he looked just like the hoodie PR Dave urged us to hug and then there were the photos of him looking totally heterosexual with his “assistant” Chris Meyers. But now the disembowelling of Britain’s military, which I wrote about in the last post comes home to roost, as more than 5,000 Britons are trapped in the chaos as Libya turns against the Mad Dictator, Mu'ammar al-Gaddafi and his son Saif who only mere months ago was shooting (birdies!) at Waddesdon with the Rothschild’s and Peter “some of my best friends are millionaires” Mandelson.

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2007/11/waddesdon-manor-buckinghamshire.html


But unbelievably the Dalek is now in charge of the Foreign Office which is looking decidedly amateurish in looking after British citizens in Libya – a country Britain has cosied up to get oil and other contracts. Hundreds of terrified Britons have found evacuations arrangements decidedly vague as they were still trapped in Libya last night as the plane meant to rescue them sat on the tarmac at Gatwick with a ‘technical fault’. The first specially-chartered flight to Tripoli designed to rescue 500 stranded men and women had been announced yesterday by Foreign Secretary William Hague. But as Colonel Gaddafi’s regime teetered on the brink of bloody civil war, and other nations evacuated their citizens from danger, Britain’s response to the crisis descended into chaos.



Last night, the Royal Navy’s HMS Cumberland was due to arrive off Libya’s second city Benghazi – but will not seek to dock as it is not safe.Yesterday, in a menacing 70-minute address delivered by Libya's leader, the ruler instructed his followers to "fight until the last drop of my blood". Colonel Gaddafi's remaining supporters have joined forces with foreign mercenaries to terrorise the streets of Libya. It appears they are ready to kill as many people as it takes to stay in power.

It emerged that the Ministry of Defence had thought about sending C-17 transport planes to Malta, but abandoned the plan over fears that Gaddafi would see it as a prelude to an invasion. The Cobra crisis group, normally convened to handle emergencies has not yet met. Prime Minister David Cameron is on a trip to the Gulf, statesman as he is selling arms to the Arab Dictators; Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg is on holiday with his children – thought to be in Switzerland.


Mr. Hague with a Special advisor

As criticism mounted, Mr Hague cancelled a trip today to Washington, where he had been due to meet Hillary Clinton, to take ‘hands-on’ control of the crisis. HMS Cumberland has three dozen soldiers and Marines but they will not go ashore at Benghazi until it is safe. A source said: ‘We can’t just go into the port as we don’t know who is in control. They could be hostile.’ Mr Hague said Britain will send ‘as many planes as necessary’ to evacuate Britons.


Somebody called Hague said I was blowing my trumpet in Venezuela!

‘Our preference clearly is for people to leave on commercial flights as they have been doing, or on our specially-arranged charter flights as they will now be able to do, rather than to send in military flights without permission – although we don’t by any means rule out doing that,’ he said. Well to call this a rubbish response as France, Germany, Italy evacuated their nationals using military planes and Turkey took out 2,000 of its citizens by ship is just to understate the position – at the same time Britons have been unable to contact their embassy in Tripoli and found nobody from the Foreign Office at the airport. It is not that Britain doesn’t have two Sovereign Military Bases in Cyprus and long standing relationships with Malta, less than 20 minutes flying time from Libya, to which they could run a shuttle. Indeed after the recent hiatus in Egypt the Foreign Office said they “helped” people leave on commercial flights (as if that had anything to do with them) and ran ONE Charter Plane where they trumpeted the fact people were charged £300 a seat “so as not to undermine commercial operators!” Nothing like being taken advantage of by your own country in an emergency!



Even my own dear Ireland which has nothing resembling the UK’s Military assets or bases had this morning a Learjet and a Casa Air Ambulance in Malta to evacuate Irish Citizens. The aircraft flew into Malta overnight for a possible evacuation. The Casa aircraft, routinely used for fisheries patrols, can carry 21 people. On behalf of other governments Air Malta was running shuttle planes between Valletta and Tripoli. The Foreign Office finally managed to load 300 Britons onto a plane at Tripoli, but only after it had borrowed the jet from BP. The plane the Government had intended to use to evacuate Britons waited on the runway at Gatwick airport for 10 hours before taking off late on Wednesday night. Mr Hague admitted the efforts had been a failure and said he would establish a review to investigate. Portugal, Turkey, France and the EU had already pulled out thousands of citizens.


Irish Air Force Med Vac plane in Malta


Douglas Alexander, the shadow foreign secretary, said ministers seemed to have been “slow off the mark” and should convene the Cobra emergency committee. He said British nationals deserved to have had a senior Minister taking a grip of the Government’s response earlier. Hague and Britain’s Foreign Office have not impressed throughout in a country Britain ran from 1943 to 1948, where it has extensive interests and many stranded citizens in danger. William Hague announced yesterday that he thought Gaddafi was on his way to Venezuela according to his intelligence. Unfortunately for the Yorkshire Dalek’s credibility he was on the phone to UN General Secretary, Ban Ki-moon who had rung him in Tripoli at the same time! Oil worker James Coyle, who was barricaded with 90 British colleagues in a compound, said: "We are living a nightmare and we have asked the Government and they have just totally ignored us. They don't reply to emails, they have cut off the phones to Tripoli. We told them the situation three days ago, they never even replied to us. We have been left without any protection whatsoever."



William Hague can pontificate all he likes, they clearly didn't have a plan and it shows. Ryan Air to the rescue! Where is the Ark Royal, Harrier Jump Jets, Royal Naval support vessels and Nimrod Surveillance aircraft when you need them? Why, sent to the scrap yard by the Coalition of Convenience. This is a fine introduction to the reality of the Big Society or Britain Lite as we should rebadged it. Cutback so much “It’s a useful as a chocolate fireguard” as the say in Hague’s native Yorkshire!


Scenes at the Libya /Egypt border post

Big Society, Small Military?

Being republican with both a big and a small R the Celtic Sage is hardly an admirer of British militarism or imperialism. How could I be given their history in Ireland and my belief that the people are sovereign – I believe in being a citizen, not a subject? There is still too much unfinished business out there from the days of Empire which indicates that “Perfidious” and “Albion” are still two words which go together. Witness the shameful dispossession of the inhabitants of Diego Garcia, the abandonment of their allies against the Japanese the brave Karen people of Burma, their ignoring of the oppression of the Tamils in Sri Lanka since independence and the shabby racist treatment of ex Ghurkha soldiers and their families. Then there were the squalid post-colonial misadventures in Kenya, Aden, Cyprus and Suez to name a few which suggest “Our Boys” as they are known in gender prejudice Tabloid Land have frequently been ill used by politicians. Then there was the Mother of all Illegal Wars, where Britain was not just unconscious of the present in Iraq but apparently also unaware of its shameful past in that country.

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/04/britain-in-iraq.html


Nevertheless if you are not a pacifist you accept that Britain needs Armed Forces which must be properly resourced. You must also accept that there is a special compact to look after members of the Services who are prepared to die or be maimed to defend you and I - The Military Covenant. However I doesn’t recall either the Great Empire Defenders aka The Tories of the Lib Dems who form the Coalition of Opportunism which is grinding the UK back to the Stone Age tell the electors “Elect us and we’ll destroy the Army, Navy and RAF!” Nope, I never heard that before the election, did you?



No siree this was not the election platform but yet the UK’s Armed Forces are being ritually disembowelled on parade grounds around the world as we write. The Flagship of the Royal Navy Carrier Ark Royal and the entire Harrier Jet Force are being scrapped, £4 Bn of Nimrod Spy Planes (ordered by Conservative, Michael Portillo when they were in last time) will never fly and are being cut up. In the most significant changes to Britain’s defences since the post-Suez review of 1957, ministers and officials plan to scrap large parts of the Armed Forces. The Services will lose up to 16,000 personnel, hundreds of tanks, scores of fighter jets and half a dozen ships.


HMS Ark Royal has been sunk! The Flagship of the Navy she was the fifth Royal Navy ship to bear the illustrious name of Queen Elizabeth the First’s flagship which led the defeat of the Spanish Armada.


But the RAF will bear the brunt of the planned cuts. The Air Force will lose 7,000 airmen – almost one sixth of its total staff – and 295 aircraft. The cuts will leave the Force with fewer than 200 fighter planes for the first time since 1914. In addition, the Navy will lose two submarines, three amphibious ships and more than 100 senior officers, along with 2,000 sailors and marines.


Your job is OK Son!

The Army faces a 40 per cent cut to its fleet of 9,700 armoured vehicles and the loss of a 5,000-strong brigade of troops. The defence review scaled back Britain’s Armed Forces over the next decade, leaving the UK with just one operational aircraft carrier, a smaller number of surface ships and a reduction of 42,000 MoD personnel. The dismantling of three existing Nimrod reconnaissance aircraft, which were close to completion at a cost of £4.1 billion, is one of the most embarrassing outcomes of the review.


£4.1 Billion of new Nimrod surveillance aircraft which have never flown being cut up and scrapped

One amazing feature of the Demolition Coalition so far is the compliant press coverage from the Murdoch and Tory Press. When you consider the acerbic and highly personalised disinformation campaign against Labour and its entire works before the May Election the docility of the right wing press in the face of swingeing Defence cuts is both incredible and hypocritical. Remember the highly personalised campaign against former PM Gordon Brown for not supporting “Our Boys.” Now we are told he supported them too much!



Labour’s “Cool Britannia” has been replaced by the LibCon’s “Cruel Britannia.” So the casual cruelty to the Armed Forces continues with career prospects being destroyed, RAF pilots who cost £4 M each to train being sacked with only short flying hours remaining before they get their wings, 100 long serving soldiers being sacked by email, Sea, Air, Rescue being privatised one week and the process abandoned the next and experienced pilots telling David Cameron to his face that he has destroyed their careers.



We have been here before under the Conservatives. Remember saved the cost of one Navy ship they withdrew from the Falkland Islands and it cost us an entire war! The Falklands War cost 255 men, six ships (ten others suffered varying degrees of battle damage), 34 aircraft and £2.778 billion. Another Conservative triumph of economic management! This current disembowelling of the armed forces is even more perverse because it is based on two big lies. One is that we need to replace Trident, the Cold War MAD (mutually assured destruction) system which will cost £34 Bn. And never be used. The other is the lie about the HUGE budget deficit. But the government’s budget projections do not take into account the selloff of the stakes in the banks rescued in the 2008 Credit Crunch at a cost of £37 Bn. For UK PLC’s stake in these banks. The perfidious nature of George Osborne’s projections means these are not included. So the country, including the armed forces is being wrecked to keep an Election Bribe to one side for 2015.


Big Society community based Defence Partnership

It is not just the Armed Forces which are not safe in the hands of the Tory / LibDem Coalition, the whole country is at risk. David Cameron is certainly standing behind "Our Boys and Girls" - in the queue at the Job Centre!

To see what serving members of the Armed Forces think of their treatment by the Government see;

www.roguegunner.com

Sir John Soane’s Museum

Sir John Soane’s name doesn’t trip off the architectural tongue today but in his day he was Britain’s most influential and prolific architect – a classicist some of whose work is startlingly modern. For instance every major gallery built today is “top lit” to give an even quality of light on the paintings whilst protecting them from direct sunlight. Soane came up with this solution first for the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the architectural consensus is it has never been bettered. He designed the imposing edifice of the Bank of England in the City of London whose solidity was to speak to us of the solidity of the British currency at the height of Empire. Why he even inspired the Red Telephone box! So much of what he designed has been either demolished; altered or not built in the first place that is importance could be overlooked if it was not for London’s most amazing Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields which he bequeathed to the nation in 1837.




Dulwich Picture Gallery

This is not like any conventional museum for it is an amazing cabinet of curiosities for he filled his house with a most amazing and eccentric collection. Not only did he fill his house he also bought the houses on either side and even then he had to extend the lot and then again had so many items that he even designed folding displays to fit more paintings in. So this is a cabinet of curiosities on steroids for nowhere will you see such an amazing treasure trove on display, from the sarcophagus of Pharaoh Seti I to Hogarth’s “The Rake's Progress” to Greek Sculpture and more, much, much more.


Sir John Soane 1753 - 1837


Sir John Soane's Museum

Soane was born in 1753, the son of a bricklayer, and died after a long and distinguished career, in 1837. Soane designed this house to live in, but also as a setting for his antiquities and his works of art. After the death of his wife (1815), he lived here alone, constantly adding to and rearranging his collections. Having been deeply disappointed by the conduct of his two sons, one of whom survived him, he determined to establish the house as a museum to which ‘amateurs and students’ should have access. Now this unique place is to be enhanced further as the private apartments of the Sir John Soane are to be opened to the public for the first time since his death more than 170 years ago, after a £7million restoration which will take three years. Because of the genius of Sir John in getting Parliament to pass a special Act to protect his collection all this is there, as he intended, to see and enjoy FREE!


Library


Dining Room


Dome

Soane began his education in the architectural office of George Dance, one of the leading Neo-classical architects of the day. In 1771, he enrolled in the Royal Academy Schools where he won a gold medal for his design for a triumphal bridge (1776) and a scholarship to study in Italy (1778-81). In 1788, he was appointed Surveyor to the Bank of England. Many other public and private commissions followed, among them Dulwich Picture Gallery (1811-14). The security of this position allowed him to develop his highly idiosyncratic architectural vision. He gave his house and important works of art to the nation as the Soane Museum.


William Hogarth's "The Rake's Progress"


In 1833 Soane negotiated an Act of Parliament to settle and preserve the house and collection for the benefit of ‘amateurs and students’ in architecture, painting and sculpture. On his death in 1837 the Act came into force, vesting the Museum in a board of Trustees who were to continue to uphold Soane’s own aims and objectives. A crucial part of their brief was to maintain the fabric of the Museum, keeping it ‘as nearly as circumstances will admit in the state’ in which it was left at the time of Soane’s death in 1837 and to allow free access for students and the public to ‘consult, inspect and benefit’ from the collections.



The Bank of England


Sarcophagus of Pharaoh Seti I

Thanks to the recent restoration of No.14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the Museum can now restore an entire 2nd floor of No.13; comprising an ensemble of exquisite and intriguing rooms. These include Soane’s private apartments: bedroom, bathroom, oratory, book passage and Mrs Soane's Morning Room and the Model Room above. Other spaces include the Tivoli and Shakespeare recesses.



The restoration, called Opening Up the Soane, will let visitors see private rooms including the bedroom and bathroom. Part of his original bed was recently discovered in museum stores and is to be rebuilt. The work will also include the re-creation of the Tivoli Recess, Britain's first public gallery of contemporary sculpture. This will permit, for the first time since Soane's death in 1837, the display of 80 architectural models he used for teaching students at the Royal Academy.



Other rooms, including the Catacomb where Soane housed his collection of Roman funerary urns, are also being returned to their original use, having been adapted for visitor lavatories at the end of the 19th century. Watercolours of the apartments, painted in 1825 by Soane's pupils, are being used to govern the restoration. In addition to designing the house, he also directed the design of its furnishings and decorations, showing the finished result to interested parties including his Royal Academy students.


Soane's Bedroom


Soane's Model Room where he used c. 80 models to teach students

The museum's director, Tim Knox, said: "The restoration will help to address the problems caused by 110,000 visitors a year in a house which was built as the private residence of a great gentleman architect in the Regency era."The museum will not close during the works, which start next month and are due to be completed by 2014.

Today the Museum is housed in three fairly modest-sized interconnected and expanded houses house not a palace, so it really shouldn't take long to stroll round. Except that almost every inch is crammed with mouldings, architectural features, sculpture and art from the 18th and 19th centuries and back through antiquity. Some of the lighting in 'the crypt' is so low that you sense the almost life-size statuary rather than see them as they stand guard close to a painted stone sarcophagus from ancient Egypt. Everywhere there are lanterns and squints to allow daylight down into galleries, mezzanines and tiny dark corners. And then there is the famous gallery room where the walls covered with paintings open up like barn doors to show painting on the inside, and then, magically, they open again to finally reveal a hidden day lit space and the odd Turner or Canaletto. Oh yes, and there are the complete original oil paintings of Hogarth's 'The Election' and 'The Rake's Progress' which that artist created to promote sales of his engravings. All astonishingly restored and exhibited by the staff in such a low-key manner. For this is no conventional museum and even after all these years and despite its priceless contents you still feel you are being invited into Sir John’s personal space to view his idiosyncratic and slightly out of control collection.



There is a postscript for this great Architect would no doubt be happy to know that his tomb inspired one of the 20th Century’s great design icons, the Red Telephone Box. St. Pancras Old Churchyard is today somewhat forlorn set in the lee of the railway tracks behind Kings Cross and St Pancras Stations. Indeed as an apprentice architect the writer Thomas Hardy was involved in the controversial clearing of part of the churchyard to build the railway tracks.

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2007/11/st-pancras-reborn.html



Soane's mausoleum which provided the inspiration for the design by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott of the iconic red telephone boxes.



But this is historically one of London’s oldest churches named after the Roman Saint; St. Pancras and containing many graves of the good and great, the composer Johann Christian Bach and the sculptor John Flaxman. It is also the burial place of William Franklin, the last colonial Governor of New Jersey and illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin. There is a memorial tomb for philosophers and writers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, she being a famous reformer and mother of Mary Shelley. Here Sir John Soane designed a tomb for his wife and himself in the churchyard, which is now Grade I listed. This mausoleum provided the inspiration for the design by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott of the iconic red telephone boxes.




The website for the museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Holborn is;

http://www.soane.org/

For the wonderful enclaves which are the Inns of Court around Sir John Soane’s Museum see;

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2009/04/inns-of-court-london.html


For DC’s RLT (Reduced London Tour) which deftly avoids overpriced tourist traps see;

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2007/09/day-in-london.html

For more on the Red Phone Box and other British design icons see;">For more on the Red Phone Box and other British design icons see;

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2009/01/great-british-design-quest.html




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