London Concert Halls and Theatres

My busy vignettes of London's high culture. 

Who doesn't like an evening out in Theatreland? Surrounded by plush velvet, tassels and gilt or in a forest of acoustically engineered shapes; flapping a glossy programme in the heat; suppressing a cough; fretting that the phone isn't turned off...

Here are the smartest and most prestigious of London's concert halls.  It's only this year that I've managed to visit them all*.  As for the theatres - well, there are scores of them and I got it down to a select ten, including the old and the new, dance and opera, west end, south bank and further afield.

These vignettes are fun to assemble and populate.  I dug deep into the oeuvre of obscure musical instruments for London Concert Halls.  For no reason other than my own initial, they all begin with C:
cittern, chitarrone, charango, clarinet, cor Anglais and crumhorn.  On Some London Theatres it's all scenery and the accessories of theatre-going.  The bust on the plinth is Garrick.

The list of venues in full:

London Concert Halls:
Barbican Centre, Royal Festival Hall, St. John's Smith Square, Cadogan Hall, Wigmore Hall, Royal Albert Hall.

Some London Theatres:
National Theatre, Almeida Theatre, Menier Chocolate Factory, Royal Opera House, Duke Of York's Theatre, Gielgud Theatre, Tricycle Theatre, Shakespeare's Globe, The Old Vic, Sadler's Wells.


* The Cadogan Hall for the Pasadena Roof Orchestra.  I became tearful when they played "A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square".

A Monument To Architectural Folly

My love of a rusticated pilaster is documented.  I can dig a dog-tooth and ogle an ogee.  There is a wealth of obscure words for different shaped bits of stone and each one makes me feel that I should store it mentally in case it comes up in a crossword.

For my final day, for a while, of supervising the art school print room, I made a jolly three-colour screenprint that came out of some happy hours looking through books of architectural details and terminology.  It all came together this afternoon and this evening and all twenty copies came out pretty well.

Drawn and printed today!  A preposterous erection.

The books in question include works by Matthew Rice and Osbert Lancaster, Peter Ashley's "Preposterous Erections" and a King Penguin on the English Tradition In Design.

Here you will find:

Doric columns, interlacing arches, quoins, Venetian windows, consoles, crockets, a lucarne window, Elizabethan chimneys, egg and dart, shield-bearing lions, triglyphs, staddle stones and a crinkle-crankle wall.

That's just the main feature.  The border brings you trefoils, cinquefoils, linenfold, trumpet moulding, ball-flower, volutes and label termination.

Of course, an antefixa would have been a step too far.