#Marble Arch

[fidjiefidjie]

Bonjour, bonne journée ☕️ 🌂

Marble Arch ,Londres 🇬🇧 1954 Angleterre

Photo de © Marc Riboud

[underachievers-please-try-harder]

Track of the day // Mary in the Junkyard - Marble Arch

[paralleljulieverse]

This Week in Julie History: Coronation Night Gala Supper Dance and All-Star Cabaret, Cumberland Hotel, 2 June 1953

Seventy years ago, in June 1953, London pulsated with the exhilarating energy of Coronation Week. Just as witnessed during the recent ascension of King Charles, crowds thronged the flag-bedecked streets of the capital, hearts ablaze with patriotic pride, waiting for a glimpse of their new young Queen Elizabeth II.  Numerous celebrations filled the Coronation Week of 1953, ranging from quaint neighbourhood street parties to grand, opulent balls. Almost every hotel and restaurant across the city curated special coronation-themed events. Among these, the Cumberland Hotel, located in the upscale Marble Arch district, offered a notable highlight with a magnificent Gala Supper Dance and Dinner. 

Tickets for the gala were priced at 5 gns—approximately £200 in today's terms—so it was clearly a high-end affair. But for their money, guests were indulged with a gourmet six-course supper featuring suitably coronation-themed dishes such as Le blanc de poularde Reine Elizabeth -- Queen Elizabeth chicken breast -- served with Windsor Pearls and Royal Potatoes. Enhancing the experience, guests were also treated to a cocktail on arrival, half-bottle of vintage champagne and after-supper liqueurs.

A superbly curated All-Star Cabaret performance served as a delightful accompaniment to the evening's supper. Compered by celebrated magician, Billy McComb, it featured a line-up of top variety entertainers including comedian Reg Dixon; radio impressionist Peter Cavanagh, the singing duo, Jack and Daphne Barker, and ‘Britain’s youngest soprano’, Julie Andrews.

That Julie was contracted as one of the gala’s headliners attests to her rising professional stock in the era. Now aged 17, she was fast moving beyond the child star persona of her early career and events such as this cabaret marked a pivot to a more mature and sophisticated style.

Unfortunately, as she relates in the first volume of her memoirs, Julie didn’t actually make it to the Cumberland Hotel that night due to a car breakdown:

“There were many glamourous events and galas during the time of the coronation, and my mother and I were invited to perform one evening at a hotel on Park Lane. We set off in Bettina, our trusty car. There was a low bridge on the way to London, where the road took a huge dip. We were decked out in our best attire, and as happens so often in England, it was simply teeming with rain. Ahead of us, under the bridge, was a vast body of water. “Oh, just plow through it,” I advised Mum. “If we go fast enough, we ’ll come out the other side.” Mum gunned the engine, and Bettina came to a hissing stop right in the middle of the pool. Her motor had completely flooded. Dressed in our finery, we waded out of the deep water and stumbled to a garage to ask for the car to be towed to safety. We never did make the concert” (2008, 154).

There is no record of how Julie’s absence was conveyed to the crowd at the Cumberland or what their response was...but we’d have been crying into our five guinea half-bottle of vintage champagne!

Sources:

Andrews, Julie (2008). Home: A memoir of my early years. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Bartlett School (2023). Survey of London: Vol 11 Histories of Oxford Street. Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London.

Cumberland Hotel (1953). A souvenir of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. London.

Evening Standard, 27 April 1953: 2.

Copyright © Brett Farmer 2023

[ocelotrevs]

Marble Arch, London

13th March 2023

[sendhimtotheshadowrealm]

[joyfulrebelblossom]

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"NEW VISTA GREETS VISITORS TO ART GALLERY," Toronto Globe. August 2, 1933. Page 9. ---- An Important detail in the original plans of the Toronto Art Gallery has just been completed in the form of a marble-arched entrance from the Court to the Long Gallery. It faces the main entrance and Jeads the visitor in a new course to discover the attractions of the Gallery. An incised marble pediment placed over the arch reads: "Sir Edmund Walker, O.V.O., First President of the Gallery, 1904-1924,"

[rayjuss]

[justinempire]

Edgeware Road London.

This road in London UK leads to Marble Arch and Oxford Street, where at the corner of which is the site of the  Tyburn Tree.

“The gruesome history of Tyburn Tree has nothing to do with nature or greenery and everything to do with justice and death.

Tyburn – meaning ‘place of the elms’ – was a village close to the current location of Marble Arch and so-called for its position adjacent to the Tyburn Brook, a tributary of the lost Westbourne River.

Tyburn’s ‘tree’ was in fact a wooden gallows where criminals were hanged to death. The site, operational for over 650 years, became renowned as the principal location for public executions in London.

Prisoners sentenced to death would begin their last day at Newgate Prison in the City. They’d then clamber onto horse and cart to embark on a very public journey through St Giles in the Fields, down Oxford Street, before arriving at the Tyburn Tree – their final destination. A journey that would now take around 20 minutes on the number 23 bus could take up to three hours due to the number of people crowding the route, wanting to get one last look at the condemned.

It was certainly a public show. Executions were thought to be a deterrent to crime (ironically, pickpocketing at these events was rife due to the huge crowds) and so spectators were heartily welcomed in their thousands. The placement of the gallows in the centre of a busy roadway overlooking Hyde Park made it hard to miss. Those at the more fortuitous end of the social ladder could even pay to ascend viewing platforms constructed especially for the occasion.”

https://marble-arch.london/culture-blog/history-of-tyburn-tree/

[halaldudeinlondon]

Dinner at newly opened BKC (Biryani Kebab Chai) at Marble Arch. Three of my favourite things in one place!

The lakhnawi lamb biryani was fragrant and delicious!

The kebab platter was amazing, with succulent burrah lamb chops, lamb seekh, malai chicken tikka, and mouth-melting galouti lamb patties

Murgh makhni - chicken curry cooked in spiced tomato and fenugreek with butter, served with laccha paratha made with ghee and saffron.

Samosa chaat with sweet and spicy chutneys

Kashmiri pink chai made with milk, rose petals and pistachio nuts

Biryani Kebab Chai 7 Edgware Rd London W2 2ER [view map]

[vintagehomecollection]

The outside cloister is echoed inside by a long passageway filled with arched windows. It's the cold-weather alternative to the outside walkway.

The Not So Big House - A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live, 1998

[wroteonedad]

Can Bad Interior Design & Architecture Be Art?

My brain has been feeling a little bit slow lately. Long difficult weeks at work mixed with the post holiday blues are something that are beginning to take its toll on me. I love nothing more than doing something that is spontaneous and different from the things I do every day. I love different, unless it's within a working environment, then I'll lie and say I love doing different things in the hospitality industry. All things aside, this week I decided to delve into something that is both slow and fairly simple.

Interior design can no doubt be considered an art form. The little trinkets stored on shelves, the texture and location of the sofa, and the rich peoples obsession with having marble everywhere. I never really thought about how much marble the rich have in their homes until you watch any form of Penguinz0 on YouTube about 'ugly homes' and he'll spend most of the time ripping into the marble everywhere. And maybe he's right, marble for the most part is pretty horrific.

But there are lots of mediums and details when it comes to exactly what creates a piece of art in interior design. I remember as a child at one point, I really wanted to become a designer, though I feel this may have something to do with the amount of Sims I played. I would always create a mix of homes. Sometimes it was a I'm going to use motherlode 10 times and create something so luxurious, so fancy and other times I would make a huge square building where every room would all be together in a small contained space and I would do anything possible to kill them. But what if we were to focus on the form of bad interior design? Something that is frequent in homes and that subvert every form of what it is that makes interior design art, and if the bad can still be considered a form of art. Take it from Dina, an interior designer based in Boston who not only runs her own Instagram account, focused on designs for customers to spruce up their homes. But she also runs another account on the side, the infamous 'pleasehatethesethings' in which supplies a large gallery of some of the most hideous designs in peoples homes. Some of them so bad, they are meme worthy, and I've seen a lot of them pop up again on TikTok.

We've got doors in the middle of the wall with no steps to access the door, a toilet on the centre of the staircase, a shower than when turned on goes straight into the toilet and the Jed (jean bed) to name a few terrible examples on the page. The entire page is the thing of nightmares and I love it. If anything, it shows people the deal breakers to look out for should they go to a house viewing and see anything half as erratic as that. I guess to some degree this can be considered a form of art, not a good type of art, but it feels so ironic like it was supposed to be a joke. Or worse yet, it wasn't designed to be a joke, but was left uncomplete because it's from an old build which doesn't have the sufficient space in order to make it have a design that isn't just functional and basic. Most interior design work you see is mostly something that only people with some form of money can afford, the working class don't typically have the spare funds to just knock over a pillar and completely tear down the kitchen in order to make it aesthetically pleasing. But maybe that's the point with bad design, it's for the rich to laugh at. The best we can do to make our homes look nice is to purchase little trinkets that can brighten up a rather bland mould ridden space. Old builds on a small budget are difficult, like last week I took my salt lamp off the plate it had been sat on for months and the whole plate was submerged in water where the home has such an awful damp and mould problem.

Ironically, it would also appear that the rich do tend to make bad decisions when it comes to the look of their homes. In this instance in the photo above, we have a toilet in the shower room. Perhaps this is from the plumbing, they wanted the shower to be moved elsewhere, but couldn't get a toilet in anywhere else so they just chose to keep it in the shower. It looks like walking into a toilet cubicle without any privacy. And the worst part,,,, there is marble everywhere else except for where the one toilet is situated.

Spicing up the idea of bad interior design, there is also this bedroom in the image above. I'm not really sure where to begin with this one, it looks like something you would see in a Disney hotel and I don't mean that in a good way. At the same time, why is the whole bedroom under the sea themed and why did this person decide to have a elephant painted on the ceiling? I have so many questions. This bedroom is not the quality of 'my home doesn't have enough space to build the thing I wanted' rather it's giving 'I had this weird dream about this nightmare of a room so I'm going to make it a reality'. The wall, floor and bed all with matching tiles are a living nightmare and I just cannot comprehend any type of person in the world wanting to sleep in this room.

If you thought that room was bad, there is also someone who lives in the Disney village who has a painted Woody from Toy Story painted on the ceiling in the corner of the bedroom. This was taken from a screenshot of a Kurtis Conner video where he delves into Disney adults. I don't want to expand on that video, but he looks into families who live in the multimillion pound homes which reside within a private neighbourhood in Disneyland. Every one of these homes are filled with 'subtle' Disney accents to make these people feel like they are living their childhood dream, but to me it has to be interior design at its worst. I could maybe understand the bad Disney interior a little bit more if you were staying in one of their designated hotels, but a home that you buy and choose to live in is wild to me. The placement is random, there is nothing next to it other than this one image of Woody and I think if I woke up in the middle of the night and looked up at the ceiling, he would make me scream and cry and throw up.

But the fun doesn't end at bad interior design because we can also extend into forms of the exterior itself. It's time to go into detail about two of the worst archiectual pieces in London, except one was never built. The first on the other hand, it was there once upon a time.

Say hello to the Marble Arch in London, the most infamous outdoor installation created in England to date. This was supposed to give you some of the best views of London, but to get there you had to walk up about a million steps just to find the view was the lovely heavily congested street. This God awful mound that was built still cost £2 million and gave us nothing. It was designed in order to attract more people to Oxford Street other than to shop, so these people could go to a new and upcoming tourist destination. The mound was supposed to be attached to a gallery and café, something that would be radical and different for the area. If you class paying anywhere between £4.50 and £8 to climb up a giant grass mound as a radical and fun day out of course. According to Winy Maas, founding partner of MVRDV, they not only wanted the structure to be built over the top of the 200 year old stone arch across from the mound, but they also wanted the piece to be steel based, and not on scaffolding and because of this, the original budget spiralled out of control and made the piece look more disappointing as time went on. It seems that MVRDV are so embarrassed by their own project, that it isn't even mentioned as one of their 393 completed projects on their website. I'm sure it was built to be something that was spectacular to view and would give you such an alternative view to the thick smoggy skies of London, but it just doesn't work. This was a flop, and it's sad because I went through the other projects created by MVRDV and they make some amazing out of the box pieces that are tailored to every form of space and environment. It could have been, but it wasn't. And I too would be too embarrassed to put this under my work portfolio.

Speaking of other outdoor mediums which deemed to be so unsuccessful that nobody even managed to start building it was the Garden Bridge, endorsed by disgraced ex PM Boris Johnson. The flashy high quality blueprints had been designed by architects, but it just never happened. It was something that was supposed to be sustainable. The idea consisted of one of the bridges over the River Thames to be transformed and covered in trees and flowers in order to help with smog levels and add some classic greenery to the capital centre. It was suggested that building this would cost an estimated £53 million. It could have been a beautiful piece of architecture had it not cost so much of the taxpayers money that Sadiq Khan lost trust that Johnson would have been able to deliver anything like it.

I'm not sure I would go so far as to say this is a piece of ugly architecture, but it did indeed turn out to be a form of architecture deemed as unsustainable and just undoable due to funds needed and its corrupt government trying to look green aware. The original proposal had promised to pay out over £21 million to build a brand new bridge over the River Thames, which would theoretically lower emissions over other bridges in Central London, especially with a bridge designed to connect North and South London by pedestrians. The bridge would then be covered in an estimated 270 trees and 2000 shrubs and have a lovely view of the rest of the smoggy city from its green utopia. Taxpayers still ended up forking money for this project despite it having no official planning permission to be built anywhere and Boris Johnson was then left in 2017 to give evidence for the downfall and failure of the entire project.

Do I think we can consider bad interior design and architecture as art? I'm very much in the centre about this, at the end of the day art is subjective. Interior design, if it's badly designed because of the bad building then I can't argue that it could be considered as any other art form except for a meme. This is the type of low quality image that I want to see at 2am when I've gone delirious and begin to think it's the funniest thing in the world. I mean, show me that under the sea bedroom after I've had 5 beers and I'll tell you that I want that built myself in my home. Architecture on the other hand, can always be considered a form of art no matter how disgraceful it is. What we can take from the Marble Arch piece is that maybe from the right angle, it would look okay, but because of its lack of budget and overall structure, it was just too janky to ever look good. I am also a firm believer that if Garden Bridge had gone ahead, I think it would have looked slightly similar to Marble Arch by end project and it could not have been sustainable for the taxpayer to have to spend their money on. It could have been, but it wasn't.

[arc-hus]

The House of Courtyards, Dubai - Studio VDGA

[inspiredlivingspaces]

thisisglamorous.com

[thewales-family]

The Prince of Wales visits the Western Marble Arch Synagogue to learn about how it had been supporting the Jewish community and meet Holocaust survivors, who reflected on their experience. and a number of young ambassadors from all backgrounds, who have taken part in the Holocaust Educational Trust’s flagship 'Lessons from Auschwitz' project, where they learn about the history of the Holocaust in London, England -February 29th 2024.

[nomadbuzz]

Angles. India 2023