London: May 2-3

A little blog catch up today as I prep for the long weekend here, which will consist of me and Nicole embarking on a trip to Jane Austen's cottage in Chawton, her grave in Winchester, and Lyme Regis, where a significant (in both senses of the word) portion of Persuasion takes place.

Wed., May 2: I take advantage of further nice weather and go to yet another semi-rural house in the western suburbs, Chiswick.


Chiswick is notable because it was designed and built by Lord Burlington, and was one of the properties the great 18th century poet Alexander Pope had in mind in his Epistle to Burlington (okay, yeah, that's geeky, but this is a research trip). The building is from an early period of 18th century architecture, Palladian, way before Robert Adam's time. The interiors are much heavier than Adam's. The ceilings are heavily decorated, but unlike Adam's light reliefs at, for example, the library ceiling at Kenwood, the ceilings at Chiswick have panels a foot high, or, in the case of the blue velvet room, brackets at least a metre high. It gave me a much better appreciation of what people meant when they said that Adam's style was lighter and flatter that what came before. A few more Chiswick photos here. No interiors, again, but I'm quite pleased with a couple of the exterior shots.

Thursday (May 3) I went to the Sir John Soane's Museum of Architecture and sat in its library, reading books on architecture. I also flipped through a full-sized, folio copy of Robert and James Adam's Works in Architecture. It was incredibly useful just to see the plates at full size, since no detail is lost. During the lunch break, I ate lunch in one of the fields that comprises Lincoln's Inn Fields, which was pretty cool.

And yeah, and after never getting around to it in Edmonton, I finally saw The Lives of Others in London (go figure). It's very very good and I would recommend it.

Posted 12:22 p.m. Fri., May 4, London