Thread by @BrendanCormier

Catching up with this thread on a Nairn walk I did two weeks ago, an epic 20km traipse across South London. South London is really really big y’all.

First up, St. John in Vassall Rd - G.E Street, 1870 - “Street’s overwhelming fault was his heartlessness. But this marvelous building suggests that the trouble was not simple absence of feeling but an inability to feel except through the intellect.”

Loughborough Junction - “Each road has a bridge a few yards along it. This unique signature could so easily be an enrichment instead of an embarrassment, the bridges accentuated and dramatized instead of disregarded.”

“By contrast, the LCC’s well-publicized Loughborough Road Estate, is all artificial relationship... no more than an arid geometrical exercise masquerading as a place.” I dunno, I still love this estate.

Side note: the fenestration on this one still baffles me.

Electric Avenue, Brixton - “Electric, all right, and high voltage too. Stalls everywhere, arcades everywhere, diving through buildings and under the railway. And it is the 20th century New World the has saved the bacon of the Old.”

Granada, Mitcham Rd, Tooting - Cecil Macey, 1938 - “99 cinemas may be a shoddy counterfeit and so may 99 films: but this is the hundredth. Miss the Tower of London if you have to, but don’t miss this.” Now bathed in the eerie blue glow of slot machines.

King’s Head, Upper Tooting Road, 1896 - “The plan is a tour de force. Wren might have calculated them: this is a St James Piccadilly among pubs. And just as that is a proper church, this is a proper drinking place.”
I love a good pub as cathedral comparison.

Christ Church, Streatham - John Wild, 1842 - “Noble, strong and sensitive. This is how 19th century church architecture could have gone if Pugin had not dashed in with his inspired lunacy.”
Beautiful, this one. Even if I still screw up how to pronounce Streatham.

Sydenham Hill Station - “This is the quintessence of true suburbia, the illusion of rurality more effective here than the real thing would be.” Feels way more New England than old England.

Dulwich College - E.M Barry, 1866 - “This apparition is a fair candidate for the wildest 19th century building in the whole of London - and there is certainly some competition. Fragments of all styles and scales are thrown at each other with a kind of nihilistic joy.”

Dulwich Art Gallery, Sir John Soane, 1811-14 - “One of Soane’s most original, least satisfying designs. For once, the miraculous inventiveness is not connected up to an emotional purpose. It remains an intellectual solution” Nairn, the fanboy, is disappointed.

Crown and Greyhound, Dulwich Village - “Think of all the things which you have been told don’t make a pub: wrought iron, leader lights, plastic flowers, olde woodwork. Put the whole lot in a big Victorian pub and you have a masterpiece.” I strangely dislike this place.

St Barnabas - Oliver & Leeson, 1894 - “Just around the corner from the careful arcadia of Dulwich Village, this suddenly blows you two hundred miles north. It is by Newcastle architects, and has all the scale and freedom from pettiness that the Gothic revival meant up there.”

Side note: fairly sure I spotted Richard Ayoade pop out of this handsome house in East Dulwich.

Rye Lane, Peckham - “Now that the east end has been gutted by bombs and the wrong sort of rebuilding, Rye Lane is one of the few cockney streets left inside London - an unquenchable vitality has pulsed through it for 90 years.”

Side note: when a road cuts through a railway overpass at a super acute angle, it approaches a kind of Gordon Marta-Clarke sublime.

Licensed Victuallers’ Benevolent Institution, 1827 - “Benevolent indeed, the most affable of London’s many Grecian public buildings. The designers knew when to stop.” An underrated skill.

The Denes, Camberwell - Borough Architect’s Department, 1957-63 - “would need a herd of elephants to demolish the landscape... an immense sequence of interlocking squares.” BUT MY GOD THOSE WHITE PICKET FENCES!!!!

Sceaux Gardens, Camberwell - Borough Architect’s Department, 1957-63 - To finish, this gem. “A good sensitive example of a conventional layout - high slabs, medium maisonettes and a few low houses. What makes it special is the thick landscape which has taken over.”