Category Archives: Museums

Liverpool 2

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The Mersey wind cuts with a sharp knife: I tucked everything around me as I headed down to the river. The open views of the famous riverside buildings have been redacted by the big blots of modern buildings – but the latter do provide good reflections. Having watched Terence Davies’s “Of Time and the City” a couple of weeks ago, I remembered the overhead railway, and reflected that the waterfront has probably never presented a perfect view. (But the Cunard Building tried hard!)

To the Maritime Museum, where I found myself unexpectedly interested by the history of Liverpool’s docks. More expectedly, I was very taken by the glamour of interwar ocean liners. The Titanic exhibition I largely swerved because of school groups, but the photograph of a rack of plates, still on the sea bed and half-covered by sand, was surprisingly moving. A modern Vanitas.

The Garden Museum

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Yesterday was so hot that I hid away in my hotel room until the evening. Today was cooler, but even so the Garden Museum seemed like a good place to visit. En route I passed the old headquarters of the London Fire Brigade (1937 E P Wheeler) with its wonderful reliefs by Gilbert Bayes.

The Garden Museum is planted in a deconsecrated church next to Lambeth Palace so there’s not much in the way of garden, but the displays were intermittently interesting. There is also a church tower to climb – which, of course, I did.

The current exhibition is about the country gardens of Bloomsbury women: Lady Ottoline Morrell and Garsington, Vanessa Bell and Charleston, Vita Sackville-West and Sissinghurst, and Virginia Woolf and Monk’s House. (Did their husbands have no say in the designs?) Anyway, it’s a hook on which to hang some nice works – Cezanne-style paintings by Mark Gertler and der Blaue Reiter-style paintings by Roger Fry. Oh, and more of Vanessa Bell’s blurry work. She certainly seems to be flavour of the month. My steal was the freestyle embroidery of Garsington in the moonlight by Marian Stoll. (My photo is rubbish, but I can’t find a better one online.)

Scattered amongst the vintage packets of seeds and videos about influential gardeners were some artists I’ve seen recently: Harold Gilman from York/Manchester and William Banks Fortescue from Southport. There was also a little nudge towards a future outing for me: Charles Jencks’s Crawick Multiverse. I hadn’t realised before that it’s possible to get there by train . . .