Charleston Farmhouse 1981

This is a beautiful little book of photographs taken by Kim Marsland at Charleston Farmhouse in 1981. The Bloomsbury Group had left and the Charleston Trust were yet to take over; it was a house in flux, a time capsule captured in these evocative pictures. Kim Marsland was then a student at Maidstone College of Art, which was where I’d studied until six years earlier. I’d painted the front door of our little house in red and green chevrons and furnished it with cheap second-hand furniture decorated with painted designs, and covered the walls with hand-printed wallpaper. But I’d not heard of Charleston. I think few of us had in those days. Kim Marsland’s photographs recall an intimate time before Charleston’s domestic decorations became an internationally recognised style. Continue reading “Charleston Farmhouse 1981”

Frames of reference

Retreat & Rebellion

Two Temple Place is a neo-Gothic mansion on the north bank of the Thames, east of Somerset House on Victoria Embankment in London. It was built in Early Elizabethan style, entirely of Portland stone, for William Waldorf Astor in 1895. On the roof, there is a gilded weather vane, a model of the Santa Maria in which Columbus discovered America; the Union Jack flies from the flagpole and beside the gate hangs a wrought iron bulldog. Since 2011 the house has been managed by The Bulldog Trust as a venue for exhibitions of publicly owned art from regional UK collections. Continue reading “Retreat & Rebellion”

Frames of reference

South Downs Sunday

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Sunday dawned cold and sharp, the sun straining through the early morning Ditchling mist. We took a walk around the village, just as the sun broke through, illuminating walls of flint and brick. Continue reading “South Downs Sunday”

Frames of reference