Court Rooms and culinary confusion

 

The Company's New Year Year Court was held at Bakers' Hall yesterday - the first time the Company had visited this particular venue. The building, the fourth or fifth owned by the Company on the site was completed in 1963 after its predecessor was seen off by the Luftwaffe in 1944. Its design - both external and internal - is typical of the times. The Hall itself features some stained glass panels from the studio of John Piper which portray a graphic image of the various fires which destroyed the previous halls. 

The Court Room (shown below left) followed the form of what was the accepted norm for the design of such chambers set down centuries ago. To the best knowledge of the Clerk there is only one other of this type in the City - that found in its original form in Tallow Chandlers' Hall.

This particular room was a trifle disconcerting  for both Master and Clerk with the latter sitting with his back resolutely to the Master during the entire proceedings. It might be appropriate to offer a small prize for the best bubble caption that can be applied to this photograph.

Among the more normal business of the Court, Yasmin Shariff was admitted to the Livery, and Kent Jackson - a senior Director of Skidmore Owings and Merrill's London Office and Christopher Dyson - principal in his own Spittalfields based practice - were admitted to the Freedom of the Company. 

A new Student member was also admitted to the Company. Naveen Anandakumar was indentured for the period of his studentship to Chartered Architect and Citizen of London Mrs Anne Markey. The admission is based on the City of London's traditional Binding of Apprentices.

Naveen is the most recent of 17 current Apprentices / Students; all will, hopefully go on to become Freemen and Liverymen when they have satisfied their respective Part 3 examiners on completion of their studies. A number of their predecessors have already taken this step.

The culinary confusion referred to above relates to the decision that the meal should take the form of a buffet first course followed by a dessert. This was done as something of an experiment to see if the cost benefit of such an arrangement and the consequent lower ticket price would encourage greater attendance. It did - numbers were 50% up on those for the previous couple of years at this function.The jury is out on whether a significant majority approved of the arrangements. Many seemed to have done, some did not. Watch this space. 

Market research on the blog

The Clerk’s wife, who would be among the first to admit that she has little interest in something as unattractivelty named as a Blog and therefore little expertise in these matters, was encouraged to have a look at the WCCA Blog. She had been told that some found it difficult to get at and use and was asked to carry out a road test on the beast. Her thoughts were informative.

She managed to hit on the essential fact that, to get the most out of the blog (which she thought presented an interesting mosaic when opened) one needed to look at the row of buttons three lines down from the top which read Recent; Date; Label; Author. Clicking on these allowed her to group the items in date order, in subject order etc

This approach is commended to you.

p.s. by clicking on the first button - that normally says 'flip card' - located on the LHS of the top black horizontal bar, one may change the general format of the WCCA blog to one of several alternatives.  

This second approach is also commended!

A hidden gem on the fringe of the City

No 2 Temple Place is, for those who do not know it, worth the detour. Located very close to Temple station it was designed by John Loughborough Pearson for the first Lord Astor in 1895 as his London pad and base from which he ruled his empire once he had been driven from the USA by the fears of kidnapping. It is a sumptuous building both internally and externally which displays a great deal of excellent craftsmanship. It is only open for three months in the year (this is the first year it has been open at all) and currently houses a nice little exhibition about William Morris with significant contributions from Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Maddox Brown, Philip Webb et al.

Set to close at the end of January, it will re-open in January 2013 with a new but, as yet, unknown exhibition.

The building is now owned and managed by The Bulldog Trust.