2011 Streak 98/365:Walk - 3.1 miles, Time - 1hr, Weather - sunny, hot with a very blue sky
A notice board might seem an odd subject for a photograph, even if it is a rather splendid, old fashioned, notice board that probably dates from somewhere around the middle of the last century. But it is not the reason for the photo - it is there to indicate that the building we can partially see, behind it, is the Quaker Meeting House
I chose to show this fragment because the building does not have much of a frontage. There are a few steps down to a gateway, behind which is a small courtyard leading to the main meeting room. The label will have to stand for the whole.
It is a hot day but when you approach the building seems somehow calm and cool. This is an amazing quality common to a number of religious buildings but Quaker building tend to have the extra qualities of simplicity and modesty. They are not immediately dated by the flourishes of decoration but by simpler things such as the shape and types of window. This building dates from 1718.
When I look at it I also think of the design philosophy of the New Town, which was recently highlighted for me by a few incidental sentence in an excellent article about the architect James Stirling
(in the immediate post war years) The public sector, now a spent force in architecture, was dominant. Like almost everyone who had talent, even Stirling spent a short spell working for the London County Council. Architecture was meant to be about social service, producing the best housing and schools affordable in an age of austerity. It was a noble vision, democratic and modernist, but it was the vision of puritans.
The architects of the New Town took the ethos of simplicity and plainness of form (along with the reductionism of modernism) and extended it over 6,000 acres. The result was rather dull.
The Quaker Meeting House is not
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