A visit to Harrow School

Let's try and keep this mostly pictoral. A tour of Harrow School buildings with The London Appreciation Society. 

Arrive Harrow-on-the-Hill station, turn right, buy a Tesco meal deal, pass 1970s shop with moulded cement brick façade on upper floor. 

There are few examples of these across London, such as in Portobello Road market which is now a Tesco store.

Up Petersborough Rd. Literally 'up' – it's a hill. The hill. Harrow Hill. Sat on a bench for a lunch munch and admired the view. Near the top, on the left, there's an in-wall GR post box. 

Most in-wall boxes I've spotted are Victorian era and much smaller in size. I wonder if this one was replaced because it wasn't big enough to cope with all the letters sent home by the boys who boarded here. At the junction with the high street there's a Capital Ring signpost and, round the corner, on the school side there's a milestone set within the wall. Love a milestone.

Opposite the milestone there is an acanthus pillar box:

As per the mark at the base, this is a replica. Nice though.

Joined the tour. We were first taken to the old schoolroom and I noticed that the naughty boys had carved their names into the exterior. 

Much of it is very well rendered. But this was merely a taster to the interior which is slathered in carvings, these having become a sort of rites of passage such that every boy in attendance here, including some very well known names such as Churchill and Byyon have literally made their mark here. Much of it is beautifully achieved, but other works are poorly-planned where the lads hadn't realised that their long name wouldn't fit into that space.

Almost every little space has been used, with some names running along edges and reveals:

Into the other buildings. I do love site-specific toilet signs. 

Then into the Speech Room...

The organist's shoes

... and across to Sir George Gilbert Scott's gorgeous multi-faith chapel:

An example of ensample, above, and a wall of memorial commemorating children who died whilst at school here, below, looking like a patchwork quilt or an oversized stonemason's swatch book

Stunning views back to central London from the gardens at the rear, hard to capture, better viewed in person.

By the time I returned to the main street the tour group dispersed so I went to investigate the village where West Street meets High Street near the old Kings Head Hotel. There are some wonderful old Georgian houses here giving it a very out-of-town countryside feel. Many shops retain their old façades shop fittings such as this one shown below, which used to be reTouch lighting store. I wonder what it was in the past – with the fittings and mirrored display areas I'd guess it was originally a drapery store or a tailors.

A bus came along with South Harrow on its blind so I headed back to Holloway the long way via the Piccadilly line. 

Update on the Imperial Hotel renovation at Russell Square

Let's cut the chase*  – oh dear, it's as I feared. Here is an update about the renovation of this marvellous example of 1960's architecture.

It used to look like this, giving luxury airport vibes:

In my previous post I had written that I had been told that the orange letters (Eurostile/Microgramma with gilded outlines and recessed centres) would be reinstated. Er. No. 

A few weeks ago I noticed that much of the scaffolding had been removed. I snapped this image:

Here we can see that he orange letters have been replaced with some boring blocky letters that I'm pretty sure are from a typeface, a font, created for web use. The twelve letters (inc wd #) is now crammed into a panel that before contained just five letters.

It's just THE IMPERIAL now. The word HOTEL has been dropped. Hello cabbie, take me to The Imperial. Perhaps they then get driven to the war museum or the college, ha ha!

A closer look:

Check out the strange choice of letterform here, especially that ugly letter M which is overly wide and has a truncated centre. Unless this M is being used as a feature, some kind of impish design device on logos and branding, I see no reason to choose a 'font' that has such a bizarre quirk which is echoed only once here, at the top of the letter A. To add to this, some of the other letters have very slight angles on the ends of verticals and horizontals, such as the Es which have what I can only describe as italicised ends.  Ditto the very the top of the I (shudder). These quirks further highlight that the letters haven't been installed properly – some of them aren't straight – I mean, how is that possible when there's a simple golden grid to follow?!

I'm disappointed. People are often telling me I moan about things. That's not the case. I'm often merely disillusioned or saddened after hoping for a good outcome, made worse when things could have been better achieved so simply. Also, with my eye for typography and design I can often see that things haven't actually be designed or thought through properly.

Many logos on our high streets today are created as scalable vector files using web-based fonts designed for emails, and on-screen applications. Everything is becoming super-simplified, thus losing an sense of design. Logos or brand names are kept simple so that they can be scaled down small for use on an app icon or a web bar. Back in the day we would design a suite of logos for a client – a small logo for pens and business cards, a mid-sized version for print and press ads, and a larger more detailed one for shops signs, billboards and vehicles. Today, many logos that are simply typed out, often with no regard for letter-spacing. Ah well. This is progress. But I digress.

Here at the The Imperial (hotel) I suggest the letters are based on, probably pulled directly from, a modern scalable font designed for web use because sharp points on A, M, N, V, W, and Z do not scale or render very well on-screen, hence many new fonts designed specifically for computer use have been been pruned. Verdana, created in 1996 and shown below, is fast becoming one of the most ubiquitous typefaces, clearly outstripping Gill Sans, the Sans Serif favourite of the 1930s (British Rail, Penguin Books, BBC, Tommy Hilfger etc). 

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ 

I'm also not a fan of Verdana's topped and tailed capital 'I' – there is another similar typeface being used a lot lately that also employs this same device – it implements even wider bars making short words like PIN, HIT and BIO and look very strange indeed (ugh!) – if you can identify it, please let me know.

Thanks for getting this far – I had intended this post to be just a quick update with a couple of pictures and captions, but I got a bit carried away!

*Cut to the chase – surely this should be 'cut out the chase'? Do we not get straight to the point after saying this and miss out the journey?

If the Search facility is not visible at top right...

...simply scroll to the bottom of your screen and click on 'View Web Version'

The "restoration" of an Art Deco era Burton's store

Montague Burton, the tailor of taste. But, imho, not so tasteful these days on Long Eaton High Street.

I have just been alerted to the "restoration" of a Burton's store in Derbyshire. I know this isn't in London, but I fear this type of thing is likely to happen on similar sites here in the capital. Ugh – paint it black strikes again!

I'm here stealing/copying the pics from the link above to show the before and after, though the first pic looks to be from Google streetview anyway:

Hmmm... me no likey – Burton’s 1930's façade had survived, complete with the Burton logo at the top, for almost 100 years. Yet, rather than remove a layer of stone-coloured paint (see close-up below) and give it the Portland stonework a gentle clean, they've instead sloshed black and white paint all over it. I am not sure where the £10,000 has been spent. I notice that their second pic is captioned 'Burtons building revamped' which better describes what's happened here. 

OK, so they’ve installed some [fake?] windows, but it would never have looked like this back in the 1920s – hence, this is not a ‘restoration’.

They say that the building looked messy before – I say this was exacerbated by the mix of shops at street level, two of which had with ugly modern signage which, we can see, haven't been upgraded since the renovation. 

This next pic is Google streetview from 2022:

It shows that the building at that time retained a reduced but empty Burton store with serif letters on a red panel. Look closely to see that there's also a ghostly repeat of the 1920's logo within the black fascia above the phone shop, echoing the carved company logo at the very top of the building which would have been red. Here's a close up which also shows peeling paint and boarded windows, now revealed (or rendered?):

An alternative view shows that some lovely architectural details were also in place 2022, specifically, a branded metal ventilation grille at the curved end...

...and a foundation stone at the left corner showing that Stanley Howard Burton was one of the family present at the opening ceremony in 1935:

Burton made sure that family members personally attended the opening of each new store. Three more foundation stones can be found at this site – one at centre front next to the door to the phone shop showing Arnold James Burton was also in attendance and two more round the side flanking the entrance to Chalkie's snooker hall – one shows Lady Montague Burton, but the parked car obscures the one on the left side of the door and, possibly, another metal ventilation grille. 

I’m interested to see how much of the old Burton’s store is still in place today – perhaps, some tiles, mosaics or terrazzo are also to be found.

Back to the black – I’m befuddled how/why the decision was made to paint the building such a stark shade – it surely now stands out like a funereal eyesore rather than an elegant reminder of a bygone age…?

More about Burtons here.