Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Spotted at the Øl hygge café bar, High Street, Horbury, this morning: to celebrate his 300th birthday last month, John Carr makes a brief visit to his birthplace, the cottage at the left-hand end of this Grade II-listed former farm house, which dates from 1637.
After his extended stint as architect in residence at the Redbox Gallery, Queen Street, the John Carr roadshow was moving on to its next venue . . . at the other end of Horbury, in the Carnegie Free Library.
This house at the top end of Queen Street, Horbury, was once the ‘Ring o’ Bells’ public house, later Walker’s butchers shop.
Just across the road at St Peter’s Church as part of the John Carr 300th anniversary celebrations this weekend, we had a talk by Andrew Morrison, CEO, York Civic Trust, on ‘The Impact of John Carr of York’, although in view of where the celebrations were taking place, he went with ‘John Carr of Horbury’ (John Carr was born and brought up here) for his opening slides.
There’s not a lot of room for any backstory in my phone box gallery display to mark the tricentenary of John Carr but ‘Antique Architect’ Robert Adam, who he worked with at Harewood, was a big influence so he gets to make a walk on – well swagger on, this is Robert Adam! – appearance in the Redbox show.
John Carr goes gothic: Fillingham Castle Lodge, Lincolnshire.
John Carr was up against London architects when he won the competition to design a multi-purpose civic building for Newark-on-Trent in 1773.
The wreath has turned out folksy rather than streetwise Hamilton-style energetic but it reads clearly so it will do the job. The ‘300th birthday’ wouldn’t fit in, so that’s going on the plinth below the John Carr cut-out.
I was going to use a design based on the south door of Horbury St Peter’s Church as a frame for my ‘John Carr, 300th anniversary’ logo for the Redbox Gallery display but, as an architectural feature, it would have competed with my model of the spire, so I’m going for a laurel wreath instead.
Towards the end of his life John Carr, who rose to be Mayor of York, was depicted in two busts as a latter-day Roman senator, so the laurel wreath is appropriate.
With his sense of humour, John Carr would probably have chosen to have a putti – a cheeky little angel – floating above him, like the one that beams down from the plasterwork by the chancel arch in his church.
Rather than design the logo on my iPad, which would have enabled me to take advantage of all its graphic features, I’m sticking with the recycled theme and making the wreath from cardboard.
More progress with my St Peter’s spire model the the John Carr display. I’ve done it all by eye but as I added frieze, balustrade and pilasters to the belfry I realised that even adding a slither of card to my model would change the proportions. I’ve been working from a photograph and one of my drawings made close to the church so the spire isn’t as tall and soaring as it appears when seen from a distance across the valley.
My first day – my first ever day – with a very faint positive test for Covid-19 and I’m taking the chance of being grounded to catch up with my cardboard model of St Peter’s Church, Horbury, spire for my John Carr tricentenary exhibit in the Redbox Gallery.
Barbara’s brother John unfortunately caught covid at the hospice but, as of this morning when we made a video call to him, he wasn’t showing any covid symptoms.
It’s a bit of a challenge fitting the life and works of Yorkshire architect John Carr into a phone box but I’ve got all the elements here:
To speed up constructing the models from cardboard cartons, I’ve invested in a glue gun. For think corrugated cardboard like this I find a stout pair of scissors more useful than a sharp craft knife.