THE BARBICAN

The Barbican at night, arguably one of the most forbidding urban developments in London. I took this picture, which looks like a Piranesi nightmare, after leaving a concert at the Barbican Centre.

The route to and from the Centre isn’t intuitive and those who aren’t regular visitors have to be guided from the surrounding streets by a line painted on the ground. The Barbican isn’t legible, in the sense that you can’t read your direction or see where your path is leading. You always seem to be shut in. Its forbidding aspect doesn’t come from the high towers or any lack of human scale but from this sense of being trapped and lost.

Town planners now understand that legibility is needed for a sense of safety and to deter crime. The animal welfare expert Temple Grandin showed that cattle in slaughterhouses were afraid of walkways whose exits they couldn’t see and persuaded the owners to change their layouts. Even the inside of the Barbican Centre is hard to read.

I came out of my concert from one of the many exit doors to find myself in the underground car park. (If a building has too many exits, for all practical purposes it has no exit.) Then a walk to the underground station through a dark vehicle tunnel with a narrow pavement.

CHARLES HOLDEN AND WALTER GROPIUS

In a paper on The Flowering of the Arts in the Inter-War Period (1918 – 1939), Enid Marx has an arresting juxtaposition of pictures, the interior of Picadilly Circus Underground Station, designed by Charles Holden, and the interior of the City Employment Office in Dessau, designed by Walter Gropius, both built in 1929. Were they in contact and did Holden go to Dessau? Marx doesn’t say.

Picadilly Circus Underground Station

Dessau Employment Office

SPOON BASH

That’s what Steve Wager calls his occasional classes in making a silver spoon, which is pretty accurate because, when I went to one last weekend, we did spend five hours hitting a silver ingot with a hammer. There’s a way of doing it, of course, and it was interesting to me because I’ve never worked in metal before, except occasionally to cut a brass profile to shape clay, but all materials have their own way of behaving and all have to be treated with respect. Silver hardens as it’s worked and has to be softened in heat – not too much, not too little. Steve’s rule was “until salmon pink”, and if too much you ruin the silver.

By lunch – which Steve serves to his students – our little ingots were still little ingots with hammer marks, but Steve assured us we’d have a spoon by the time we left. Sort of. There was still a lot of filing and polishing to do when we got home. Obviously not a professional job, but I’ll take pleasure in serving jam from one of my jam pots with my silver jam spoon. For information about Steve’s classes you can contact him here.

STEVE WAGER, SILVERSMITH

Steve Wager, whom I’ve known for several years as a fellow trustee of the Society of Designer Craftsmen, runs classes in his south London workshop for people who’d like to know something about the craft of the silversmith. Just for fun I went to one of his spoon bashes at the weekend, where he taught us how to take a small silver ingot and to beat it into something vaguely resembling a spoon. It was a change from clay, a very different material.

He’s been in the trade for forty years, serving a traditional apprenticeship with Asprey and then working for them for many years before setting up independently. The large piece he’s holding is a loving cup in silver and silver gilt with inlaid jewels, which he talked to us about between our sessions with the planishing hammer and which I persauded him to take out of its box and to show us. It has a maritime theme, with a Neptune and a mermaid. (Price on application to S. E. Wager.)

Steve, with his great skill and experience, has a low opinion of jewellers and silversmiths who can do no more than assemble prefabricated components – he dismisses their work as “modern craft”. On the wall is his very formal admission certificate from the Worshipful Society of Goldsmiths in 1983, acknowledging that he has been apprenticed to a master in the ancient mystery.