Letter

This is a magical time of year when we firmly put a notice in the shop window saying ‘Closed until January 2nd’ and settle down to ten days of enjoying family, friends, good food, long walks, reading and, in my case, getting ahead with the three Spring books.  I am in Cambridge, where we sit by an open fire and do nothing more energetic than bicycling to the market to buy tangerines and fennel and chestnuts or venturing to the (new) John Lewis to buy trousers.  But one of the main joys of Cambridge for many people is Kettle’s Yard ,the house bought by Jim Ede fifty years ago and beloved since then by generations of Cambridge residents and visitors.

A Room to Live In is a new book about Kettle’s Yard with contributions from those who love it.  Here is an extract from the pages Ali Smith has written so eloquently:
’Spring 1986: ’One winter’s afternoon I visit a local art gallery… and what I will remember most clearly from this first visit, right there alongside all the astonishing art, is that more than a gallery it’s a house, and more than a house it’s a home. Next I will remember the light switches, and how they’re made so that you can see, directly, how power works.

Then there’s the way the windows gather the town into the house, reconcile opposites like insider and outsider, give nature to art and give art to the trees and the pointed spire of the old church, revealing this house’s tradition, an alternative art tradition, one of openness. It’s no surprise, afterwards, when I hear that Jim Ede has strong links to Scotland.  The real surprise to me, a passionate student of modernism at the time, is that this first afternoon, I find myself sitting in a comfortable old armchair in a house that feels like someone’s home, with a first edition of a TS Eliot poem there in my hand.’

Autumn 1992: ‘I am back living in Cambridge again, after a couple of years awy.  For a couple of years I’ve been telling people elsewhere how the nature of the house is an inspiration when it comes to how to have a home and how to treat art, both; how it demonstrates that the home is an art, and how it demonstrates that art can be a home.  Now that I’m back living here again, one of the first things I do is visit.’

Summer 2006: ‘I am visiting beautiful Farley Farm, in Sussex, where Lee Miller and Roland Penrose lived. It’s not far from Charleston, where the Woolfs and the Bells made their home outside London. I’ve visited both houses, both houses have been very welcoming indeed and have given us, in one instance, an organised tour, and in the other a private visit.  In both cases it feels like a real privilege.  Both remind me of somewhere, but for the moment, in the dining room of Farley Farm, with its long wooden table in front of me, I can’t think quite where.  Why do I keep wanting to sit on the chairs we’re not really meant to sit on?  Why do I long to lift that book off the shelf and have a look at it?  Why do I expect that table in front of me to be covered in books there for the looking at?  What rare place am I imagining where that level of intimacy with a building like this is possible, where a visit has become something else, a little different, unexpected, a kind of democratic?  That place doesn’t exist.  I’m making it up, surely.’

‘Summer 2007: I ring the bell of the house, sign in and go straight upstairs.  The house is full, as usual, of happy-looking visitors.  You can tell the new from the old.  The new ones wander about in a wide-eyed exclamatory ecstasy of disbelief.  The ones who’re returning either wander through the house with the kind of pride that means they think it belongs to them, or, if they’re with someone, make straight for their favourite places and artifacts, saying things like Come and see or Wait till you see it!’

Kettle’s Yard is open at this time of year from 2-4 every day except Monday.   If any UK Persephone reader feels flat after Christmas, we recommend a day trip to Cambridge and a visit to Kettle’s Yard.

Here is a devastating article in The Times about Gavin Stamp's book Britain’s Lost Cities, the theme of which is that ‘the destruction meted out on Britain's city centres during the twentieth century, by the combined efforts of the Luftwaffe and city-planners, is legendary. Medieval churches, Tudor alleyways, Georgian terraces and Victorian theatres, many vanished for ever, to be replaced by a gruesome landscape of concrete office-blocks and characterless shopping malls. Reproduced in this haunting volume are hundreds of top-quality photographs of cities from Plymouth to Dundee, all of streets and buildings that are gone for ever.‘  Sometimes, when I can face it, I re-read Adam Fergussons’s The Sack of Bath,one of the gloomiest books I have ever read on this subject; how Kettle’s Yard survived being ‘upgraded’ I cannot think…

On a more upbeat note – last night we watched the film of Girl with a Pearl Earring. We enjoyed it very much indeed, but it is not nearly as good as the book!

Nicola Beauman
59 Lamb’s Conduit Street
30th December 2007