Architectural bike tour - "All that life can afford"

A bike tour of artists’ and architects’ houses led by Stephen Bayley, one of the world’s best-known commentators on design.

Architects and artists are especially sensitive to their environment. Sometimes they influence it, other times it influences them. We start with the Bankside house reputed to be Wren’s home while he watched the building of his St Paul’s, “Beautiful, Magnificent, and beyond all modern works of its kind” according to Daniel Defoe. Then onto William Blake’s Lambeth. Blake was London’s greatest artists and lived for a time in Hercules Road. The house no longer exists, but the mood of his “the youthful Harlots curse/Blasts the new-born Infants tear” most certainly does. Then onto Stockwell where Vincent Van Gogh, the nineteenth century’s greatest colourist, lived in drear conditions in Hackford Road. Across the river to Chelsea, over Albert Bridge (Victoriana never was finer) and a view of Damien Hirst's houseboat and the artists’ houses on Cheyne Walk : Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Norman Shaw to the right, Whistler, Walter Grieve and Hillaire Belloc to the left. Half a mile north to Old Church Street where Walter Gropius and Erich Mendelsohn brought the Bauhaus to Blighty in two fine International Style Houses. Then to Holland Park and the Arab House of the painter, Lord Leighton. This is as a box of luminous Turkish Delight: at once full of absurdly rich original Middle Eastern features and curios, it is also the triple distillation of the Victorian. This is what happens when great celebrity and an unlimited budget go building.

”London, the needy villain's gen'ral home,
The common sewer of Paris and Rome,
With eager thirst, by folly or by fate,
Sucks in the dregs of each corrupted state....”
“London”, Samuel Johnson

Stephen Bayley is one of the world’s best-known commentators on design. He founded The Design Museum, has written books on Sex Drink and Fast Cars, Taste and The Albert Memorial as well as thousands of articles in indiscriminate places. He is presently Architecture and Design Correspondent of The Observer and will lead this tour on his Brompton folding bike which, except for its lack of lightweight componentry, he considers a practical masterpiece.

Start point:
Garden on river side of Tate Modern, Bankside.
Organised by Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, the ride will be marshalled by Southwark Cyclists.

All Booking enquiries to:
London Festival of Architecture www.lfa2008.org

All other enquires to:fliss.mills@fcbstudios.com

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