St Veronica's (Re: pynchon-l-digest V2 #4617)

[Mark Wright AIA]

Howdy

I've always thought of St. Veronica's as a Victorian great house, the
sort of building that bankrupted its builder's children and then got
deeded over to a handy charitable organization in furtherance of its
good works. You think of it as a purpose-built institutional building,
but in that case it would have looked nothing like an urban hotel but
would instead have sprawled across its fenced or walled grounds,
spreading out horizontally and fleeing its own center as P describes.

The White Visitation is a mash of everything, rendered in part in
glazed terra-cotta. Perhaps some of its owners have taken a page from
the Brighton Pavillion, others from the Tudor prodigy-houses of Robert
Smythson. Doubtless much of its older fabric has been re-cased after
the Palladian fashion of Lord Burlington and Kent, and a few of its
interiors decorated it the neo-classical style of the Adams's. These
are wonderful sorts of buildings to get lost in, bewildering labyrinths
to all but the family and their servants. No two observers will see —
or remember — quite the same building.

My conflation of St. Veronica's with TWV is more of a slip of the
tongue than genuine confusion.
Mark


> Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 10:56:46 +1100
> From: jbor at bigpond.com
> Subject: St Veronica's
> 
> > This is the sort of thing P's got in mind. It's tough to find
> pictures
> > of these tings because no one wants to look at them anymore.
> Knebworth
> > is perhaps one of the most accessible of these things, though it is
> > north of London rather than on the south-eastern coast.
> 
> I think you're getting St Veronica's mixed up with 'The White 
> Visitation'. And there are plenty of pictures of the style of 
> architecture.
> 
> St Veronica's Hospital is in London; it's "a lengthy brick 
> improvisation, a Victorian paraphrase of what once, long ago,
> resulted 
> in Gothic cathedrals ... " (i.e. so it's not Perpendicular Gothic and
> 
> it's not necessarily exclusively neo-Gothic), and it's near St 
> Veronica's Downtown Bus Station (see ps 46 & 50).
> 
> My best bet is something along the lines of the Midland Grand Hotel
> and 
> St Pancras Railway Station in King's Cross:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:StPancrasMidlandHotel.jpg
> 
> 'The White Visitation' is a red brick Palladian house beside a ruined
> 
> "ancient Abbey" and seacliffs (72-3). Over the centuries, with
> various 
> renovations and decorative additions, it has become "a classic
> 'folly'" 
> (82-3). It's somewhere along the coast of Kent or East Sussex, near
> the 
> fictitious village of "Ick Regis" (cf. Bognor Regis and Lyme Regis).
> 
> best


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