- Mar 27, 2025
- 3 min read
Updated: Apr 6, 2025
Discovering Lucinda Lambton's "Animal Crackers"
by Blue Firth founder of Dohm Ceramics
27th March 2025
Whenever Blue sends me an article, it fills my heart with joy. Blue is one of those rare people who cultivates the odd, the creative, and the festive corners of life. Nowhere is that more evident than in this introduction to Lucinda Lambton—someone I now realise was a glaring omission from my life. And if you, too, haven't yet had the pleasure, then you're welcome. Well—Blue's welcome.
One way to cement a love of architecture is through its silliness. Gargoyles led me to misericords, which led me to follies, which led to the irreverent, plummy voiced (tipsy-by-lunchtime?) television beauty Lucinda Lambton.
“Who the hell is this woman!?” I exclaimed to myself as I watched this Laura Ashley’d, puff-sleeved, chignon-sporting babe straddle moats and climb stiles to look at an obelisk built to the memory of a pig called “cupid”. Or stop on the A45 outside Henley to pay respects to the gravestone of a marmoset.
Hers is a career that has encompassed 85 films- all written, directed and presented by her for the BBC and ITV. She has written numerous books, all photography by herself, spanning subjects from the sublimity of suburbia to an ode to the lavatory. Lest we forget the absolute banger of a book “An Album of Curious Houses”, where my eyes first fell upon surrealist concrete vision Monkton House, paint-encrusted 63 Hornsey Road, and Rushton Triangular Lodge. I eagerly look out the left hand side of the train window for the latter on every return journey to London from my Nottingham home (around 4 minutes after Market Harborough station for anyone visiting the Midlands).
In the TV shows her style is idiosyncratic to say the least, it’s like having a conversation with the most magnetic person at the best dinner party. Historical facts delivered as personal anecdotes interspersed with charming outbursts of laughter. Sheer bliss to watch. The book is endless pages of curious structures- eccentrics and outsiders abound.
Her playful irreverence for a subject that felt dauntingly elite was a tonic. Though I loved Jonathan Meades and Peter Ackroyd, neither of them adorned themselves with pussy-bow blouses or were indeed women. Did this mean I too could band around the country looking for strangeness and joy in the built environment? I took it as a resounding yes. Here I come Jack the Treacle Eater, by way of St Peter’s Seminary then off to the Holy Grail: Dennis Severs’ House.
Learning architectural history through adventure, story and soundbite became a way for me to map the island I live on. It even got me into my postgraduate course at art school. “Remember it’s not a gargoyle unless it spouts water, then it’s a grotesque!” thus rang the words of a dear friend and historian Chris Matthews. He told me this when we were both two sheets to the wind at a night club in the early 2000s and I regularly “spout” it as if I were Lucinda herself. Though I barely touch a sherry before the sun is over the yard arm...
Criminally neglected (though pleasingly obscure?) Lucinda Lambton still awaits her post-Tik Tok renaissance with a freshly pointed audience. But as the internet never forgets, you too can take a leap into the world of beastly buildings as one of her most iconic shows is up on iPlayer now: Animal Crackers. A perfect spring treat. Enjoy!
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