In summer of this year the Royal Festival Hall, on the South Bank of London’s river, was reopened after a major, two-year refurbishment. The auditorium itself was remade and restored, and the rest of the building was significantly remade/restored too. The spirit and the materials of the original building were respected, at the same time changes needed for the place’s new uses were made. The architects leading the work were Allies & Morrison, among the most convincing and least pretentious of the UK firms practising ‘modern architecture’.

James Mosley has welcomed the new year by adding two substantial posts to his blog Typefoundry: an update on his thesis about the appearance of sanserif letters in eighteenth-century Britain; and an explanation of why the inscription recently added to the National Gallery in London is all wrong. This latest post deserves wide circulation in the blogosphere – not to mention the wider culture of the UK.