A couple of days ago I posted a reel about the sad, dilapidated state of the wonderful openwork cast-iron Demidov fence in front of the Pedagogical Library in Bolshoy Tolmachyovsky Lane, and literally today word came that restoration work has begun there…
A couple of days ago I posted a reel about the sad, dilapidated state of the wonderful openwork cast-iron Demidov fence in front of the Pedagogical Library in Bolshoy Tolmachyovsky Lane, and literally today word came that restoration work has begun on the spot. I do not yet know anything about the project or the contractors; it seems they may even be enthusiast volunteer restorers. However that may be, I am very glad that this much-loved monument of Ural cast-iron founding in the centre of Moscow, dating, incidentally, from the 1750s, will now have a chance.
The fence was made to a design by the celebrated serf architect Fyodor Argunov and cast at the Demidov works in Nizhny Tagil. And the most common comment under the video about its decline was: "They're deliberately waiting for it to fall apart, so that somebody can cart it off to his dacha." To which I replied: "God willing, it won't fall apart." It will not fall apart in the end, do you hear?
It remains only to learn that in Kolomenskoye, for example, they have at last set about destroying the thickets of Sakhalin knotweed, and then one's spirits will rise altogether.
