A view with a room

Northumberland’s glorious new timber observatory fits beautifully into its forest surroundings. Jonathan Glancey took along his telescope

‘Gateway to the heavens’ … Kielder Observatory. Photograph: Charles Barclay

It is the darkest place in England. The Kielder Forest, occupying 250 square miles and situated just where Northumberland brushes against Scotland, has the lowest levels of light pollution in the country - making it the perfect place to watch the stars. Here, far from towns and cities, where all that artificial light smogs up the skies, Charles Barclay, a young, London-based architect, has designed a gloriously inventive yet low-key observatory. It is a place where amateur stargazers and professional astronomers can share telescopes, viewing platforms, ideas and knowledge, beneath one of the most wonderful sights the country has to offer, as the sun sets on clear days and eyes adjust to the seemingly infinite expanse of stars above.

This really is a remote spot. It is the last great, uninvaded playground of the red squirrel, as well as home to otters, roe deer, six species of bat (happily evident in the hot summer skies) and any number of birds of prey, from goshawks to windhovers. Unless you are prepared to drive, though, the Kielder Observatory, built for the Forestry Commission and the Kielder Partnership, is very hard to get to. The last passenger train stopped at Kielder Forest station in 1956. If trains were running along the route today, they would be busy all summer: there is so much to see, by day as well as by night. There’s the vast reservoir, opened in 1982 and almost instantly redundant, designed to quench the thirst of heavy industry along the Tyne, Wear and Tees. There are 155m trees, great stretches of moor and bog, and a cluster of enigmatic artworks, plus numerous other structures - including Japanese architect Kisa Kawakami’s Mirage, which features 1,000 steel discs woven between trees - all commissioned over the years by the Kielder Partnership.

And now there’s the observatory. I finally got here by the post bus that runs morning and afternoon from Hexham, half an hour from Newcastle upon Tyne by train. The observatory - which is not staffed all the time, so check before you go - is a small wonder, a kind of wooden pier stretching over land. When the doors of the turrets concealing its telescopes glide open, it looks like a child’s drawing of a warship. With its decks and galley, its largely timber and steel construction, and great views out across the waters of Kielder Forest, the observatory really does feel like a ship at sea - especially as night settles in and only the ghostly shrieks of barn owls remind you that you are a long way from tidal waters.

Set on concrete stilts, the observatory has two hand-cranked, rotating telescope turrets; between them sits an open-air terrace where amateur stargazers can unfold their telescopes, and a timber retreat called the “warm room”. This is where professional astronomers can operate the smaller telescope remotely, by computer. The room is equipped with a stove, and there’s a compost lavatory next door. All the energy the observatory needs is generated by a 2.5kw wind turbine and by solar power. This special building touches down on the Kielder landscape as gently as a long-legged fly on the nearby reservoir.

It has not been expensive: the total cost, including equipment, was £415,000. Projects like this will never make architects well off, yet who could resist such a challenge? Charles Barclay was a natural choice. He has a good feel for buildings that are inventive and gentle, as well as being imaginative and economical; his best work includes the renovation and remodelling of an 18th-century barn in the Cotswolds, and a new timber house for a Cornish dairy farmer at Liskeard.

Barclay’s observatory is a happy balance between what appears to be little more than a simple, almost cartoon-like, timber gangway with some sheds on top and some fine technology inside, with the cranks and cogs needed for the telescope turrets sitting delightfully within the simple wooden walls, floors and ceilings. It is rather like being in an early Victorian steamship, especially in the dark, when the red lamps glow (red keeps light pollution to a minimum). The timber, Douglas fir and Siberian larch, has had to be imported; the abundant supply within Kielder Forest is not suitable for building. Equally, there’s a nice balance between the computer-linked telescope and its larger sibling, a 20in Pulsar Optical, a mighty star-spotting device.

So the Kielder observatory is not just a special building in a special place, but a gateway to the heavens. At night, in the darkness of the forest, the sky is anything but still: shooting stars flare, satellites flash as they spin past, planets appear to rise and fall, and the moon glides by. I trained my telescope on the Dog Star, at its height in summer (hence the phrase “the dog days of summer”). It was the clearest view of it I’ve ever had.

The observatory joins a growing cluster of unpretentious, low-cost British buildings by intelligent architects that offer something way beyond what money can buy, far from the world of crude modern development. These gems include the simple yet sophisticated An Turas ferry shelter on Tiree, designed by Sutherland Hussey Architects; and Tony Fretton’s Faith House on the Dorset coast. Both are, as it happens, good places to watch stars from. And, because of their rarity, these buildings, along with the Kielder Observatory, are curiously exotic, and well worth working that little bit harder to get to - much like the stars themselves.

· Details: kielderobservatory.org

From a monsoon predictor to dishes that can cross the road
Jonathan Glancey picks five other great gateways to the heavens

Royal Greenwich Observatory, London
Commissioned in 1675 by Charles II, this observatory, commanding a magnificent view over the Thames and central London, was designed by Christopher Wren with Robert Hooke. It was the originator of Greenwich Mean Time, and in 1851, a line drawn through the observatory became the prime meridian (longitude 0 degrees).

Jantar Mantar, Jaipur, India
This elaborately sculpted stone observatory, built in the 1720s, boasts 14 major devices for measuring time, predicting eclipses, tracking stars, ascertaining declination of planets and determining the beginning of the monsoon season. Enchanting, unexpected and very beautiful.

WM Keck Observatory, Hawaii
The twin domes of this station, on the peak of Mauna Kea, Big Island, Hawaii, sit atop a 13,600ft dormant volcano. Night skies here are as dark as any human could hope for, and the journey up is breathtaking.

Parkes Observatory, New South Wales, Australia
Opened in 1961, this station, with its big telescope/communications dish, was a great help to Nasa and the first manned mission to the moon in July 1969. It is one of the most important centres for locating pulsars, which were once thought to be beacons created by extraterrestrials.

The Very Large Array, New Mexico, US
There are 27 radio telescopes here, built by the US National Science Foundation as part of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Arranged on tracks, the dishes can move huge distances. They can even cross Highway 60. The location, 7,000ft above sea level, is one of magnificent isolation.

Classics of everyday design No 50

The Morris Minor is as English as toad-in-the-hole and Brooke Bond tea - and better than the Mini

‘A friendly design’ … a Morris Minor

The Morris Minor is 60 years old and, although these chummy little English cars haven’t been made at home since 1971, they remain very much a part of the national roadscape. The Minor was the work of a tiny team of engineers working at Morris Motors under Alec Issigonis (1906-88), who went on to design the Mini.

The official owners club boasts 15,000 members, while there a number of specialist engineering firms that will not just keep your “Moggie” happily on the roads, but, should you so wish, bring it up to modern standards beneath its old-fashioned skin.

While not exactly ideal for motorway driving – the fastest of the original cars had a top speed of just 75mph or so – the jelly mould-shaped Morris remains a fine car for bustling along lesser roads; especially around the snaking ways of English country lanes. I drove one recently for the first time in a long while, and positively enjoyed the precise rack-and-pinion steering, excellent handling, surprising low-down strength of the engine, the clickety-click gear changes, and the bubbling, burbling sound of the exhaust.

The Morris Minor is, as it always has been, a friendly design - never exactly in fashion, but never really unfashionable, either. Its international peers and rivals, among them the VW Beetle, the Citroen 2CV and any number of small Renaults and Fiats, seemed more serious bits of kit than the Morris – a kind of John Betjeman on wheels – and yet, on British roads at least, the Morris is still very much about while the rest have become quite rare.

Although thought of as a quintessentially English design, the Minor took its cues from the very much bigger 1941 Packard Clipper, styled by a team that included Howard Darrin and Werner Gubitz. And, when the first Morris Minors rolled off the production line in Cowley, Oxfordshire in 1948, most were shipped off to the United States.

By the time, though, that the Morris had adopted the long-running look we know it best by today (from 1953 onwards), it was thought of as English as toad-in-the-hole, Brooke Bond tea, class distinction and Marmite sandwiches. An honest, reliable, cheerful car that was a pleasure to drive, it sold in a variety of guises: the half-timbered Traveller (a mock-Tudor estate car), a Convertible, that seemed destined for trips to southern counties teashops, a 5cwt van (a favourite of the General Post Office), and a small pick-up.

Remarkably, the Minor was widely used as police “panda car”, or local patrol car, when British bobbies could no longer manage to walk. They must have put the frighteners on Ronnie and Reggie Kray-style villains pulling away from bank heists in smoking, two miles-a-minute Mk2 Jags.

Today, you are far more likely to see a Morris Minor on the road than an old Mini. The 60-year-old Morris might have been a lesser design in the great scheme of automotive things, and yet it played a major role in British life for several decades, and remains not just a much-loved period piece, but a true - and happily modest - example of a very usable and affordable classic everyday design.

‘Stolen art uncovered, is it yours?’ appeals FBI

Gallery: a selection of the 137 stolen artworks

An Extensive Landscape With Peasants By a Well, Flemish School, 17th century

Wanted: the owners of 137 artworks discovered in an apartment in Manhattan, suspected stolen. The FBI is appealing for owners to come forward to claim the paintings and sculptures that were found in the Upper East Side - some of them stuffed under a bed - in one of the more unusual mysteries to fall to federal investigators.

The artworks were found in the apartment of an occasional art writer and genealogist called William M V Kingsland, who died in March 2006, aged 62, leaving no will. His collection of about 300 pieces - including works by Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso and Odilon Redon - was handed to two auction houses to sell off.

But over the past 18 months the relatively straightforward story of an intestate private art collector has slowly turned into a deepening mystery of double identities and theft. The alarm was first sounded when a gallery owner bought a portrait by John Singleton Copley of the Second Earl of Bessborough for $85,000 (£ 42,000).

Looking into its provenance, he found it had been stolen from Harvard University in 1971.

The FBI’s specialist art crime unit was brought in to investigate, revealing further stolen works, including a bust by Giacometti valued at about $1m, which Kingsland had used as a doorstop. The sale in London of a small still-life by Giorgio Morandi for $600,000 was also rescinded after it was found to have been stolen.

The ultimate irony was that two works by Picasso that were on their way from his apartment to Christie’s auction house were stolen by the removal workers in mid-transit. The paintings, valued at £30,000 each, were recovered, only to be identified as already having been stolen - from a New York gallery in 1967.

As the legitimacy of the collection was unravelling, so was the identity of its owner. Kingsland was a well-known figure among art houses and within the rarefied world of Upper East Side high society. He presented himself as a bon viveur and expert on the genealogy of prominent local families. He told friends his middle initials stood for Milliken and Vanderbilt and that he lived on Fifth Avenue. But he very rarely invited anyone into his home and after his death a rather different picture emerged.

He was born in 1943 to Jewish refugees from Europe who lived in the Bronx. His name was Melvyn Kohn, which he changed aged 17 because he wanted a name that was more “literary sounding”, according to his parents.

There was no Fifth Avenue address. Nor had he attended Harvard or been married to a French royal, as he had let it be known.

Colin Stair, whose auction house in Hudson, New York, was one of the two appointed to sell the collection, visited the Kingsland apartment in 72nd Street soon after he died. “It was frankly a mess. It was crammed floor to ceiling with art works - they were stuffed under the bed, over every surface.”

Of the works that Stair Galleries have handled, at least four were stolen. Stair said he noticed a trend: “The smaller the items were, the more likely they were to have been stolen.”

The FBI has now identified 20 stolen pieces but suspects that among the 137 whose provenance is still in doubt there could be many more.