It was a full week, but without drama or disaster. No hail, no severe transport disruptions. I got where I wanted to go on time (for the most part), didn't get lost, and didn't lose anything. Weather was cooperative, alternating between sunny and cloudy days, with temps in the high 50s to low 60s. I continue to ignore news of political turmoil in America as much as I can, which has been easy to do as the radio here is full of football. I gather several London teams have won some big matches. All and all, a pleasant week. Mondays as usually a bit tricky to plan for, as many galleries and museums are closed. I try to use the day wisely, working in some things that are open daily. For my first stop on Monday, I booked a ticket to see Edvard Munch Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery. Turns out I probably should have booked for a different day, not knowing that old people get in for half price on Mondays. (My Art Pass gives me half price entry to exhibitions on any day.) The exhibition was positively heaving with OAPs, many of them ignoring instructions to carry their bags and knapsacks on the front of their bodies. I couldn't count the number of times someone banged into me with their bag! Nonetheless, I enjoyed the exhibition and learned a lot about Munch, his associates, patrons and friends, who he painted with an astute eye to capturing their personality as well as their visage. I've been using the Bloombery Connects app more often to listen to audio commentary as I move around in exhibitions. In some cases, the audio is just a repetition of what's in the wall text, but in this instance it gave additional insights into the work and the man.
I then walked eastward, stopping in Embankment Gardens to bask in the sun and eat my packed lunch. Next I popped into the Maughan Library of KCL (another new place to me) to see a small exhibition of 500 years of maps. The exhibition used a lot of AI to provide additional information, accessible via QR codes, none of which worked for me. But it was pleasant to merely admire the old maps. A tube ride to Archway and then the bus took me to Kenwood House at the top of Hampstead Heath where I saw a recently-opened exhibition of portraits (paintings and charcoal drawings) by John Singer Sargent of "dollar princesses." These young American women, often heiresses of industrial fortunes, married into the British aristocracy around the turn of the last century, providing much-needed financial resources to prop up their land-rich-cash-poor estates and mansions. Some married for convenience, and several had very unhappy matches, but many did find love. The most interesting part of the exhibition was reading the biographies of the women -- contrary to the negative stereotype associated with them as marrying for the title, they led lives of contribution and success in their own rights, founding charities, holding elected office, flying airplanes, etc. I was then only (last of the day) person viewing the exhibition, and had plenty of time and space to read and admire.
Since it was a gorgeous spring day, I walked down and across the Heath to the west side, then headed to the Magdala Tavern for a pint of Harvey's Sussex Best. Pints are three pounds fifty on Mondays at the Magdala, and the pub is a very comfortable place to sit on my own for a bit. No screens showing football, no loud music. It's really a locals' local and there were clusters of men and women in the bar side, with younger people out in the tiny beer garden.
On Tuesday, I rode the Jubilee Line to Canary Wharf and made my way to the London Museum Docklands for Secrets of the Thames, an exhibition about mudlarking and the amazing things found on the foreshore at low tide. The Thames has given up all kinds of bits and bobs -- glass, pottery, metal, leather and jewels -- from Roman times, the middle ages, and particulary the modern era. The exhibition galleries were pretty quiet (no school groups!!) and the objects were intriguing to look at. Lots of photos in this review. I stopped at London Bridge on my way back from Canary Wharf, walking down Bermondsey Street to the White Cube gallery. I always like to visit this gallery, and I knew there was an exhibition of sculpture on at the moment, but I confess to not having done any homework on the artist or work. I can now add Richard Hunt to the list of African American artists, along with Lonnie Holley, Noah Davis and others, that I had never heard of in my own country but discovered in London. This posthumous retrospective exhibition brings together 30 or so of Hunt's works, mostly in metal, from 1955 to 2023. Through his work, he explores themes of Greek and Roman antiquity, culture and symbolism of Africa, along with western Modernism, always infused with his deep association with community and the civil rights movement (e.g his bust of Emmett Till). A very good exhibition and introduction to the man and his work. I'll be looking for more of him in American art museums.
I've reached the point in my stay when I've seen most of the Must Do items on my spreadsheet and am now filling in with the smaller things, recently opened or soon-to-close gallery shows, and things I somehow missed earlier as I zig-zagged around town. Wednesday gave me an opportunity to tick off four more gallery shows. I started the day at the Barbican Centre (yes, I'd already been there) to see Encounters: Giacometti and Huma Bhabha, a sculpture exhibition in a temporary gallery space. When we hear Giacometti's name, we can immediately draw a mental image of his long, lean sculptures. The Pakistani-American sculptor Huma Bhabha, however, is another one who is new to me. The small exhibition brings together about 30 works (figures, body parts), half from each of them, in conversation with each other. Bhabha is 62 years old and based in Poughkeepsie, NY, so I'm hoping to continue encountering her sculpture around the northeast of the US.
When there's a nearby Waitrose with a sushi counter, that can only mean one thing -- Forgotten Ends for lunch, eaten on a bench somewhere. Refueled, I walked through Moorgate, past Liverpool Street station, through the old Petticoat Market, and up Brick Lane to the Gilbert & George Centre. Their new exhibition, DEATH HOPE LIFE FEAR, had just opened. Included are 18 older pictures, dating from 1984 to 1998. Large, colourful, satirical, psychedelic and, as always, with biting humor and social commentary.
It was a quick walk from there -- with a bit of streetart viewing in between -- to the Townhouse in Fournier Street for a textile exhibition called Patched Narratives. Six women collaborated to bring VE 80 narratives, primarily from their own families, to discarded girls' school uniform jackets and other textiles. The piece that I found most touching was a jacket that the sewer had embellished with five unique applique flowers, each symbolizing a year that her grandmother waited for news of her husband, missing in action, before learning of his death.
Grocery shopping and an early dinner followed before I was out the door again and headed to the National Archives in Richmond for a book talk -- Hallie Rubenhold, author of the new book Story of a Murder: The Wives, the Mistress and Dr Crippen, in conversation with Anthony Delaney, co-host of the After Dark podcast. I've been fascinated by the Dr Crippen story for years -- the murder of his wife Belle, fleeing with his mistress on a steamer to Canada, the police chase by sea and his ultimate trial and execution. But the story I knew didn't tell me much about Belle herself, and Hallie has done that in this book, just as she did in telling the stories of the women who were killed by "Jack the Ripper" in her previous book The Five. I'll be buying the new book when I get back home (too big and heavy to buy in the UK and carry back with me). I continued exhibition and gallery hopping on Thursday, but my first appointment was for a guided tour of 2 Willow Road, Erno Goldfinger's modernist house in Hampstead. The house and contents (art, ceramics, etc) are just as they were when Goldfinger's wife moved out and left it to the National Trust in the early 1990s. I'd been in the house twenty years ago, but I don't think I did a guided tour back then. It's only recently that the property was added to the list of places where I could use my Art Pass and get free entry, so I figured it was time to revisit it. The tour was fascinating and I thoroughly enjoyed looking at the architectural details as well as all the modern art inside.
Before leaving Hampstead, I took a look at a new show by local printmakers from Kentish Town at Burgh House. There were some very nice prints in the show (I didn't buy anything, but I did take cards from several of the printmakers).On into Bloomsbury for the round of galleries there, stopping first at the Peltz Gallery (part of Birkbeck College, it's a fairly new gallery that features the work of faculty and post-grad students). The current exhibition, Cursed Objects in Museum Shops, is curated by students and full of tat purchased from museum gift shops that are of questionable taste or connotation.
As I was making my way to my next stop, feeling a bit peckish and having thoughts of hitting Waitrose for another cup of Forgotten Ends, I passed the Hare Krishna food cart outside SOAS (originally called the School of Oriental and African Studies). I'd seen the cart before and always declined the offer of a free hot lunch, but this time on impulse I accepted. The meal was a tasty plate of dall with potatoes, green beans, peas and carrots, along with wholesome bread. The volunteer doesn't preach or chant or anything else, merely doles out free vegetarian food cheerfully to students, faculty or anyone else who wanders by. With warm food in my belly, I was ready to hit a few more galleries. Next, I popped into the October Gallery, a gallery I often visit, to see Aubrey Williams: Elemental Force, followed by Herald St (their branch in Museum Street) where I saw an odd exhibition by Nicole Wermers called Tails & Fainters.
My final destination of the day was the Karl Marx Memorial Library in Clerkenwell Green. Remember, when I went there for the open house on May Day I promised the volunteer I'd come back for the tour? I kept my promise. The place is a rabbit warren of little rooms, turning corridors, and twisting staircases, all crammed to the gills with stuff (books, posters, photos, artifacts) related to Karx and Lenin (both of whom spent time in London), socialism, the British Battalion of the International Brigade (they fought in the Spanish Civil War), anti-fascist organizations and various trade union movements. Although primarily a research library, housing collections that are utterly unique, they also undertake various projects and exhibitions. Tucked in a corner is a moquette of a statue of Sylvia Pankhurst, a full-sized version of which will be installed soon on Clerkenwell Green.
After all that running around, I needed a change of pace. On Friday, I went by myself on another day trip, this time to Margate, a seaside town that's both seedy and arty. It was my second visit to Turner Contemporary (the first was in 2019), this time to see Resistance, an extensive photo exhibition curated by Steve McQueen. There were well over 100 black & white images of British protests, from the suffragists, unemployed workers and anti-fascists in the 1930s, to civil rights for Black and South Asian communities, miners' strikes, nuclear disarmament, gay, women's and disability rights, taken both by professional and citizen photojournalists. I thought this exhibition was better curated and more coherent than the photos of 80s Britain that I'd seen a few weeks back at Tate Britain.
I was happy to see that Anthony Gormley's Another Time is still installed a bit off shore beneath Turner Contemporary. Last time I was here, the water was up to his shoulders. This time I could see his feet.
Tracey Emin is originally from Margate and a while back she moved her studio here from London. Apparently lots of other artists have followed her down here. It's possible that I walked past some studios without knowing it as I meandered around the streets of the town, past lots of cute antique and gift shops, taking photos of the rather rundown Victorian architecture. I didn't notice any open art galleries, either. Perhaps that's more of a summer thing. There are plans for 2025 artists' open house day(s) but no info available yet. It would be fun to come down here for that.
I really slowed down at the weekend, with lower step counts and not hitting my Fitbit-imposed cardio load goal either day. But I did have two enjoyable days exploring new things south of the river. Saturday was one of the rare open days at the restored Crystal Palace Subway, the only remaining bit of the former Crystal Palace high-level station. Here, throngs of first-class passengers once arrived from London to see the Crystal Palace itself after it was moved from Hyde Park. All that ended when the whole lot burned down in 1936.
My friends Janie and David, who live nearby, met me at the Overground station. After David and I had taken all the photos we could possibly want of the subway, we drove to Dulwich Picture Gallery, where all three of us sat on a bench and ate a fine packed lunch (yummy homemade tuna salad sandwiches!). We then went into the gallery to see Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious (she was married to the artist Eric Ravilious, who died while serving as a war artist in WW2). Garwood was an accomplished artist, with a ‘sophisticated naïve’ style, but is largely unknown. The exhibition featured oil paintings, humorous wood engravings, marbled paper, drawings and collages. This very short video shows snippets of the exhibition and gives a sense of her unique imagination and creativity.
A hot bath and a bottle of beer (Badger Fursty Ferret) back at my gaff rounded out my day. My plan for Sunday was the least ambitious of the entire week. I spent the morning doing my laundry and faffing around on my laptop. Once I had hung my damp clothes on the airing rack, placed in a sunny window, I took the tube to Chelsea to see some of the remains of Chelsea in Bloom, an annual event when shop owners deck their storefronts with floral displays to coincide with the Chelsea Flower Show. Really, I shouldn't have bothered. This was the last day for it, and most of the displays were looking pretty bedraggled. Yet, hoards of punters were roaming up and down the King's Road, posing for photos in front of the blooms while parents, partners and friends obligingly took the snapshots. I beat a hasty retreat after using the loo in Peter Jones department store in Sloane Square, getting on a bus for the Elephant and Castle.
One of the very first tours I had booked when planning my London trip was for the Cinema Museum, located south of the river in Lambeth in a former workhouse. As a child, Charlie Chaplin, along with his mother, had spent time in this workhouse when they were totally destitute. I wanted to see the inside of the workhouse and learn a bit about British movies and cinemas, so I jumped as soon as I read that they were resuming the tours after a winter hiatus. Turns out it wasn't a tour after all as they'd put so many people on the list for this Sunday that it wouldn't be possible to tour them around the building. Instead, we were told to look at the displays in the corridors (walls covered with various movie posters and signage from long-gone cinemas) and converge upstairs in the auditorium (the chapel of the former workhouse). There, one of the board members, who had worked in various cinemas as a projectionist in the 1960s or 70s, gave an interesting Powerpoint presentation of at least an hour, a show & tell of some of the more interesting things in the museum's collection. I gather that we were shown a number of things that they have in their storage areas, things we would not have seen if we'd had a tour of the building. After an interval, when people were encouraged to buy beverages and snacks, we watched a number of shorts from the 1930s to 70s that would have played in the cinemas before the feature film. Although it wasn't what I'd expected, it turned out to be an enjoyable and entertaining way to spend the afternoon. 
When it was over, I took a circuitous route to Waterloo station, going past four little mosaics of Charlie Chaplin in Lambeth Walk.
So, can I keep up this mad pace a bit longer? Clearly by the end of last week my stamina was waning. I've got five more days left of my time here, so I'm hoping I'll rally and have a final burst of energy before crossing the finish line. Stay tuned for the last installment from this UK visit to find out. Stats:
Monday:
£10.50 Munch at NPG (half price with Art Pass)
Maps exhibition - free
Heiress exhibition at Kenwood House - free with Art Pass
£3.25 banana cake at Kenwood House
£3.50 pint at the Magdala
13,825 steps
5.67 miles
Tuesday:
£8 Museum of London Docklands (half price with Art Pass)
£3.95 cake at museum
White Cube Gallery - free
£20 poster (gift) at Wallace Collection
£2.10 groceries
18,712 steps
7.68 miles
Wednesday:
£5.50 sculpture at Barbican (half price with Art Pass)
£2.45 Forgotten Ends
£12 talk at National Archives
£5 beer at National Archives
£14.30 groceries
26,444 steps
10.88 miles
Thursday:
2 Willow Road - free with Art Pass
£20 top up Oyster card
£1.80 pastel de nata
£5 Marx Library tour (concession price)
£5.25 groceries
21,387 steps
8.83 miles
Friday:
£28.20 train ticket to Margate
Turner Contemporary - free
£4 cake
£4.90 groceries
18,947 steps
7.79 miles
Saturday:
£20.50 Dulwich Picture Gallery
Crystal Palace Subway - free
11,668 steps
4.79 miles
Sunday:
£7 Cinema Museum (concession price)
£1.40 protein bar
15,099 steps
6.19 miles
