Chaos on the Northern Line (Week 3)

When I checked the Citymapper app on Monday morning to see how long it would take me to get to Tate Modern (I would normally take the Northern Line from Tufnell Park to Waterloo), I noticed the wee yellow "i" on the Northern Line icon. Hmmmm... Seems there were some delays due to a signal failure at Stockwell. I sez to meself, "No worries. Leave 10 minutes earlier." Little did I know the chaos that would ensue, lasting until Thursday. 

I rocked up at the Tufnell Park station a bit before 10 am, well after the morning rush should have been over. After waiting on the platform for at least 10 minutes (trains normally come along every 3-4 minutes), one pulled in. The doors opened and no one got off. Every carriage was heaving with people. I saw a tiny space inside the door, and was grateful that a women moved in just enough to let me squeeze on. Luckily I'm small and I was only going one stop. Crikey!

Citymapper had told me to change for the Thameslink at Kentish Town. I'd totally forgotten that this was an option! After a wait of about 8 minutes on the platform at Kentish Town, the train pulled in and it was virtually empty. A fast, smooth journey and I was spit out at Blackfriars for a very short walk to Tate Modern. Did I mention the rain in the forecast? There was none as I walked to the station in Tufnell Park (though the skies looked ominous), but by the time I reached Blackfriars it was absolutely chucking down. Storm Benjamin had arrived. Even with my raincoat and brollie, I was pretty well soaked by the time I entered the Turbine Hall. But I was 10 minutes early to meet Janie, so I had time to dry off a bit with the help of the hand driers in the loo.

I also had time to walk through the new installation in the Turbine Hall. Faithful readers of this blog will know how much I normally enjoy these installations. This one, however, was underwhelming. By Sámi (indigenous Northern European) artist Máret Ánne Sara, the installation is made of sticks, bones, pelts and skulls. I think it's about the relationship between land, water, reindeer, etc. It doesn't begin to occupy the immense space in any sort of effective way. Meh. 

Janie took me as her +1 to two exhibitions: Emily Kam Kngwarray and Theatre Picasso, both of which I'd been debating seeing but was a bit put off by the heafty price tag, even with my Art Pass. I'm always happy and grateful to be a member's +1.

The Australian Aboriginal artist Emily Kam Kngwarry is here shown for the first time in Europe. Her paintings and batiks are definitely unique, like nothing I'd ever seen before. The works involve depictions of "country", the land and the lore of the people who inhabit it. I don't think the wall text or the video adequately explained the meaning of Dreamtime and how that is translated to two-dimensional art. Therefore, the works felt mysterious and inaccessible to me, and ultimately looked very samey with all the dots. I could see the emu tracks and little lizard creatures, but not much else. But on an abstract level, the works are moving and strong, with beautiful colours and textures. Maybe that's what western white people are allowed to see.

And maybe I'm dumb as a post, but the Theatre Picasso exhibition made no sense to me. I think they just pulled a bunch of paintings and drawings out of storage -- Picasso wearing a bull's head or (in a video) acting as Carmen with a veil over his head and a fag in his hand -- then built a fake proscenium, and called it theatre. Ho, hum. 

We stopped in to the nearby Bankside Gallery to see a nice show by the Royal Watercolour Society and then had lunch at a new place in Southwark Street called All That Falafel & More. Good food, friendly staff, excellent prices. Yum. The rain was intermittently soft and torrential as we made our way to and across Waterloo Bridge. Janie then headed to Embankment Station and I pushed on to the Courtauld.

Yes, this was my second visit to the Courtauld Gallery. Unbeknownst to me on my initial visit, there are some Wayne Thiebaud etchings and prints in a display called Delights. This display is included with general admission (free in my case with my Art Pass), so I felt I need to go back and have a butchers. 

I also took a look at The Barber in London: Highlights from a Remarkable Collection, also free to me with my Art Pass. Lady Martha Constance Hattie Barber (1869–1933), who was predeceased by her wealthy husband and who had no children, left her entire fortune for the establishment of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham. Her vision was that the institute would develop an art collection of a similar quality to that of the National Gallery or the Wallace Collection. The collection is normally housed in a Grade I listed Art Deco building on the campus of the University of Birmingham. The building is currently undergoing extensive refurbishment and so parts of the collection have gone out on loan to other art museums. The Courtauld is fortunate to have a small assortment of paintings, and they are all stunning, including works by Gainsborough, Reynolds, Turner, Degas, and Monet. 

Dodging the rain, I got a bus to Bloomsbury for my second visit to the British Museum. This time I made a beeline through the crowds to the Prints and Drawing Room (room 90) to see Nordic noir: works on paper from Edvard Munch to Mamma Andersson. Other than Munch, I'd never heard of any of these artists. The pieces started with two prints by Munch and then carried on through the 1940s to the present. It was interesting that I'd just seen the installation at Tate Modern by a Sámi artist in the morning and then saw all this Nordic art in the afternoon. 

Not even attempting to get anywhere on the tube, I spent Tuesday riding buses and concentrating my activities in and around Trafalgar Square. I started with the National Gallery, where I saw the blockbuster exhibition Radical Harmony - Helene Kröller-Müller's Neo-Impressionists. This is another exhibition based on the collection of a remarkable woman. One of the significant art collectors of the 20th century, she assembled the most comprehensive ensemble of Neo-Impressionist paintings in the world. Collected with the aim of being publicly accessible, these works now form part of the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands, which she founded in 1938. Even though I'm not a huge fan of Pointillism, I really enjoyed walking through room after room filled with colour. 

I then strolled around St James's Park and watched the pelicans before I meandered my way through a few nearby galleries. At the Mall Galleries, I saw several rooms full of works by the the Society of Wildlife Artists -- lots of paintings of birds and a few mammals, fish and slugs. Next, the Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA) where I saw something having to do with oil that I didn't like much. Finally, on to the Whitecube Mason's Yard for large colour photographs by Andeas Gursky before walking up Shaftsbury Avenue to Covent Garden to catch a bus. 

On Wednesday, the Northern Line was even more of a mess. Tufnell Park station was closed entirely (it's a non-interchange station, so TfL must consider it insignificant). I needed to get to London Bridge to meet my friend Jane for our trip to the Metropolitan Police Museum in Sidcup. I scurried over to the Holloway Road and joined throngs of people at the bus stop. When the number 43 came along, I had to push my way in the front door to be the last passenger let on the bus. With each stop, as people emerged from the side door, I was able to inch my way down the aisle of the bus. Finally, somewhere around Islington Green, I got a seat. I rocked up at Waterloo with just enough time to spend a penny (i.e. use the loo) before Jane and I caught our train. 

The exhibition is actually a rare loan of items from the Crime Museum (a collection used by the Met for training purposes, not open to the public) to the Metropolitan Police Museum (a collection related to the history of the Met). It's a small exhibition -- housed in a single room -- and only 10 people at a time are allowed inside. Our guide took us around from display to display, telling us about the crimes and the police detection methods used to aprehend the criminals. We saw items related to Dr. Crippen, the Blackout Ripper, the Great Train Robbery, and John Christie, as well a bunch of other baddies I'd never heard of. Before I knew it, an hour and a half had passed. 

After lunch in a caff, Jane and I got back on the train into London, watching the skies as the grey moved out and sunshine returned. We made a spur-of-the-moment decision to go to Regent's Park to see the annual Frieze Sculpture on display in the park. This turned out to be a great plan -- the sculpture (fewer pieces than previous years) was much better quality than the past couple of years. Less is more. We had a fun time looking at each piece, making up our idea of what the sculpture was about, and then reading the word-salad (probably written by gallery staff) on the display boards. Jane is much more outgoing than I am -- she would ask anyone nearby what they thought of the sculptures and got into some funny interactions. The October sun, low in the sky at this latitude, cast golden highlights on the yellow leaves and long shadows on the ground. 

I then walked down Tottenham Court Road to Foyles, where I had a long sit-down with a beer and a book before my evening event. In the vestry house (lovely!) of St Giles in the Fields, I attended a talk about the Irish in the Rookery of St Giles by historian Breda Corish. The talk was interesting and I learned a fair bit about the Irish who came to the area in the 17th and 18th centuries, but would have liked to have heard more about the 19th century. 

Thursday was Warhol in Woking. Thank goodness my train ticket from Waterloo was an open day return, as the chaos on the Northern Line was still ongoing. I tapped in at Tufnell Park just after 9:30 (off-peak in order to get my 1/3 senior railcard discount), but the train was late, heaving with people and I had to change platforms at Camden Town. Stressful as this was, I boarded a train at Waterloo with four minutes to spare and breathed a sigh of relief. (There's a frequent service to Woking, so I could have gotten the next train if necessary.) 

It was a cold and miserable day, so I headed straight to the Lightbox Gallery. I'd been meaning to visit this gallery for years, and now that I've seen how easy it is to get to and what a lovely space it is, I will be back. I was there to see a large Warhol exhibition and to attend a curator's talk on Warhol Unmasked: Art, Identity and Reinvention (1968-1987). Both the exhibition and the talk were excellent.

My visit to the Lightbox also included a nice sit-down in the caff, where I ate my packed lunch and purchased a cup of tea and a brownie. The Lightbox also houses a local history gallery telling Woking's Story, with displays about a Medieval manor, a local department store, Woking during WW2, Brookwood Cemetery, customs and clothing of mourning, and a local psychiatric institution. All of the displays were developed by local citizens who, with support of archivists, researched and assembled the artifacts. There's the usual interactive bits and dress-up corner for the kiddies, but there's plenty to interest adults as well. 

The weather was a bit better when I emerged from the Lighbox three hours later, so I wandered around the town center a bit. There really isn't a whole lot to see. The streets and a large shopping precinct are full of chain stores -- Nandos, McDonalds, Taco Bell, Pret, etc. I popped into the one charity shop I saw. Most of the independent shops seemed to be barber shops -- I'd venture to guess that Woking may have more barbers per capita than any other town in Britain. 

The author H. G. Wells lived in Woking for the year in which he wrote The War of the Worlds. There's a sculpture of Wells in the town center and one of a Martian from the book. 

Back at Waterloo, the skies were relatively clear so I walked around a bit and then caught a bus for King's Cross (deverted, it actually stopped at St Pancras), and then walked up York Way to the Pangolin Gallery. I saw two exhibitions, primarily of sculpture. The one by Geoffrey Clarke I really liked. 

The other by Almuth Tebbenhoff didn't move me much (but then, it had been a long day and I was knackered).

Although I continued to Tufnell Park by bus, I later learned that the signal failure in Stockwell had finally been fixed earlier that afternoon. Yay!

On Friday morning, I made it by tube in no time flat to Green Park, then walked the short distance to the Christea Roberts Gallery in Pall Mall where I met my mate Simon. He introduced me to the splendid watercolours of Emma Stibbon, whose exhibition Melting Ice | Rising Tides had just opened. Simon has been following her career and thinks she is a star. In this exhibition, she "explores and documents through drawings, prints and an immersive installation, how the warming environment of the polar regions directly causes rising sea levels and coastal erosion on UK coastlines, with a specific focus on Sussex and North Devon." She often mixes seawater and ground up rocks with her paints to interesting effects. 

After a cuppa, we walked to the Royal Academy where Simon escorted me into the Kerry James Marshall: The Histories exhibition as his +1. He'd already seen the exhibition, so he took a fast turn through to revisit a few things, while I happily spent well over an hour and a half looking at the monumental paintings. Once again, I'd come to London to learn about an African-American artist I hadn't previously heard of. This is a huge exhibition, filled with monumental paintings -- colourful, thought-provoking, challenging, enlightening, ironic, moving, etc. The exhibition will not be shown in the US, so I was glad to have had the opportunity to see it here in London. 

I spent the rest of the afternoon mooching around galleries, starting with ones in Cork Street behind the RA, including the Goodman Gallery where the second half of the El Anatsui exhibition was on view (I'd seen the first half at the October Gallery in Bloomsbury). 

The number 9 bus then took me to Exhibition Road where I hopped off and walked up to the Serpentine Gallery. First, I made my annual visit to the Serpentine Pavilion. I thought this year's (by Marina Tabassum) was better than some of the others we've seen lately. The proportions and scale are lovely, and it looks like it was a very nice space for coffee or an event when the weather was warmer. They'll be taking it down in a few days. 

The exhibitions in the North and South galleries left me totally cold and so I exited quickly. Exhibitions here have been very hit or miss recently, with a few more misses than hits. 

The afternoon was sunny, so I strolled up to the Italian Gardens (now put to sleep for the winter, but the fountains looked lovely in the bright sunshine) and on to Paddington where I caught the tube back to Tufnell Park. 

Just before going to bed, I checked Citymapper for the best route to use on Saturday to get me to the Heath Robinson Museum in Pinnar, a place I'd never been. It would involve getting the Metropolitan line from Finchley Road (I'd never been past West Hampstead on this line). All looked fine and very doable. I would be able to walk (quickly) to the Parliament Hill Farmers' Market, get my bread for the week, then get the Mildmay Line from Gospel Oak to Finchley & Frognal, walk (again briskly) down the Finchley Road to the other station where I'd catch the Metropolitan Line. Easy ... until it wasn't.

When I got to the platform at Finchley Road, I found that there were delays on the Metropolitan line, all the way out to and beyond Pinnar. Yeeeesh! Transport hell seemed to be following me around. I was to have met my friend Jane at the museum at 11:15, but it soon became clear that wasn't going to happen. Over the tannoy came an announcement that anyone waiting for the train for Amersham (that's the one I wanted) should take the next one for Uxbridge to Harrow on the Hill and change there. Jane and I texted each other as I was getting on the Uxbridge-bound train. She was already at Harrow on the Hill and reckoned she'd still be there when my train pulled in. There, we implemented Plan B and got a bus the rest of the way to Pinnar, arriving around noon. 

The museum is charming and the soon-to-close exhibition, Connections and Contraptions, full of marvelous automata and machines made by guest artists, was a delight. We had so much fun looking at the drawings, turning cranks, pushing floor pedals, and watching the gizmos do their thing. One automata picked its nose, while a fox with its body made of a guitar plucked the strings and played an eerie tune. I had never heard of Heath Robinson, but I now know that his name has become an idiom in the UK for a machine that is overly complicated, impractical, and amusing. A second room contained display boards detailing Heath Robinson's life and career as an illustrator. All well worth the schlep to Pinnar. 

After lunch in a local caff, we roamed around the town, going into several charity shops to check out the clothing and knickknacks. We each made a purchase of a book, one on 1930s design for Jane and one called Paved with Gold: A Scrapbook of London Life for me. 

We turned our clocks back on Saturday night, thus bringing an end to British Summer Time and plunging us into late-afternoon darkness and making everyone grumpy. Even the wasps are upset about the cold and dark, and they have decided that they prefer to be inside my loft studio rather than out in the cold. Throughout my stay, I've been trapping one or two a day with a glass and then releasing them out the shower room window (now that I've been to the World of Wasps exhibition, I'm much more respectful of them). Sometime in the early hours of Sunday, EIGHT of them decided to move in with me! I've evicted them.

With no real plan for Sunday, and not a whole lot of energy, I went down to the Marylebone Farmers' Market to buy two of my favourite savory pies for my final week. There was no sign of the sun and a cold wind was whipping between the buildings as I walked from Bond Street station up towards the market. I nipped into Waitrose to buy a pain aux raisins, which I ate on a bench in Paddington Street Gardens as is my custom when I go on the pie run. Then, pushing on into a driving wind, I walked to the 67 York Street Gallery to see an exhibition of abstraction and modern British art. 

Feeling drained from my busy week, I caught a bus and headed back to my gaff to do laundry, chill, write and begin to sketch out a plan for the coming week. I still have mates to see and things to do!

Stats:

Monday:
£ gift for a mate
£9.95 lunch for two
£9.24 groceries

Tate Modern - free as +1 of member

Courtauld - free general admission with Art Pass

British Museum - free
19,661 steps
8.19 miles

Tuesday:
£12.50 National Gallery (50% off with Art Pass)
£3 Mall Galleries (50% off withArt Pass)
£2 cookie
£2.39 groceries
14,316 steps
5.87 miles

Wednesday:
£50 top up Oyster
£6 lunch at caff
£6.50 beer at Foyles
£5 talk about Irish in St Giles

16,174 steps
6.63 miles

Thursday:
£12.64 train to Woking
£12.25 Lightbox Gallery and talk
£5.90 tea and brownie
13,140 steps
5.39 miles

Friday:
£1.95 pastel de nata
£9.69 groceries and wine
Royal Academy - free as +1 of member
Serpentine Gallery - free
17,302 steps
7.21 miles

Saturday:
£5.70 farmers' market
£5.95 sandwich at caff
£1.70 groceries

£1 book at charity shop
Heath Robinson Museum - free with Art Pass
13,672 steps
5.91 miles

Sunday:
£8 pies at farmers' market
£1.30 pain aux raisins
12,053 steps
4.97 miles