Blake and Mosaics in Lambeth

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Whew! I finished my last map for the London trip. This walk is primarily about the life of William Blake, who lived in Lambeth from 1790 to 1800, and the Southbank Mosaics project that commemorates his work. The goals of Southbank Mosaics are to beautify the streets around Waterloo and to provide skills to marginalized people of the area. Hundreds of members of the local community have also volunteered their time on Project Blake, working on the mosaics and recording Blake's poetry. A few of my Flickrmates and I volunteered for an afternoon last year, mostly sorting donated tile into bins by color and also putting a few glass pieces into Blake mosaics that were in process in the studio. The panels we worked on are now hanging in a railway tunnel in Centaur Street. I really haven't read much of Blake's poetry, except for "Jerusalem" and the one about the tyger, but I'll read up.

A visit to Lambeth must include a stroll down Lower Marsh Street, where there are many vintage clothing shops, market carts in the street, and I Knit, the best knitting shop in London and the only one in the UK with a liquor license. You can hang out on their sofas, work on your knitting project, and have a glass of wine or beer. Northampton SO needs something like this.

On this walk, I may also spend some time at the Garden Museum and the second hand book stalls by the National Theatre. The Tate Modern and the Hayward Gallery are close by -- both good places to go to use the loo or get out of the rain.

Dickens in Southwark

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I've made yet another walking tour map. This one follows nearly verbatim and step-by-step the Dickens in Southwark walk on Richard Jones's London Walking Tours website. I'm not sure if I'll climb the 311 steps to the top of the Monument at the beginning of the walk (nah, too chicken) or pay to see the Old Operating Theatre and Herb Garret at St Thomas Church. I've got this planned for a Friday so that I can buy portable food for the day at Borough Market. The banana cake and brownies from Flour Power City Bakery there are to die for.

The last walk I need to map out is Blake in Lambeth before I start plotting out our plan of attack for London Open House weekend. I hope my loyal readers aren't getting too bored by these maps. I've made them public on Google maps, and I surprised to see that they're getting quite a few views, so I'm curious if other people are actually printing them out and using them. If you do, please leave me a comment and let me know how it went for you.

Ladbroke Grove to Notting Hill Gate

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Now that I've gotten the hang of making my own Google maps, I'm having a lot of fun plotting out my London adventures. Usually when I walk around London, I carry a map book as well as narrative descriptions of a particular walk copied from a book or two, and maybe another map that I've printed from the web. It's rare that I follow any one prescribed course, as I'm generally trying to cobble together bits of different ones and work in other things of interest to me along the route. Now that I'm slipping into my dotage, I tend to forget some things in all this checking back and forth between my papers (and I look like a fool standing on a street corner, leafing through everything and trying to work out where I'm going next). With my own customized maps, I'm hoping to see more of what I want and look less of a prat doing it.

I'm planning to start this walk at the gates of Kensal Green Cemetery when they open at 9 a.m. I'll roam around the cemetery for a while (this will be the third of the Magnificent Seven that I'll see), and then cross Regent's Canal into Ladbroke Grove. From there, I'll wander down Portobello Road, which I hope won't be so crowded as I'm planning this for a week day, and into Notting Hill. I've mapped out some of the places in Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty (2004 Man Booker prize winner, and also a great miniseries). After that, I'll head toward Hyde Park for a walk through Kensington Gardens and over to the Serpentine Gallery. Weather permitting, of course. If it rains, I reckon I'll spend the day at the V&A and the Natural History Museum.

Of Monks and Thieves: A Walk Around Clerkenwell

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For the past two years, I've been saying that I'm going to do a walk around Clerkenwell, but I haven't gotten to it yet. When I next go to London, I'm bound and determined to work it in. I've read several different walks (in Time Out London Walks and an online walk of Dickens' London), and made my own walk on Google Maps. It starts with the Priory of St John, continues on to Bleeding Heart Yard (mentioned in Little Dorrit) and Clerkenwell Green, passing several locations in Oliver Twist, then goes through Exmouth Market, down a lovely old Georgian street where Dickens' bank was located, and ends up in Whitecross Street. I've worked in several places to stop for food and beverages, including one of the few remaining Italian delis in the area, and Whitecross Market where there are specialty food vendors on Thursday and Friday. Since the walk starts and ends at the Barbican, there's an opportunity to stop in there to see what's on in the art gallery. And if it starts to pour, the Museum of London is a close by place to take shelter.

I Heart the Internets

How did I ever manage before the internets, especially Web2.0? My social life -- minimal though it still is -- would have been nonexistent. I would have spent hours in the local libraries, or a fortune on books. Instead, all my needs are met while sitting in my study wearing my jammies or slacking off at work. I still think that LiveJournal and MySpace are useless wastes of bandwidth, but I've softened my tone on social networking considerably. Here's what I've been up to lately, particularly stuff related to planning the April trip to the UK:

• Put info about my mini-meetup to volunteer at Southbank Mosaics (see previous post) on Upcoming. I've now got three other Flickr mates who will be joining me, and a couple of maybes.
• While I was noodling around Upcoming, I learned about a Flickr meetup at Borough Market on the Saturday when I'm there. I'm watching that event.
• On Ravelry, I read a while back about a yarn shop called I Knit -- it's the UK’s only yarn store with a licensed bar and late night knitting 5 nights a week. When I first read about the shop, it was located in the uncharted territory of South London somewhere. I just found out that they've recently moved to Lower Marsh Street, Waterloo, which I already have on my itinerary as there are several funky vintage stores there. I need to buy some metric size needles that aren't available in the US.
  
• Used the 24 Hour Museum and London is Free sites to find out about exhibits and other things going on while I'm there.
• Added Londonist and Diamond Geezer to my blogroll on Bloglines. I read them every day to find out about events, restaurants, politics, crime, etc.
  
• Put a seed in the brains of other members of the Guess Where London group on Flickr to schedule an all-GWL pub meet while I'm in town. Someone else in the group has found a venue and the discussion thread is full of people's replies that they're coming (and, sadly, several who will be out of town).
  
• Researched potential destinations for a daytrip with two of my Flickr mates who I met last fall. They're letting me choose where we'll go -- I'm thinking of Kent, to the seaside in Whitstable if it's nice weather or to Canterbury if it's not.
• Listened to podcasts on London Walks and followed the routes on Google Earth or aboutmyplace. I've taken notes on a couple of walks that I might do (Wapping, Islington, Chelsea and Clerkenwell). It would be really dangerous for me to walk around London with my mp3 player plugged into my ears. I already have too much of a tendency to walk into traffic. I also joined the London Walks group on Facebook so I can keep up with new info.
  
• Speaking of maps, I installed the Minimap Sidebar extension for Firefox. It's really useful because it lets you open a sidebar to find a location in Google Maps without leaving the webpage you're on.
  
• Started a Flickr group for London Reflections. I'll try to concentrate on taking reflection shots for the pool, along with all the hundreds of other photo ops that are out there.
• Used Google Documents for my spreadsheet of all the places I want to go, sorted by day to make an itinerary, with address, URL, nearest tube station or bus route, hours and other info.
  
• Imported my events from Upcoming into my Google Calendar.
• Used Google Notebook to clip things I found on the web for future reference.
• Checked rail schedules and fares on the National Rail website.
  

One disappointment is that Transport for London won't let you top up your Oyster card from outside the UK. It would be so much easier if I could transfer money to my card before I leave home. I've used the Journey Planner a lot, however.

If any of my three or four faithful readers finds this stuff useful, please friend me on whatever social networking sites we both use. I need all the friends I can get.