The Dead, the Gasometer, and the Line of Beauty

After a great night sleep on the inflate-o-bed that I bought for Spooner from amazon.co.uk (because he doesn't do online shopping -- what's up with that?), and waking up sans jet lag, I set out for what I thought was going to be a relatively easy first day on the pavement. Crikey, was I wrong about that. I've just walked back into Spooner's flat, poured a glass of his Scotch, and looked at my pedometer. I walked 28,688 steps today (that's 11.76 miles), so it's no wonder that I could hardly drag myself up the 50 steep, windy, treacherous stair steps to the flat. My feet are sore, but I don't have any blisters and my back held up really well. (I must remember to do my stretches at least once a day while I'm here.)

My day started with a short, brisk walk up to the Hampstead Heath overground station. Rosenbeans will remember that station -- the network used to be called the Thameslink, and you couldn't use your pre-Oyster travel card on the line, so Rosenbeans and I would get the train between Finchley and Frognal where we were staying and Hampstead Heath near Spooner's first flat, trying to avoid having to pay the fare to the ticket collector on the train. Now you just use your Oyster card. I got off at Kensal Rise station and realized that I hadn't a clue how to get from there to Kensal Green Cemetery, but I did know it was on the Harrow Road. Seeing that I was literally on a rise, I walked downhill and got to the Harrow Road soon enough. The gates were open and I walked into the cemetery. Not 5 minutes later I ran into a woman who started chatting. She clearly knew her way around, and I did not. I said that I did know that Charles Dickens' beloved sister-in-law was buried somewhere near the entrance, and she showed me right to her grave, not 20 feet from where we were standing. Dickens really wanted to be buried next to Mary Hogarth, his wife's sister, but the family prevailed and buried Mary in the Hogarth family plot, sans Charles. He did pay for a nice marker for her.

At the suggestion of the woman I met in the cemetery, I went back to the office and bought the £2 guide to who is buried where. I could easily have spent half a day in the cemetery, but I cut it short after finding Marc Brunel's tomb, on which someone had just recently laid a bouquet of lilies, and not finding Wilkie Collins or Anthony Trollope. I can now check off #3 on the list of the Magnificent Seven.

Leaving the dead in the shadow of the gasometer, I crossed the Grand Union Canal and started my walk through Ladbroke Grove and Notting Hill. I saw nearly everything on the walk that I had mapped out, and I'm so glad that I did this on a Monday, i.e. non-market day. I found two decent, though very different, loos along the way -- one just inside the main door of Sainsbury's at the start of my walk, and the other a Victorian subterranean public loo. So many of the public loos in London have been closed, and the ones that remain open are usually Gents', so I felt that I really HAD to use the Ladies' under Bevington Road, just off Golborne. It was clean, safe, cost 20p to get into a stall, and had a lingering wiff of Victorian bog pong that seemed right.

Along my route I saw many things recommended to me by my Flickr mate Malcolm, and found the places referred to in The Line of Beauty -- the pub where Nick and Leo meet, the house in Kensington Park Gardens where the Feddens live, the private garden itself (which is most likely Ladbroke Square Gardens and not Kensington Park Gardens), the cinemas at Notting Hill Gate, and ended my walk on Rotten Row in Hyde Park, which Nick walks along after leaving Lowndes Square (which I skipped seeing) near the end of the book. In between these noted places, I saw photos on a wall, mosaics, a tiki bar, bootscrapers, some interesting doorbells, a reflective pavilion, and picked up a few conkers. When I reached the point where I could walk no more, I exited Hyde Park, hopped the tube at Knightsbridge, and called it a day.

Pedometer reading: 28,668 steps (11.76 miles)
Expenses:
60p for a raisin and hazelnut roll to munch through the morning
£2 for the cemetery guide
£3 for a tuna and salad sandwich on brown bread and a bottle of water
£1.60 for a chocolate croissant at the tea house in Kensington Gardens

In England's Green and Pleasant Land

I can't believe that I'm still standing, let alone writing this post, given that I slept all of an hour and a half on the plane and didn't nap when I reached Spooner's. It took me over an hour to get through immigration at Heathrow -- it's usually about 20 minutes, but this is a particularly busy time because international students are all arriving for the fall term and, let's face it, this is a great time of year to be in London.

We actually worked in a lot of stuff for a half day of exploring, with one person only semi-coherent and semi-oriented. We took the tube to Moorgate and then headed over to Liverpool Station so I could use the loo (note to self: the loo costs 30p). I'd heard about the Raven Row Gallery on the Robert Elms Show on BBC London, so I wanted to stop briefly there. It is in an absolutely wonderful Georgian house that once had shops on the ground floor, behind beautiful bowed windows. The gallery is the inspiration of Alex Sainsbury (Son of Sainsbury's) and features new contemporary artists. But the building itself is the real work of art, and worth seeing no matter what is on in the gallery. Everything has been painted the same ivory color, which might sound a bit monotonous and boring, but it really serves to highlight the lovely bones and bows of the house and the rooms.

From there, we went to Dennis Severs House, a totally different type of back-in-time experience. The house is in Folgate Street near Spitalfields Market, and was once the home of Huguenot silk weavers. Dennis Severs purchased the house in the 1970s, saving it from the wrecking ball. He lovingly filled the rooms with what, in his imagination, depicted the lives of the (imaginary) Jarvis family during different times in the 17th - 19th centuries. The rooms are absolutely chock-a-block with stuff -- half-nibbled biscuits, clothing, furnishing, pets, chamber pots, etc., etc. But that's not all. Dennis Severs actually lived in this house for 20 years. A house without electricity, central heating, plumbing (there is one cold water tap in the basement kitchen), or a bathtub. Since his death, friends of Dennis Severs have maintained the house as he would have wanted it. The idea is that visitors will walk around from room to room, silently experiencing the house and its inhabitants. You sense that someone has just left a room or that you are intruding on a private moment. The whole thing is meant to be a multi-sensory, time transport experience that can be yours for £8.

We did a little more rambling in the East End: Spooner shopped for spices in Brick Lane, I looked for street name signs and street art, and we stopped for snacks at the Albion Cafe (corner of Redchurch and Boundary Rd). Quite a lot, really, for an arrival day on little sleep.

Tomorrow: Kensal Green Cemetery and Notting Hill (weather permitting)

Distance covered: 16579 steps (6.8 miles)
Expenses:
£20 to top up my Oyster card
£8 for Dennis Severs House
£4.10 for snacks at the Albion Cafe

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.