Good mates, good art and good beer

With those three elements, I'd say it was a perfect day.

Wednesday had an appointed beginning (meeting Judy at Tate Modern) and end (Guess Where London meetup at Craft Beer Co. in Leather Lane), but lots of room in the middle for spontaneous choices and a walk in the sunshine, when it made a brief appearance, along the Southbank. The first (and the best) thing we saw at Tate Modern was Tacita Dean's new Unilever installation in Turbine Hall, which had just opened the day before. I purposely didn't look at any press coverage of the opening, because I didn't want to have any images in my head of what it would be like. It's big and it's fab! We viewed it first from the bridge across Turbine Hall, and then went down below, where people were sitting on the floor to view it and little kids kept running up and touching the screen. It really needs to be seen from both vantage points, as in incorporates architectural elements from Turbine Hall itself and you need to experience it from both angles and in both scales. I'm doing a mental inventory of the four or five Unilever installations I've seen, and I think that this is by far my favorite.

After Judy treated me to lunch, we wandered across the river to One New Change to check out the views from their 6th floor roof garden. Nice view of the dome of St Paul's, but you really can't see much of the City or beyond because parts of the building itself -- which is an ugly shopping centre -- are in the way. While you can get some glimpses of bridges, the river itself isn't visible. And there are no views to the north, which I would have enjoyed. I guess I'll just have to wait for next year's Open House and go to Broadgate Tower if I want panoramic views.

Back across the river, we returned to the Tate Modern. All together, we saw Diane Arbus photos, Contested Terrains (four African artists), and did a quick walk through the very, very grey Gerhard Richter exhibition (my advice is to skip the rooms with the grey stuff and go straight for the color).

A wander in the warm sun brought us to the Hayward Gallery, where we met up with our mate Malcolm and chatted under a festive bunting of white underpants. More white underpants, this time in the form of a large chandelier (called the "Massachusetts Chandelier" -- don't ask me why as I haven't found out yet), awaited us inside -- all part of Pipilotti Rist's Eyeball Massage. This exhibition was great fun -- full of videos, projected onto walls and gauze curtains, onto objects small and large, inside pocketbooks and shells, and even from a tiny hole in the floor. You can walk in and out of the curtains, stick your head into holes to see things in a large box, or lounge on the floor on pillows made of stuffed trousers and shirts. This review describes it much better than I can.

When our eyeballs were thoroughly massaged, Malcolm and I said goodbye to Judy and walked up to Leather Lane (with a quick stop to look at the inside of The Black Friar pub, which I'd never seen) for the GWL meetup. The Craft Beer Co. is a lovely, new-ish pub that serves a great variety of crafted ales (I had one called Winter Meltdown and another called Hophead -- thanks Malc and David for treating me!). As always, it was lovely to catch up with old mates and to meet new ones.

Another note of explanation for my faithful and observant readers: My posts are time stamped with Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5). Please don't think that I'm awake at 4 in the morning writing these -- I'm too knackered to stay up that late or wake that early.

Expenses:
(Judy treated me to lunch and exhibition entry at the Tate Modern)
£2.75 for beverage at the Hayward
£8 for the Pipilotti Rist exhibition

20,975 steps
8.27 miles

A Retrograde Ramble in the City

Most of yesterday was taken up with future-oriented activities: doing a load of laundry so that I'd have socks and underwear for the second half of my visit, and various errands that Spooner needed to do in order to be ready for his expedition to a farm with his students (leaving today, returning on Friday). One of his missions involved a trip to Citibank to deposit a check. The nearest Citibank branch is in Hanover Square, which put us very close to the Opera Gallery in New Bond Street, where I'd just read that Mr. Brainwash was having an exhibition. We figured this was not to be missed (note that I didn't say "too good to be missed"). It was as we expected -- Mr. Brainwash's work is largely derivative, but in case he shows up in another movie (he was the subject of Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop), I wanted to say I'd seen his gallery show in London. His non-derivative pieces involved using bits of broken vinyl records to replicate black and white posterized portraits of The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, etc. Though somewhat creative, these weren't exactly interesting. But there were some things in the gallery by other artists that we enjoyed seeing.

The highpoint of the day was a backwards-looking activity -- Through the Time Tunnel: A Retrograde Ramble, a guided walk in the City. We met up with my Flickr mate David at Tower Hill Station for this two-hour walk backwards in history from the 21st century to Roman London. Our guide, Steven, is an amateur history buff who had worked in the City for 30 years, using his free time to explore and learn about its history and hidden gems. Now retired, he leads seven different walks each week. He showed us the old Royal Mint building, a hydraulic pumping station, the first Peabody estate in London, remnants of a rail line used to bring goods from Shadwell and Limehouse docks to the warehouses in Tower Hamlets, Wellclose Square and Wilton's Music Hall, St Katharine docks, and some bits of the foundation of St Mary Graces (destroyed in the dissolution of the monasteries; I had seen a skeleton from this location in an exhibition at the Wellcome Collection several years ago, so it was really interesting to connect it all together). Our walk ended at All Hallows by the Tower, where we saw a Roman tile floor in the crypt. This was only the second guided walk I'd been on (the first was about Jewish radicalism in the East End) -- both were non-commercial, done by local history enthusiasts, and were highly informative and really fun.

After the walk, we dashed off to do the last of Spooner's errands. This afternoon, he and his group of 14-year-olds will take a bus to somewhere in Hampshire, where they'll stay in a hostel, cooking their own meals, and will work for 2 days on an organic farm that has buffalo, pigs, chickens and vegetables. I can't wait to hear the stories when he returns on Friday.

Expenses:
£20 to top up my Oyster card
£5 for the guided walk, which goes to Oxfam and Cancer Research UK

13,578 steps (and a lot of bus and tube journeys)
5.35 miles

Groundhog Day

I'm finding myself retracing steps and revisiting places quite a bit on this trip. Yesterday (Monday) was almost a carbon copy of the last Saturday of the 2010 trip, except without Spooner and Malcolm. I was on my own for the day while Spooner got his hair cut, bought Wellies and made other preparations for his upcoming 3-day expedition with his students to an organic farm in Hampshire. So, I spent a chunk of time at the V&A, then walked up Exhibition Road to Hyde Park, visited this year's Serpentine Pavilion (ho-hum) and the Serpentine Gallery, and then walked up to Bayswater Road.

At the V&A, I saw a great exhibition called The Power of Making, which was all about crafts taken in new directions with incredible results. I also saw parts of the Medieval and Renaissance galleries, wandered through the ceramics gallery in search of an Ai Weiwei exhibition that hasn't started yet, and saw the (free) photography part of the (not free) Postmodernism exhibition.

Lunch -- a cup of lovely roasted veg soup -- was the best part of my stop at the Serpentine Pavilion and Gallery. There's a retro Citroen van, converted to a snack truck, sitting outside the gallery. I'll have a photo up at some point, but meanwhile you can see this one by my mate Malcolm.

Speaking of my photos, here's the story: there's an open wireless network at Spooner's flat, but I can't connect to it because Tony (the owner of the flat who is now traveling around the world for a year) has set it up as a LAN and he has to be here to allow new computers to be part of the LAN. I don't really understand it, but it means that I have to use Tony's desktop computer rather than my netbook, and I'm reluctant to dump all my photos from my camera onto his computer. So, my posts will go unillustrated until I'm home. So sorry to disappoint my faithful readers, but you'll just have to come back here at a later date.

In the evening, Spooner and I went up to the Almeida Theatre in Islington to see Tracey Ullman in a new play. She hasn't been on stage in London for 20 years, and I had high hopes that she'd chosen something really fab for her return. But it's not. I'm no theatre critic, but I know a crummy play when I see one. 'Nuff said. We did have a very nice pub meal at the Charles Lamb before the show, however.

Expenses:
£1 for map of the V&A (yes, they charge for this now)
£3.50 soup and roll at the Serpentine
£9 meal and a half pint of bitter at the pub

22,483 steps
8.87 miles

Market Day

Sunday is a big market day in London, and we took in three of them -- the Queen's Park Farmers' Market just up the road from Spooner's flat, Columbia Road flower market, and Brick Lane market. We wandered our way down through the East End from Columbia Road to Whitechapel Road, passing through Arnold Circus, starting at the top of Brick Lane and weaving our way in and out of the crowds, back and forth on various side streets -- Bacon, Sclater, Hanbury, Princelet, Wentworth -- checking out the streetart along the way. I'd read a lot about the East End over the winter, including Child of the Jago, The Worst Street in London, On Brick Lane, and re-reading parts of East End Chronicles. I always have in my head dozens of spots that I want to see, and streets that I want to explore, and I never seem to get to all of them. Having now done this on a Saturday (last year) and a Sunday, I'm not sure which is better -- on Saturday, the streets are rather quiet and less interesting, without any stalls, vendors or many people, but on Sunday it's too crowded in places and I get so overwhelmed with just trying to navigate through the hordes of people that I often forget the various places I want to go in my effort to make it through the mob and not get separated from Spooner.

We stopped into two different galleries -- the one that's in the old Rochelle School in Club Row (Arnold Circus) and the Whitechapel Gallery. I'd wanted to go to the Whitechapel to see the hall of mirrors by Josiah McElheny, but was somewhat underwhelmed -- or it was just over my head because I didn't know enough about the intellectual premise behind it all. However, there's a fabulous exhibition in an upstairs room -- the selections from the Government Art Collection, curated by Cornelia Parker, called Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain. Throughout the upcoming year, different people will be selecting pieces from the vast art collection of the British government, to be arranged around a theme. The works in the current exhibition are all hung salon style, according to the color spectrum -- Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain is a mnemonic for ROYGBIV. Have a look at the exhibition booklet to get a sense of the range of pieces and the humorous juxtapositions. We enjoyed seeing which government ministry owned particular pieces.

Our evening was a quiet one spent back at the flat -- a glass of wine, a hot bath, and dinner.

Expenses:
£3 raisin walnut loaf from farmers' market
£4 Map of Spitalfields Life, bought at Labour and Wait
£5 Lunch at Meraz Cafe in Hanbury Street
£1 juice

19,216 steps
7.58 miles

A Sweater and a Souk

Score! When I was packing for my trip, as I folded my 25+ year old cashmere cardigan that always comes with me to London, I realized that it was no longer fit for travel. A small hole had developed in one of the sleeves, and the seams were beginning to come apart under both arms. Regretfully, I left it home, thinking I might be able to find a substitute at a charity shop in an upscale neighborhood. Since our plan for Saturday was to be in Notting Hill, I had jotted down the address of Mary Portas' (Queen of Shops) charity shop for Save the Children, called Living and Giving, in Westbourne Grove. Our route through Notting Hill took us down the Portobello Road (after a stop at Lisboa Cafe in Golborne Road and the newly-renovated public toilets in Bevington Road), through the Saturday market. I passed half a dozen stalls in the stretch by the Spanish School that had a rack each of sweaters, many cashmere, but saw nothing that seemed right. Then, just before the Westway, was a stall of nothing but cashmere sweaters. On the rack of cardigans, I found one that was just a shade darker than the oatmeal color of mine. It fit and it was a good deal at £20. As the vendor explained, and as I knew, it's quality English cashmere, not the cheap Chinese variety that they sell at M&S. Success, and before noon on day 2!

We picked up some food items, looked at some bits of street art, and then got out of the market by turning right on Lancaster Road. From there, we walked up Ladbroke Grove to the top of Notting Hill where the hippodrome was located in the 1830s, and then down the west side of the hill into the old Piggeries and Potteries area, which was, in the mid-19th century, one of the most fetid slums in all of London. The clay soil here, which was responsible for the close of the hippodrome some 6 or 7 years after it opened because the jockeys refused to risk any more injuries to horse or man on the track, was used in making bricks and ceramics. And pigs apparently wallowed in it. Along the way, we saw a 19th century kiln used for firing bricks. Some history of the area during that time is here.

Carrying on, and after crossing Holland Park Avenue, we took a small detour into Aubrey Walk to see the new blue plaque for Dusty Springfield. Next stop was the cafe in Holland Park for some lunch before pushing on to Leighton House. Because there was a Souk Nour being held in the studio of Leighton House, entrance was free. As Spooner examined the books and other goods for sale in the souk, I roamed around the house to look at the jaw-dropping gorgeous tiled walls, ceilings and floors, as well as the silk wallpapers and various paintings.

On the way home to Maida Hill, we stopped at the London West Bank Gallery in Westbourne Grove to see an exhibition (a few interesting paintings). We also stopped at Living and Giving, where I didn't see anything I liked nearly as much as the sweater I bought in Portobello Road. Back to Spooner's for a quick meal and then on to the Shaw Theatre to see Far from Kansas, an offshoot of the London Gay Men's Chorus, perform their popular double-bill of We Could Have Danced All Night and Little Shop of Homos. Good, campy fun.

Expenses:
£2.50 walnut bread (eaten immediately) and custard tart for later from Lisboa
£3.80 veggie pie from the Portobello Road (for when I'm on my own for dinner)
£20 for cashmere sweater
£3 lunch at Holland Park
£4 glass of wine at the Shaw

18756 steps
7.42 miles