If it's autumn, it must be London

Apologies for not having posted sooner. I've been back in London for 12 days and have been pretty much on the go the entire time. The weather has been incredibly lovely -- sun, blue skies, warm air with a little hint of autumn -- and I've wanted to be outside as much as I can. Rain is rolling in for the upcoming week. Today is Sunday, with off-and-on rain, and I'm now taking time to do my laundry, recharge my body and my devices, and write this post.

I'm in Belsize Park, staying in the same place for the third year now. It's so comfortable and convenient, with utterly lovely hosts, that it's become my home-from-home. My first day was spent unpacking (my checked bag arrived on the plane with me this year!), grocery shopping, and setting up technology. Once I had that mostly sorted, but for transferring my mobile from EE to Vodafone and installing an eSIM (more on that later), I gradually reintroduced myself to things I enjoy doing in the Borough of Camden. 

For this post, I'm going to give you my activities in categories rather than a chronological account. Let me know in the comments below which format you prefer.

Exhibitions: Many small exhibitions were due to close soon after my arrival, so I aimed to work as many of those in as possible. 

• Pangolin Gallery in King's Cross, where I saw ceramics by Hannah Lim, which was closing imminently, and an ongoing exhibition by Zachary Eastwood-Bloom. 

• Afterwards, I hustled up the Euston Road to the nearby Wellcome Collection, one my favourite places to see exhibitions and take advantage of the facilities (excellent toilets, free lockers if you need one, great cafe if you're peckish). The exhibition there -- Jason and the Adventure of 254 -- doesn't end until December, but it was a good time for me to check it out. The Wellcome Collection's exhibitions are always about the intersection of art and medicine.Artist Jason Wilsher-Mills has filled a large gallery room with pieces that take us through his experience at the age of 11 when, after having chickenpox, he developed chronic polyneuropathy and loss of motor functioning. He depicts the year he spent in hospital, where he learned to draw and paint by holding a pen or brush in his mouth, through various 3-D pop-art works, with lights and sound, including a narration by Jason of many of the pieces. 

• All Rendered Truth, an exhibition by the African-American artist Lonnie Holley at Camden Art Centre. This was phenomenal and I'm so glad I got to see it two days before it closed. I'd heard of Lonnie Holley from a podcast called Unreformed, which was about Mt. Meigs, the industrial school that he was sent to as a boy. There was mention in the podcast of him becoming an artist who used found objects -- what most people would consider junk -- to make pieces that expound on the experience of incarceration and systemic racism. Each painting and sculpture is a work of profound pain and of beauty found within the reclaimed objects. 

• On a similar note, I saw Homelessness: Reframed at the Saatchi Gallery in Sloane Square, again just before it closed. In this small exhibition, a dozen people who had experienced homelessness presented drawings, paintings and sculpture, some made in collaboration with children, that expressed an aspect of that experience. 

• The Garrison Chapel and the King's Foundation presented an exhibition of embellishment for haute couture by graduates of the Métiers d’Art Embroidery Fellowship (one of the many high craft fellowships that King Charles supports). Amazing workwomanship. 

• I saw a few Chihuly glass pieces in Mulberry Square, outside the Garrison Chapel.

• Sculpture in the City. I wandered around in the City looking at many of the pieces on this year's sculpture trail, but forgot to take any photos with my phone. I'll probably go back to look for the ones I missed on the first go.
• Frieze Sculpture. I joined the Primrose Hill Community Association regular Thursday walk, which this week was a ramble down to Regent's Park to see the annual sculpture show. I didn't see all of it (I'll go back), but my initial take is that this year's not as good as last. Frieze uses the Bloomberg Connects app to give viewers additional info about exhibitions, etc. The content for Frieze Sculpture is usually really helpful and often includes 2-3 minutes of the sculptor talking about their work. Unfortunately for me, the day I was looking at the sculpture was exactly the time that the switch of my mobile number from EE to Vodafone was taking place, so I had no connectivity. I've since activated my Vodafone eSIM on my Pixel dual-sim phone and I'm back in business. The process was a bit nerve-wracking, but I'm really pleased with myself for figuring it all out. 
• The Brunei Gallery at SOAS in Bloomsbury, where I saw Hudood: Rethinking Boundaries. Again, no photos.
• Continuing on the theme of boundaries, I saw Polly Braden: Leaving Ukraine, an exhibition of photos and video at the Foundling Museum, about women and children who have fled Ukraine and made new lives for themselves in other parts of Europe. The Foundling Museum is one of my faves -- they always have very moving exhibitions about mothers and children, identity and loss. 
• The October Gallery for Vital Force, a small show of the artists they represent, including El Anatsui. 
• Eva Rothschild at Modern Art. Reclaimed materials made into art. Maybe I'm just tired, but this didn't do much for me. 

Talks -- Seems I booked a number of free talks, a varied bunch and all very interesting.

• Expressionists - Der Blaue Reiter, a talk about the exhibition currently on at Tate Modern at the Guildhall Library. The talk gave me a good introduction to what I'll be seeing.
• Creative Sanctuary: Artist Refugees from Nazism in 1930s Hampstead at Burgh House.
• Ben Aaronovitch talking about his new book at the Kensington Central Library. I went with my mate Malcolm, and afterwards we had pints of Doom Bar at the Windsor Castle. Doom Bar is one of the beers I was determined to try on this trip, along with Timothy Taylor's Landlord, Harvey's Sussex Best Bitter and Anspach & Hobday London Black. 
• Victorian Workhouses of London - Talk and Document Viewing at the London Archives (formerly the London Metropolitan Archives).

Open House -- Don't get me started on how much I dislike the new Open House booking system. For many years, I set out with a carefully crafted plan and knocked off 20 or so venues over the course of the weekend. Now it's a 10-day event, with much of the good stuff requiring advanced booking, something that was extremely difficult and frustrating to do. I managed one pre-booked site (Bevin Court housing project by Lubetkin) and a couple of other drop-in sites:

• Heatherwick Studio -- kinda cool, but very crowded

• The Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury -- who knew there was a vintage clothing collection on the upper floor? It was cool to ascend the steep, curved ramp that the horses would have walked up. 
• Museum of Life Sciences, King's College London -- lots of skeletons and stuff in jars
• Highgate Literary & Scientific Society
• St Augustine's Church, Kilburn. The spire is the third highest in London, after St Paul's and St Mary Abbots.

• The Tin Tabernacle, Kilburn, now home of the Willesden Sea Cadets

And last of all, I did several rambles that included obligatory stops at cemeteries, burial grounds or gardens of remembrance:

• Hampstead Cemetery in Fortune Green -- This cemetery was created when the churchyard of St John at Hampstead ran out of space for new burials. It's really lovely and has some interesting tombs. I think I missed a few of the good ones, however, so I'll need to return.
• Bunhill Fields -- a Nonconformist (i.e. not Church of England) burial ground near Old Street. William Blake, John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe are buried there. 
• St Nicholas, Deptford -- I did a long walk across Deptford, from Canada Water to Deptford Creek. The church wasn't open, but the churchyard was sufficiently strange and spooky. 

• Highgate Cemetery -- I wandered around the East Cemetery for an hour or so. 

Miscellaneous museums and other activities:

• Islington Museum -- I saw some of the book covers that Joe Orton defaced
• Exhibition about Tower Bridge at the Guildhall Art Gallery
• Chelsea Physic Garden -- only 10 quid on Mondays and Tuesdays in September
• A free Qi Gong class at the Primrose Hill Community Association. The class is running for four weeks (I missed the first as it was just before I arrived), but I'm planning to go to the remaining classes. It was a bit out of my comfort zone, but I felt taller and more relaxed after. 
• And I went with my friend Jen to an excellent gig by a Scottish band called Tide Lines at the Union Chapel in Islington. The front man has an amazing voice and writes most of their songs. He said that this gig was a stripped down (more acoustic) version of what they usually do -- perfect. 
• An open day at 13 Princelet Street, a renovated Georgian house now owned by the Landmark Trust and available to rent for holiday stays if you can afford it. 

I've probably missed telling you about a few other things, but that pretty much sums up my first week and a half back here in Blighty. Do you like this format? Would you rather see a day-by-day account? Do you want me to include my expenses and steps/miles? If so, I'll add them in. Let me know in the comments below. 

Addendum: Seems you DO want to see the stats for my expenses and steps/miles, so I'm adding them below.

Wednesday (arrival day):

€3.24 bottle of water at Dublin airport

£25.42 groceries and wine

£2.10 pastel de nata

£20 top up Oyster card

£79 National Art Pass

12,037 steps

4.93 miles

Thursday:

£3.75 sushi from Wasabi (they charge 10p each for soy sauce, ginger and wasabi!)

£8.50 bread & cake from farmers' market

Pangolin Gallery - free

Wellcome Collection - free

20,837 steps

8.35 miles

Friday:

£5.05 groceries

Camden Art Centre - free

Hampstead Cemetery - free

18,442 steps

7.55 miles

Saturday:

£11.70 bread & veg from farmers' market

£4 lunch

£20 top up Oyster

£28.13 Tide Lines (gig at Union Chapel)

Open House venues (Bevin Court, Heatherwick Studio, Horse Hospital) - free

26,146 steps

10.94 miles

Sunday:

£4.25 cake

Mudlarking exhibition at St Paul's - free (Totally Thames festival)

Open day at 13 Princelet - free

Highgate Literary & Scientific Society - free (Open House)

16,460 steps

6.74 miles

Monday:

£10 Chelsea Physic Garden

Saatchi Gallery - free

Garrison Chapel - free

£15.07 groceries & wine

£2 bath soap

20,376 steps

8.34 miles

Tuesday:

£1 pain au raisin

15p ginger root

£164 one month travel card (zones 1-2)

Sculpture in the City - free

Talk at Guildhall Library - free

Tower Bridge exhibit at Guildhall Art Gallery - free

19,920 steps

8.16 miles

Wednesday:

£3.70 bread from farmers' market

£3.65 lunch

Museum of Life Sciences - free (Open House)

£7.21 talk at Burgh House

£5 wine at Burgh House

£8 tuna bento box (got 2 meals out of it)

29,058 steps (my walk across Deptford)

11.9 miles

Thursday:

£2.95 maki roll

£2 pastel de nata

£4.58 groceries

£10 one month PAYG on Vodafone

Frieze Sculpture - free

Brunei Gallery - free

October Gallery - free

Foundling Museum - free with Art Pass

Ben Aaronovitch talk - free

24,874 steps

10.18 miles

Friday:

£2.45 lunch (Forgotten Ends - price increase!)

£10.73 groceries & wine

£6.41 Victorian Workhouses talk at London Archives

Islington Museum - free

Modern Art Gallery - free

Bunhill Fields burial ground - free

14,654 steps

6.0 miles

Saturday:

£10.90 farmers' market

£6 Highgate Cemetery

£7.95 slacks from charity shop

£1.08 ibuprofen

24,644 steps

10.35 miles

Sunday:

£10.94 groceries

£1.50 cake

90p Hall's

St Augustine's Church - free (Open House)

Tin Tabernacle - free (Open House)

10,461 steps

4.29 miles

Fifth Week +2: The recap & wind down

 As I come to the end of my London stay, I've been experiencing alternating waves of nostalgia about my home-from-home and pangs of homesickness for my Northampton. It's been a week of lasts -- last walk to the Parliament Hill Farmers' Market, last dash to Haverstock Hill to catch the tube, last loaf of rye bread with raisins and walnuts from Panzer's in St John's Wood, last pastel de nata, last meetups with friends. There are so many things that I'll miss about London, but I'm feeling a bit jaded and could do without the traffic and congestion, the crowded tubes (especially when there are unmasked people coughing away for their whole journey), unruly school groups in various cultural institutions, babies pushed in prams/chairs the size of Smart Cars, and tourists who stop in the entry to tube platforms without going left or right. But I try not to dwell on these things, rather to look back on all the fab stuff I've done here. And week five was no exception. 

Arts and culture recap:

• Fashion City exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands. This exhibition focuses on the rich history of the Jewish community in clothing design, manufacture and retail in London. It's so much more than just fashion, however, taking in immigration, education, social and economic history. The exhibition is arranged somewhat like shops, starting in the East End and then leading -- through a fake tube station tunnel -- to the West End. Even though I recognize only some of the fashion labels, I loved looking a the clothing and reading about the people involved. Many of the other people viewing the exhibits were Londoners in their 70s and 80s, and it was fun to catch snippets of their conversations as they reminisced about what they wore and people they knew. I spent a good two hours there and probably could have done more but my back wasn't having it. 

• A brief stop back at the Guildhall Art Gallery to see the Grayson Perry print 'Animal Spirit' that I'd missed when I was there previously. (Thanks to Jen for letting me know about this.) I also looked around at some of the permanent collection. 

• White Cube Bermondsey with my friend Judy to see large-scale paintings by Julie Mehretu, who is new to me. At first glance, the paintings -- particularly the dark ones -- looked very similar to each other. But the longer I looked at them, the more I saw. Different paints came forward or receded, revealing forms -- a hand here, a torso there. With no wall text to inform me, I had a hard time figuring out which paintings were in response to the war in Ukraine or the events of January 6 in Washington, DC, but I definitely sensed action and violence in several of them. 

• Judy and I continued on to the Fashion and Textile Museum to see Fabric of Democracy, an exhibition about how messages, codes, propaganda and slogans have been incorporated into fabric in aid of various causes. The exhibition is a bit disorganized, with something about the French Revolution next to World War II silk maps, and some exhibits worked much better than others. I enjoyed seeing all the scarves printed by Jacqmar of London in the 1940s with designs and slogans telling people that "you never know who's listening" or to Save for Victory.

• I took a day trip to the seaside town of Eastbourne, where this year's Turner Prize finalists are on display at Towner Eastbourne. The weather was crap for the train ride south, and it was drizzling a bit for the first hour I was in Eastbourne, but then the sun came out and, though windy, it was warm and pleasant enough to take a long walk along the shingle beach before going to the Towner. The exhibition began with videos about each of the four finalists in which they spoke about their creative process and showed more of the body of work that got them nominated. The videos were very informative, especially as the exhibition space is fairly limited and only a small selection of each artist's work is on display in their gallery. With a wide variety of works to look at, I liked some better than others and really couldn't say who I thought should win the prize (it will be announced on 5 December). 

• Friday was full of art in the East End, starting with Christo: Early Works, a pre-sale exhibition hosted by Gagosian, held inside 4 Princelet Street in Spitalfields. I met my friends David, Janie and Jane there, primarily to see the interior of this 18th century Huguenot silk weaver's house, and it was fun to take photos and mooch around, looking at the woodwork, windows and doors, bathtub and toilet. I had no prior expectations about the actual art works and must admit that I did like several of them. My burner phone's camera couldn't handle the low light, but you can see Christo's works in situ in the link above.

• The nearby, newly opened Gilbert & George Centre, where their exhibition Paradisical Pictures. In typical G&G style, these huge photo montages are colourful, comical and intriguing. The theme of this series is vegetation -- outsized and lurid -- with G&G peering out from amidst the leaves and tendrils. The purpose-built gallery is lovely and the perfect space for their work. 

• Continuing on down Brick Lane (after a lunch of Indian food at Meraz in Hanbury Street), we next stopped at the Whitechapel Gallery. The others peeled off and I stayed to see the exhibition Nicole Eisenman: What Happened. An extensive retrospective of this American artist's work across three decades, the exhibition of drawings, paintings and sculpture is arranged chronologically around themes of the NYC lesbian scene in the 1990s, introspection and self, art class, screen time, making with muck, and the rise of right-wing politics. While I didn't much like the early, cartoony and rather gross drawings, my appreciation increased as the exhibition progressed. The sculptures -- large heads, an artist at a revolving potter's wheel -- were fun. 

• Three more very brief stops at galleries in Whitechapel. I first saw photos from the Brady Photographic Archive of the Brady Girls' Clubs (community-based clubs for local girls) in the Atrium Gallery at London Metropolitan University. Next, Kevin Brisco Jr's exhibition But I Hear There Are New Suns at the Union Pacific gallery. This Louisiana-based painter's impressive works incorporate two plants -- sugar cane and four o'clock flower -- with connections to the transatlantic slave trade. Finally, a very brief look at a group exhibition called The last train after the last train at Public Gallery. Maybe I was just knackered, but this exhibition didn't float my boat. 
• On Saturday, I darted around trying unsuccessfully to avoid the rain, and saw two photography exhibitions. First up, Stepping Stones: Three Photographic Journeys at Large Glass on the Caledonian Road. I liked this exhibition very much, particularly the 'Coast to Coast' photos by Gerry Johansson, taken with a large-format (8x10) camera. Next to the Estorick Collection in Canonbury Square to see an exhibition by the Italian photographer Lisetta Carmi. The exhibition is divided into two sections -- industry (the docks of Genoa, steel works and cork factory) and groundbreaking photos of the trans community. There was a video running in a loop of an interview with Carmi in which she talks about working as a woman photographer in post-war Italy.

• And squeezing one last exhibition in, I saw Capturing the Moment at Tate Modern on Monday. This one is about the influence of photography on painting, painting on photography, and the melding of the two. The works (most of which I'd never seen before) were intriguing, the wall text was thought-provoking, and the galleries were blissfully free of children even though it's half-term and much of the museum was heaving with them.

A wee bit of history this past week:

• Tour of Oxford House, an East End settlement house founded in 1884 by Keble College, Oxford University as a place for students to live and work among the Bethnal Green community.
• A walk around De Beauvoir Town with my friend Lesley. I knew nothing of this small area tucked between Islington and Haggerston. I learned about the history, from the original manor house through Victorian housing development to what we see today. Lesley will have a version of this walk on offer soon and I highly recommend it. 
• A talk at the Primrose Hill Community Association on early travelers to the Gobi Desert. 
• When the rain departed and the sun returned, I did a guided tour of Brompton Cemetery (one of the Magnificent Seven). I do love a cemetery and I hadn't been to Brompton in yonks, so this fit the bill for a Sunday afternoon. Tours are offered by the Friends of Brompton Cemetery nearly every Sunday for only a tenner. 

• And a final guided walk around Hampstead Garden Suburb in Golders Green with Marilyn Greene. I did her excellent walk on modernist architecture in Hampstead last year and had been wanting to do the Hampstead Garden Suburb walk for ages. 

Now I'm on to organizing, packing and tidying up in preparation for my departure on Wednesday. As always, it's been a marvelous visit and I'm so very grateful to my friends who joined me for art and adventure and to my lovely AirBnB hosts who made me feel so welcomed and comfortable. Despite my grumpiness at the start of this post, I do love London and truly believe that a big part of me belongs here. Until next year, when I'll see you again underneath the arches. 

The stats:

Monday:

£6 Museum of London Docklands

£2.80 brownie

£5 EE package

15,427 steps

6.29 miles

Tuesday:

£1.25 pastel de nata

£7.50 Oxford House tour

£3 glass of wine at PHCA talk

20,251 steps

8.36 miles

Wednesday:

£5.75 Fashion and Textile Museum

£6.50 bread from Panzer's

11,381 steps

4.94 miles

Thursday:

£20 train to Eastbourne

£2 scone

£6 glass of wine at Towner Eastbourne

£1.10 packet of crisps

£11.70 groceries

20,731 steps

8.63 miles

Friday:

£10 lunch at Meraz 

£6 Whitechapel Gallery

£8.69 wine and veg

£30 top up Oyster card

14,410 steps

5.95 miles

Saturday:

£7.50 farmers' market

£3.75 Estorick Collection

16,239 steps

6.75 miles

Sunday:

£1.72 ibuprofen & Hall's from Boots

£10 Brompton Cemetery tour

19,909 steps

8.23 miles

Monday:

£9.50 Tate Modern

£2.10 pastel de nata

13,818 steps

5.62 miles

Tuesday:

£10 Hampstead Garden Suburb walk

£1 pain au raisin 

£12.95 fish & chips

21,199 steps

8.76 miles