This past Monday I hit the mid point of my London visit. On the one hand, it feels like I've done a lot, but on the other hand I think I've been faffing around too much, moving more slowly and not packing all that I have done on previous trips. I've been seeing mostly small exhibitions, going to quiet venues and attending things that would never figure on the radar of a London tourist. This is all good and just as I like it, but I'm now feeling I need to be more organized and get myself to a few of the Big Autumn Exhibitions and other Must Sees before I leave.
I'm starting to get a bit concerned about how much I'm spending. The price of admission (even with my Art Pass giving me 50% off) to many exhibitions has definitely risen since last year, as has the cost of food. Fruit, veg and most staples in the grocery stores are still cheaper than in the US, but I've been filling myself up with a lot of carbs -- my favourite breads and savory pies from the farmers' markets, pastel de nata, cake and ale -- and those purchases are adding up. In past years, I primarily spent cash (I would take a wad of notes out of the magic money machine soon after arrival and dole it out to myself throughout my stay). Now, I seem to be pre-booking most of my tickets online and using my credit card much more often since so many places are card only. It makes it too tempting to buy that piece of cake or pastry when I pass a bakery or caff. I shall aim to get this under control.
Weather this past week has continued to be crap, with a couple of nice exceptions. When it rains, I try to fill my days darting from venue to venue by tube or bus to stay dry. On the odd days that the sun reemerges, I've headed out the door for random rambles. I've had a really nice balance of meeting up with friends to attend something together and doing things on my own. Read on for the details.
Monday -- The combination of rain and limited Monday options sent me off for a large chunk of the day to Tate Britain, where I saw two of the Big Things -- Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 and this year's Turner Prize shortlist. The women artist exhibition did what it says on the tin -- it introduced me to dozens of professional women artists who are little known, very accomplished and who broke through barriers in training and exhibiting. Many of them received a lot of acclaim during their time but have since slipped into relative obscurity. This exhibition, and the recent initiatives to make the public offerings of museums and galleries more representational of the entire spectrum of the population, might result in our ability to see more of the works of women artists. I thoroughly enjoyed this exhibition. After downing my hummus and pita sandwich in a quiet corner of the museum caff, I pushed on to see the four artists on the shortlist for the Turner Prize. This was the third time I've seen the Turner Prize exhibition. It's always a mixed bag and I usually like one or two of the artists while the others leave me scratching my head. I was impressed by the work of Pio Abad and Claudette Johnson.
Tuesday -- More rain and misery. For some reason I had a really hard time structuring this day and ended up zig zagging around. I started the day by taking the tube to Piccadilly Circus (I love that station -- the architecture is fab and every exit has clear signage). I dodged the raindrops and scooted into the Royal Academy to see Frederic Leighton's painting Flaming June, on loan from a museum in Puerto Rico and not seen in London since it was first exhibited at the RA in 1896. I usually don't go in for this type of Victorian painting, but orange is my favourite colour and the painting is lovely, all dreamy and gauzy.
I then popped into the tiny gallery called Air Contemporary in nearby Ham Yard to see an exhibition of knitted, sequinned sea creatures called Fishy Business by Kate Jenkins. This was so fun! I absolutely loved all the fish and crustatians and wanted to take one home with me (alas, I did not buy anything).
Knowing that the rain would put a damper on my ability to eat in a park, I left the house that morning without a packed lunch. I thought about having a sandwich or soup at the caff in the RA (everything looked delish!) but decided to push on to the City, where I was meant to be in the afternoon, to have lunch in one of the church caffs. Turned out that I fortuitously exited the Mansion House station to find myself right opposite the entrance to Host, a caff in St Mary Aldermary. But unfortunately, though it wasn't yet one o'clock, they had run out of soup. I stayed however, and had an over-priced, underwhelming focaccia sandwich. Next time, I'll eat at the RA caff.
In the afternoon, I met up with Jen for another of the Guildhall Library free talks, this one called A Narrow Escape, about the explosion of a narrow boat hauling gun powder along the Regent's Canal in 1874. The explosion happened right under the Maclesfield Bridge, and hence it is now known as the Blow Up Bridge. After the talk, we went to the Guildhall Art Museum because Jen wanted me to see an exhibition called Kaleidoscope/London by the artist Anne Desmet. I was blown away by the intricacy and beauty of her prints and collages.
Back in Belsize Park, after a quick supper, I went to the Hampstead Theatre down the street to see Bellringers in the downstairs black box. This play had been performed recently at the Edinburgh Fringe and was brought to the Hampstead with enhanced sets and staging. It's a two hander -- funny, touching, creepy -- set in an unspecified time that could be past, present or a dystopican future. It had me thoroughly engaged and on the edge of my seat.
The rain held off long enough for me to eat my hummus and pita sandwich in Canonbury Square, where I was visited by a very handsome local tabby cat named Tommy. It's a lovely, quiet square that's had a major facelift since I last ate my lunch here in 2008. Clearly the local gardeners are taking good care of it.
After lunch, I dropped into the Estorick Collection to see an exhibition by the Italian artist Antonio Calderara that I found interesting. I liked the earlier, more representational works more than the later abstract ones.
There were still a few hours to kill before I had to be in Islington for a late afternoon talk. I consulted my map and figured out that the best place for me to while away the time out of the rain would be the Museum of the Home in Hoxton. This is a free museum that I've visited many times, first in 2004 when all it had was a row of rooms full of period furniture, set up as living rooms through the years. In the past five years or so, they've really made an effort to become more relevant and inclusive, now having installations of real homes of a wide variety of types of people who live in the Hoxton/Bethnal Green area -- families of Caribbean and South Asian origin, LGBTQ folks, young hipsters, etc. Downstairs, they've opened up some small displays with photos, audio and video depicting various aspects of faith, gardens, children caring for adults, missing people, etc.
I was so wrapped up in looking at the real homes that I almost forgot to catch the bus to Islington. There, I went to another free talk put on by the London Archives, this time by Angela Buckley about her book The Bermondsey Murder. It was an engaging talk, full of all the stuff I love: social class history, crime, forensics, the police force. Another book to add to my ever-growing list of things to read.
Thursday -- Since I'd really pushed myself to my limits the day before, I cut myself a bit of slack on Thursday. The day -- another grey and gloomy one, but no rain yet -- started with the every-other-week walk with the Primrose Hill Community Association walking group. Since the pandemic and lockdowns, they've been meeting on Thursdays on the corner of Primrose Hill Road and Regent's Park Road to walk in either park, initially a socially-distanced ramble for their allotted one hour of outdoor activity during lockdown, and now a more loosely structured walk for 1.5 hours, sometimes with a theme and sometimes not. For this week's walk, we headed quickly to Regent's Park where we were met by a lovely young man named Charlie who is one of the Royal Parks engagement officers. His background is entomology and he took us on an insect walk, telling us things about the types of insects found in the park, their habitat, what the Royal Parks are doing to promote biodiversity and all that. I learned that over 90% of life on earth is comprised of insects! I'm always in awe at the amount of green space in London and the efforts to educate the public about creatures, habitat and sustainability within the parks. Maybe next year I'll go on one of the bat walks.
I took the bus over to Lisson Grove to catch two exhibitions at the Lisson Grove Gallery (it's actually two gallery spaces, very near to each other, but this is the first I twigged that). The exhibitions were Yu Hong: Islands of the Mind (lovely paintings though a bit scarey) and Dexter Dalwood: English Painting (colourful, more abstract). I like this particular gallery and have seen some interesting things here.
Last, I went into the Courtauld Gallery (free gallery entry with my Art Pass) to see the Vanessa Bell exhibition before it closed. Turns out it was really more a display than an exhibition, with the better paintings being over at the Garden Museum in their exhibition about the Bloomsbury Group. Though the place was heaving with punters, there weren't a lot of them looking at the Vanessa Bell works -- they were all at the Courtauld for the blockbuster Monet exhibition. It looked to me that there were a lot of women who dragged their husbands, to some degree reluctantly, to see the show. After looking at the Vanessa Bell stuff, I beat a hasty retreat. I had a big day coming up and needed a good night's rest.
Friday -- Up and out the door early. I headed to Sydenham to meet up with friends David and Janie for a day trip to Lewes. For the past several years, they've taken me on a car journey -- somewhere not easy for me to have gotten by train -- to see some sights, explore the countryside, soak up some history, and enjoy each other's company. Our first stop was Charleston House, the home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant on the outskirts of Lewes. The gardens are free to walk around (although in the decline of autumn, there was still some colour and the gardens are really beautiful), so we did that and skipped the house.
Pushing on, our next destination was Monk's House, the home of Virginia and Leonard Woolf. This is a National Trust property -- David and Janie are NT members, and I had scored myself an autumn freebie to one NT property again this year. What a great place! The house is just as it was when Virginia and Leonard lived there (he outlived her by many years) and the gardens have been restored as he, the more avid gardener, would have had them (he left copious notes). It was so much fun to roam around in the house and the property. The weather was perfect for our packed lunch, which we ate in the churchyard next to Monk's House looking out at the South Downs.
We then headed into Lewes, a medieval town perched on a hillside next to the River Ouse. It's got all the good stuff for a mooch -- cobbled streets, interesting Georgian and Victorian shop fronts, a few half-timbered buildings, a castle above the town centre. And it has a brewery -- Harvey's is based here and the ale couldn't have been fresher. We had pints at the John Harvey Tavern before heading back to London.
Saturday -- I woke up without a plan, other than to walk up to the Parliament Hill Farmers' Market for a loaf of raisin & walnut rye bread. I'm obsessed with this bread and have to eat mass quantities of it while I'm in London as I can't find anything like it at home. On my way back to my gaff -- still without a plan -- I stopped at the Isokon Gallery to look at this year's display (photos of the construction of the Isokon). Back in the flat, I made lunch, consulted the weather report (it looked good!) and a destination revealed itself to me: Barking! Another new-to-me area ripe for exploration.
I could have gone straight to Barking on the GOBLIN (Gospel Oak to Barking Line on the overground, soon to be renamed the Suffragette Line) but I opted to go first to Bow to see an exhibition called In the Footsteps of the East London Group at the Nunnery Gallery. I'm so glad I did this as the exhibition was fab. It's a mixture of paintings from the 1920s and 30s (when the East London Group was akin to the Camden Town Group -- Walter Sickert taught painting classes to working class people in East London) and contemporary paintings, often of the same or similar scenes. The exhibition will go down as one of the highlights of this year's trip.
Sunday -- Grey skies returned and rain threated. I wasn't feeling very energetic, so I took the tube to Baker Street and walked the few blocks to the Marylebone Farmers' Market where I can buy the Sires Hill Bakery pies I so love. One side of the sky looked like blue might be poking through, but the other side had some grey rolling in. Putting my bet on the blue skies, I walked from the farmers' market into Regent's Park where I hoped to finally go around and photograph the Frieze sculptures. I got a bit waylayed by Queen Mary's Garden, which still had roses blooming this late into the autumn. Finally, I took snaps of the sculptures and just as I was finishing up, the rain came down. I took shelter under a tree (Regent's Park has plenty of those) and waited it out, then walked home to my flat exhausted. Laundry and blog writing awaited me.
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