It's Bloomin' Lovely Here!

It's springtime at last and I'm back in London. I left Massachusetts in late April, just days after the final remaining pile of dirty snow near my house melted away. When I arrived in London, I found the last few tulips dropping their petals, the wisteria, azaleas and rhododendrons in full bloom, and roses starting to pop. The trees and plants look and smell lovely and I'm not even complaining too much about my allergies. I blame the chestnut and plane trees, both plentiful here but somewhat rare in western Massachusetts. I learned that it's the pollen from the London Plane trees that sticks in the back of your throat and makes you cough. 

Tuesday to Friday

My first four days were spent running around from gallery to gallery, exhibition to exhibition, trying to see as many current shows as possible before they ended in early May. It really helps that I can sort my spreadsheet by date ending and then make a plan to tick them off. 

First up was Textile Art Redefined at the Saatchi Gallery in Sloane Square. The small exhibition (one room, 15 artists) featured a range of textile arts and techniques (knitting, weaving, crochet, quilting, embroidery) used to produce some amazing works. Some of my favourite pieces were made of denim, yarn and tulle.

Another of my must-see exhibitions was of two artists, Chiharu Shiota: Threads of Life and Yin Xiuzhen: Heart to Heart at the Hayward Gallery in the Southbank Centre. Both used textiles -- often reclaimed and repurposed -- to evoke themes of leaving, belonging, searching and home. I had seen Chiharu Shiota's pavilion at the Biennale in Venice in 2015 and was intrigued to see how she had used the same red threads and hanging keys in a new space with a different theme. Yin Xiuzhen's luggage carousel with suitcases depicting different cities was fantastic! For the London suitcase, she had invited staff of the Hayward Gallery to contribute pieces of their own clothing, from which she crafted a cityscape of London. 

From the Hayward, a meandering walk took me past the Garden Museum, where I happened to see a sign that there was an exhibition of Jane Hammond's botanical collages and I popped in for that. Somehow this one hadn't made it to my spreadsheet and I was pleased with this serendipitous find. Jane is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College and has exhibited many times in the MHC Art Museum, so I knew her work. The collages were a real treat for the eyes, and so fun to pick out wee animals and insects within the bouquets. 

Other galleries/exhibitions I visited (some good, some meh, some that enticed me to linger and others that had me quickly on my way):

• Photographs by Fosco Maraini at the Italian Cultural Institution
• Auction preview of 50 Years of Punk at Bonhams Knightsbridge
• Wartime Art in London at the Imperial War Museum
• Cecily Brown at the Serpentine Gallery South
• London Intersections at the UCL Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment
• October Gallery for a group show, some of which I'd seen before
• Road Work (photographs of American cars and trucks in the 1980s) at the Architectural Association
• Auction preview of Modern Made (mid-century modern) at the Mall Galleries
• Julian Opie at Christea Roberts -- I really enjoyed this 
• White Cube Mason's Yard exhibition by Sarah Morris
• Carrie Mae Weems at Goodman Gallery -- another good one
• Sadie Coles exhibition of paintings by Wilhelm Sasnal -- liked some of this
• Photojournalism of the past 12 months, the deadliest year for photojournalists, at ST.ART, including the famous photo of Andrew, formerly known as prince, in the back of the car after his arrest

I also saw the new Banksy statue that appeared overnight this week in Waterloo Square. I actually went twice. The first day it was surrounded by rather tall plastic barriers and tons of people. Several days later, the barriers had been reduced to shorter, less formidable ones and the crowds were a bit smaller. Everyone seems to love it and hope that Westminster Council lets it stay. Apparently Banksy and his helpers installed it in the middle of the night, lowering it into place with a crane, so surely the council must have known what he was up to.

And I went to the Handel Hendrix House for the first time, only just having learned that it's free with my Art Pass. It's actually two houses side-by-side, one owned by George Frideric Handel and, next door, one floor of the flat rented by Jimi Hendrix. Both have been recreated, with very few things actually owned by either musician. I thought the Hendrix side was much more interesting, partially because I remember the late 1960s and recognized many of the types of things in the flat (a shawl hung from the ceiling, just like the one my high school friend Judy wore daily c. 1970) and due to a very engaging bloke who was invigilating and told me many stories about Jimi's time there, how they discovered flat and meticulously put it back together. 

Plus I attended two talks -- one on Catherine Dickens by Lillian Nayden (Bates College faculty) at the Charles Dickens Museum and The Hidden History of London's Women Detectives at the Horse Hospital. 

Weekend #1

After all that rushing around during the week, I slowed down at the weekend. On Saturday, after going as usual to the Parliament Hill Farmers' Market for my baked goods purchases, I met my mate Jane at a vintage flea market held at the Wapping Hydraulic Power Station. Had a great time mooching around and trying things on, but didn't buy anything. 

On Sunday, I did laundry, then went to Smithfield to see the Great Hall and Hogarth Stair at Bart's Hospital, which I'd seen years ago prior to a stunning restoration, followed by a bus ride to Hackney for a guided walk about the 1926 General Strike in Hackney (part of the annual Hackney History Festival -- more about that later). 

Second Week

More of the same, it seems. Galleries, exhibitions, talks, walks, building tours and more than a few charity shops. The pace was less frenetic, however, as I had fewer about-to-end exhibitions to see: 

• Wright of Derby at the National Gallery. Also saw the Portrait of a Horse by Stubbs while I was there. 

• The new Gilbert Collection Galleries at the V&A (lost of small, jeweled boxes and many mosaics made of the teeniest bits imaginable)
• Japan House: 100 Makers from Japan (lovely crafts, fantastic loo)
• Barbican Galleries: Beatriz Gonzalez and Encounters: Giacometti and Lynda Benglis. I've seen two (of four total) of the other encounters with Giacometti and liked this one the least. Oh, well. But I loved the Beatriz Gonzalez exhibition, though it contained many images drawn on Columbia's violent history that were difficult to view. She incorporates a lot of images from popular culture, newspapers, adverts, etc.

• Donald Locke at Camden Arts Centre. He's the father of Hew Locke, whose work I really like. Didn't care at all for dad's stuff, however. 
• Burgh House to see paintings by Donald Chisholm Towner, who lived and painted in Hampstead for five decades.
• The Coming of Age at the Wellcome Collection -- I breezed through but might go back later in the month
• Mr. Bingo -- met the man, bought a print

Building tours:

• St Mark's Dalston -- another site that's part of the Hackney History Festival. The vicar told us about the building and we got to look around.

• Almshouse at the Museum of the Home -- saw one room depicting c. 1780 and another c. 1880. The tour guide was great and I learned a lot of things that I'd missed (or forgotten) from when I did the tour about 15 years ago. 

Talks:

• Premises Studio (another Hackney History Festival site). Didn't see much of the building as the recording studios were in use, but heard an interesting talk about the history and stories from the bloke who owns it. 
• Tyburnia (talk by Pete Smith at the Guildhall Library)
• Kiran Mehta on Crime and Justice in 18th and 19th Century Southwark at The London Archives.

Day trip

On Thursday, I went to Chichester, about an hour and a half (if the train is on time) south of London to see an exhibition at the wonderful Pallant House Gallery (my third visit there). 

Just as last October, my train was delayed on the way down. This time, we had to get off in Barnham and wait for another train that would be stopping at Chichester (the next stop). I arrived about an hour late, qualifying me for a nice delay repay of

£4.20 from Southern Rail. 

The exhibition I came to see was an extensive retrospective featured the prints, illustrations and paintings of William Nicholson (1872 – 1949). His paintings include portraits, scenes of family life (the artist Ben Nicholson was his son), landscapes and lovely still life works (he had a knack for shiny objects with reflections). As an illustrator, he did block prints and line drawings for various publications and children's books, including The Velveteen Rabbit. As always at the Pallant, the exhibition was beautifully curated and displayed and I thoroughly enjoyed it. 

The day was a bit chilly, but the sun was shining, so after the gallery I walked another part of the old city wall, revisited the stunning Cathedral (spent a bit more time there than my last visit) and enjoyed a stroll through the Bishop's Palace Gardens. And once again, I ran out of time to visit the Novium Museum with displays of Roman Chichester. 

Weekend #2

Saturday always starts with a walk up to Parliament Hill for the Farmers' Market. I took a different bus back to my gaff, down Kentish Town Road, in order to stop at a church book sale. They weren't doing much business (I was the only person there at the time) and I felt badly for their prospects of raising money for their building fund, so I bought four books. The asking price was a four for a quid, but I gave them two quid. By the time I got home, my laundry had finished washing. I hung it to dry and ate my black olive bread stick from the market. 

The day was getting brighter and warmer by the minute, and I decided to walk up to Hampstead (second day in a row) and onward uphill to the Hill Garden and Pergola. Clearly I wasn't the only person who had this idea, and it was a bit crowded, but what a splendid day to be there to gawp at the wisteria, azaleas and rhododendrons! It's long been a favourite spot of mine, particularly on a gorgeous day in early May. 

The Mildmay line then took me to Kensington Olympia, where I went to the Ceramic Art London show at Olympia West. The number of presenters and the array of ceramic works was overwhelming, ranging from pieces of exceptional craftpersonship (is that a word?) and creativity to the downright goofy. I didn't buy anything. 

Some time overnight an extremely cold air mass blew in from somewhere, bringing freezing temps and gusty winds. Still, I went out on Sunday -- the 85th anniversary of the end of the bombing of London -- for a guided walk in the City on Artists of the Blitz. Jonathan Wober, our excellent guide, took us to the exact spot where various artists had drawn or painted scenes of the bombing or its aftermath. 

Needing to get out of the cold and the wind, I walked a few blocks from the walk's ending point to the Guildhall Art Gallery. There I saw the exhibition Underground (and Surface) of paintings of scenes of London, particularly the Underground, by artist Jock McFadyen, accompanied by a soundscape of Underground noises by Jem Finer of the Pogues. The paintings hovered somewhere between abstraction and realism -- very evocative, especially with the oh-so familiar screeches of the Northern Line. 

I hopped a bus (too cold to walk the short distance) to Aldgate East and spent a few minutes looking at the exhibition at Stolen Space (meh; I might go back for the next show) before walking up Brick Lane. A friend in Texas of all places tipped me off to a new piece of street art that she'd seen on Instagram. It's the Wee Tiny Art Gallery, perfectly fitted into a space left by a missing brick close to the pavement in Princelet Street. Unlike at the new Banksy piece, I was the only person taking snaps of this one. 

I'm getting much better about talking with people here and there! I've discussed the diversions and closed/moved stops with ladies on the bus and had a long chat with a bloke on the delayed train to Chichester. Many people have told me that they like my purple hair -- far more compliments than I get a home in Northampton, Massachusetts, where perhaps it's not so unusual. The days are getting longer and, I hope, will be getting warmer. That means more daylight hours for me to be out exploring. There's just so much to do that I come home knackered and don't have time for writing, but I'll try to be better about blogging going forward. Stay tuned, mates. 

Stats and expenses:

Monday, 27 April:
£25 top up Oyster card
£10 one-month phone plan
€3.90 tea at Dublin airport
£19.15 groceries
£6.70 pint of London Pride

£5.50 Curious Histories
17,002 steps
6.6 miles

Tuesday, 28 April:

£5 meal deal lunch

£10.65 tofu and bottle of wine

£3.99 things for flat

20,970 steps

8.16 miles

Wednesday, 29 April:

£9.50 Hayward Gallery

£3.50 brownie

£6.50 bread

£3.25 groceries

19,086 steps

7.55 miles

Thursday, 30 April:

£11.89 groceries

£2.95 Forgotten Ends sushi cup

£13.80 Salon at the Horse Hospital

22,444 steps

8.85 miles

Friday, 1 May:

£2 beverage

£50 top up Oyster card

17,794 steps

6.87 miles

Saturday, 2 May:

£15.20 farmers' market

£2.88 flea market entry

17,085 steps

6.7 miles

Sunday, 3 May:

£2 pastel de nata

£3 General Strike walk

£2.10 beverage

16,047 steps

6.28 miles

Monday, 4 May:

£5 Wright of Derby at National Gallery

£2.54 sandwich

£2.95 banana bread

£3.50 pint of Harvey's Sussex Best

£20 dinner at The Paradise

£2.67 groceries

18,520 steps

7.25 miles

Tuesday, 5 May:

£15 Barbican Art Gallery (two exhibitions)

£2.95 Forgotten Ends

£20.79 groceries and wine

18,682 steps

7.39 miles

Wednesday, 6 May:

£7.05 groceries

£5 talk at London Archives

19,271 steps

7.36 miles

Thursday, 7 May:

£13.60 train ticket -£4.20 delay repay

£3 pain au raisins at train station

£7.50 Pallant House Gallery

£3.25 apple cake

16,740 steps

6.48 miles

Friday, 8 May:

£1.45 pastel de nata

£4 beer

££ print from Mr. Bingo

£7.50 linen shirt from charity shop

18,575 steps

7.27 miles

Saturday, 9 May:

£14.70 farmers' market

£2 used books

£16.52 Ceramic Art London

£9.47 groceries

25,440 steps

10.01 miles

Sunday, 10 May:

£17 Art of the Blitz walk

£3.30 banana bread

17,549 steps

6.93 miles

London 2023: The First Week

 

What a difference a year makes! Here I am back in Belsize Park. After a relatively uneventful flight, with minor weather delays en route and moderate turbulence across the Atlantic, my plane arrived at Heathrow a mere one minute late and, best of all, my luggage came on the flight with me. Thank you, Aer Lingus.

Now I'm well settled into the flat in Lambolle Road and am dusting the cobwebs off of the UK folder in my brain, reacquainting myself with the coinage (I still confuse the 10 cent US dime with the 5p UK coin), awakening the muscle memory for walking on uneven cobbles, revisiting all the grocery stores in the immediate area to get my favourite foods, refreshing my mental inventory of toilet locations, and learning the hard way that I need to add 10 minutes to any transit time estimates that I get on the Citymapper app, especially the walking bits. My legs are short and getting older, so I just have to reconcile myself to the fact that I can't walk at a London pace. To my #1 travel rule ("If you are nearby to an acceptable public loo, use it"), I've added a complimentary rule #2 ("If a bus comes along that's going in your direction, take it"). In both instances, you never know when the next one -- loo or bus -- will materialize.

Things in Belsize Park are essentially the same with a few minor changes. The Budgens grocery store has reopened since extensive renovations that began days after my 2022 arrival. It's a very nice store (check out the photos in the link above), though is now pricier than before. But I happily discovered that they still carry the Yeo rhubarb yoghurt that I love. In England's Lane, the French bakery still sells pastel de nata (priced at £1.90 each, which isn't much of a change if any) and there's a new convenience store that seems so-so. Best of all, right across from the tube station is a new charity shop that's fabulous. It supports the mental health charity Mind, which has shops in other parts of London but only just opened this one in the past six months or so. The shop is bright and cheerful, the staff and volunteers couldn't be nicer, and -- a lovely surprise -- the clothing is grouped first by type (shirts, skirts, dresses, etc) and then by SIZE, rather than colour like every other charity shop I've entered in the UK. 

A number of small and medium art exhibitions were ending during my first week so I darted about to catch a bunch of them:

• Art and Artifice: Fakes from the Collection at the Courtauld. I'm a huge fan of the programme Fake or Fortune, in which Fiona Bruce and Philip Mould are always bringing works to the Courtauld Institute for analysis, so this was right up my alley. I kept expecting Fiona and Philip to pop their heads around a corner to offer more info, but no such luck. 
• Black Venus at Somerset House -- Black women artists confronting and reclaiming images and representation in art since the infamous Hottentot Venus. 
• Brian Clarke at Newport Street Gallery. Big, colourful, splashy, sometimes dark stained glass windows and screens:

• Excess of Desire by keita miyazaki at Gallery Rosenfeld. Sculptural pieces made of car parts. Very cool. 

• Evelyn Hofer at the Photographers' Gallery. I absolutely loved this retrospective exhibition of a relatively unknown woman photographer (I'd not heard of her, though much of her work was done in America). I particularly liked the symmetry within her photographs.  

• Grandma's Land by Alvaro Barrington at Sadie Coles HQ in Kingly Street. Installation about his growing up in Grenada. 

There's some new temporary public art around the Strand. This is an installation that's part of the London Design Festival, called Spirit of Place by Simone Brewster. There are five pieces, all made of cork.

And there's also a new installation on the low rooftop of Temple Station, called Slackwater by Holly Hendry. It references the movements of the nearby Thames.

On Thursday, I went on one of the weekly walks with the Primrose Hill Community Association. Loyal readers will remember how much I enjoyed participating in PHCA activities last year. This walk included stops at the blue plaques of three local residents who are less known than the usual blue plaque set: Agnes Arber (a botanist), Henry Wood (musician and conductor of the Proms) and Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, an Indian economist, social reformer and political leader. It was lovely to reconnect with the group and to learn about these three fascinating, accomplished individuals. 

Thursday evening, I saw the first of several theatre performances I've booked. This one was of "Indecent" by Paula Vogel at JW3, a Jewish community cultural centre about a 25 minute walk up the Finchley Road from my gaff. I thoroughly enjoyed the performance -- the staging, the acting, the music and the story. It's a play within a play within a play (a bit confusing at times), about the controversial performances in eastern Europe, New York City, ultimately the Lodz ghetto of a play by Sholem Asch called "God of Vengeance." I managed to miss the number 13/113 bus up and back down the Finchley Road by a minute or two. I watched them both pull away from across the busy road, which I didn't dare dart across. Hence the new rule about adding minutes to Citymapper's estimates. 

I did a house tour at the Cosmic House in Holland Park on Friday. I'd been wanting to see the inside of the building ever since it opened for public tours in 2021. This was the brainchild and home of post-Modern architect Charles Jencks and his family until his death in 2019. In 2018 it was given Grade I listing. My friend Simon, himself an architect, told me about the ticketing process. As soon as July, August and September tix became available, I was persistently on the website until I scored myself a ticket. By that evening, they were gone. Admittedly, I had neglected to do much reading about the house before my visit. I was delightfully surprised to find how whimsical the place is, with various humorous motifs (faces, action figures) throughout. If you want to book for future open days, you'll need to get on the mailing list and be ready to pounce when you are notified that it's time to book. 

I rounded out the week with a shopping trip to the Parliament Hill Farmers' Market on Saturday and a guided walk around the old Eton Estate part of Belsize Park on Sunday. Oh, and I got a covid jab on Sunday morning. I was hoping for the new formulation, but it will not be available in the UK for another two months. Meanwhile, there's a big push on to get the over-65s vaccinated with the old bivalent jab, which they told me has been just as effective as the new one in the clinical trials. Since I couldn't get the new formulation before I left the US, and I've been horrified by the lack of covid precautions here in the UK (nary a mask in sight), I decided I may as well get boosted with the bivalent formulation. I was able to get it at UCL Hospital in the Euston Road, without question about immigration status and without a NHS number. 

Here are the stats:

Tuesday (arrival day):
£10 to top up my Oyster card

£20 mobile phone package for 30 days

£1.90 pastel de nata

£22.98 groceries and wine

12,694 steps

5.14 miles

Wednesday

£156.30 one-month travel card

£6.50 shirt from charity shop

17,026 steps

6.92 miles

Thursday

£2.30 sandwich

£7.33 groceries

£15 ticket for Indecent at JW3

27,844 steps

11.35 miles

Friday

£5 Cosmic House tour

£1 veggie samosa in Portobello Road Market

£1.85 pastel de nata from Lisboa in Golborne Road

£8.50 wine

18,008 steps

7.41 miles

Saturday

£11 bread & veg from farmers' market

£4 Photographers' Gallery (Art Pass price)

18,702 steps

7.62 miles

Sunday

£2.27 groceries

13,299 steps

5.45 miles