For us, the nearest place we can get even a sense of the sea – seagulls, mudflats and open water – is in Island Gardens, the park at the bottom of the Isle of Dogs where the foot tunnel goes from, but the lift is not working, and one can look across the Thames to the noble accumulation of fine buildings on the other side, with the Queen Anne Court in the afternoon sun. It was designed by Wren and Hawksmoor to replicate the work of Webb to the west, begun in 1698, financed by the proceeds of a state lottery:-

Since I have a small number of overseas readers who presumably don’t see the British newspapers, although I can’t help noticing theirs are equally scathing, I am re-posting Andrew Rawnsley’s op-ed piece in the Observer today because I admire his writing, he tends to be very well informed from within government, and his judgment is well considered. This makes this week’s verdict all the more damning of two months of relentless spin doctoring, making up policy on the hoof, endless false promises, allowing disproportionately high numbers to die, and making Keir Starmer look and feel like a proper grown-up in contrast to the arrogant, small-minded, jejune idiots who run our government so incompetently.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/14/even-tories-increasingly-fear-they-have-inflicted-the-worst-of-all-worlds-on-britain?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_WordPress

Unable to go to Grange Park Opera this summer, its season cancelled long ago, Wasfi has organised a recital by Pavel Kolesnikov, a young Russian pianist, trained at the Moscow State Conservatoire, playing Chopin and Beethoven in the empty concert hall. There is a recipe for making Russian pancakes attached:-

http://email.wordfly.com/view/?sid=MTMyXzY4ODVfMzU4ODFfNzA1OA&l=11fe289d-c6ab-ea11-bd94-e61f134a8c87&utm_source=wordfly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Pavellive-FoundSeason&utm_content=version_A

While I’m on the subject of commemorative statues – a subject which I’m fascinated to find stirring such unbelievably passionate feelings – I have been thinking about the vexed issue as to what should happen to Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus which was on display in the Turbine Hall up until lockdown, assuming it has not already been dismantled as was planned after it was due to come off display on April 5th. Is there not a possibility of making it into something more permanent ? I don’t think it belongs in Bristol because it is a satire on the Victoria Memorial. It is currently made out of deliberately ephemeral materials so that it can be recycled. But is there not an opportunity of showing it more permanently somewhere outside either near the Thames on a site outside Tate Modern and opposite St. Paul’s or, equally appropriately but less publicly, outside Tate Britain ?

As the late nineteenth-century and unexpectedly art nouveau civic statue of Edward Colston is fished out of the waters of Bristol’s harbour, awaiting an appropriate place to be displayed in a museum (few people have pointed out that Bristol Museum and Art Gallery already owns a smaller bronze version of it and the two maybe belong and should be shown together), I found the article below by Martin Kettle a thought-provoking discussion of the much bigger issue that the statue raises: that is, why the teaching of British history has tended to be entirely separate from the teaching of Imperial History (or at least it was in my time), how colonial history could and should be taught in schools, and how it is shown in museums. These strike me as being much bigger and more urgent issues than which other statues should be taken down: to change the way history is taught and seen.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/11/obsessing-over-statues-obscures-the-real-problem-britains-delusion-about-its-past?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_WordPress

My informant in the food industry has filled me in on the history of EAT: THE REAL FOOD COMPANY, which I probably should have looked up myself before posting about it. The truth is that EAT only opened in London in 1996, next to Charing Cross (that was why I knew about it when looking for a franchise for the NPG) although a version of it (E*A*T) had existed in New York since 1973, founded by Eli Zabar. So, it wasn’t a pioneer, but more an opportunistic rip-off of Prêt-à-Manger, which was maybe the originator of the idea of the quick, pick-up, reliable lunchtime sandwich in London, founded in Hampstead in 1983 and bought by Julian Metcalfe, just out of college, in 1986. I think it’s a tale of city-based entrepreneurs spotting a gap in the market. Anyway, I’ve discovered why I liked EAT. It was designed by David Collins, the clever, visually inventive Irish architect-designer, who died in 2013 and was responsible, amongst many other projects, for the Wolseley, the Connaught Bar and the National Gallery Dining Rooms. So, EAT brought elements of his aesthetic of modernist haute luxe (he was a friend of Madonna) to the high street.

Many people have already sung the praises of the series of lunchtime concerts broadcast from an eerily empty Wigmore Hall, but few can match the experience of listening to Paul Lewis play the Moonlight Sonata, with his ability to make the familiar like something one has never heard before – is it the astonishing speed of playing or its unpredictability which gives it its special intensity ? – even in spite of having listened to recordings of him having played it often before:-

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jvw9

Liane Lang, an artist who has spent her entire career thinking about and making work based on public statuary, wanted to post the following Comment on my post, but I think it deserves more than that so am posting it with her permission:-

I have been thinking about these colonial men on display across Britain and lots of people have asked me what I think should be done to/with them. It occurred to me that there is a lot of momentum right now and perhaps it should be used to campaign for a museum of colonial history. It would be a fitting place to line up the great beneficiaries of Empire in the context of well researched and documented displays on slavery, commercial exploitation and the continued prevalence of white supremacist views. It would be an amazing institution for London to have and perhaps could be sold to the conservative section by way of its gainful existence as a major tourist attraction. Think of Budapest’s Memento Park or Terror Haza or the Jewish Museum in Berlin of course, all major projects in aid of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. A museum of colonial history might be an alternative to having the ethnographic collection hidden in the basement of the British Museum. If a museum is too ambitious, perhaps we go all the way of Memento Park and bung Colston and co in a muddy field outside Slough playing ‘There’ll always being an England’ on a squeaky tannoy…

Of all the multiple things I have been reading about Edward Colston, Cecil Rhodes and what to do about public statuary, the subjects of which were until recently conspicuously ignored, I thought that one of the most sensible comments was from John-Paul Stonard who pointed out that, of course, we are not the only country which has had to grapple with, and come to terms with, monstrous things in our history and that the Germans even have a word for this. I wasn’t familiar with the word and now that I have looked it up I can understand why, but I still think that it’s a very sensible suggestion that we should learn from the ways in which Germany has dealt with its past.

I know it’s a relatively small thing in the great scheme of things with a mass of more important and contentious public issues, but I felt a great twinge of sadness and nostalgia when I read about the closure of EAT, one of several chains of sandwich shops which opened in the 1980s and 1990s and brought good quality and affordable sandwiches to lunchtime eating. EAT was always one of the best (and I always liked its graphics), so much so that I remember investigating whether they might open a franchise in the basement of the renovated NPG. I assume that many other restaurant chains are at risk of going under, but this doesn’t make it any the less dispiriting.

https://eat.co.uk