I have often wondered where Ratcliff is, apart from Ratcliff Highway, and this morning spotted a sign set into the wall on Salmon Lane (once Sermon Lane) by the junction to Barnes Street, which demarcates the parish boundary;-

This is some of the nearby housing in Aston Street:-

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I read about a Japanese gift shop in Hackney in this month’s Monocle.   I thought I would investigate.   It’s called Momosan and is on Wilton Way just north of London Fields.   It stocks little carved wooden tumblers and socks the size for Japanese men and carved wooden spoons from New Zealand and English ceramics from the Cotswolds:-

Nearly next door is an equally wonderful shop called J. Glinert which sells the best quality paper clips and pens and Ghanaian brushes and books about the local area:-

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I remember when the statue of Clement Attllee was placed outside Limehouse Library.   Of course, it could be regarded – and probably is – by some as a piece of reactionary neo-realism, but I have always thought of it as a surprisingly convincing example of modern figurative sculpture.   It’s now in the grounds of Queen Mary as the old Limehouse Library is redeveloped as a restaurant:-

The best I can do today is show photographs of Gloucester Terrace, traffic-ridden and shabby, still the land of cheap boarding houses and peeling paint which, half charmingly, surrounds Paddington Station.   Built by William Kingdom between 1843 and 1852, it’s got one house which I show below and is oddly is higher than the others:-

I have always found it odd that by far the grandest buildings on the Mall are not the two royal palaces, but the two grand façades of Carlton House Terrace, flanking the Duke of York Steps.   Was it the memory of Carlton House itself which made John Nash think and compose on such an epic scale ?  Or was it that it marked the end point of his urban composition which stretched from his great Terraces round Regent’s Park down Regent Street to Waterloo Place, the Athenaeum, and then Carlton House Terrace anchoring the composition alongside St. James’s Park ?  Either way, it is more St. Petersburg than London:-

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I have been meaning to take a photograph of New Zealand House gleaming across the lake in St. James’s Park and this morning I remembered.   It looks like a rather alien spaceship hiding behind Carlton House Terrace, as indeed it was when it landed in central London in the early 1960s.   I remember being bemused that Ian Nairn was so enthusiastic about it –  ‘full of small virtues, of the accommodating kind for which one will willingly forgo a grand gesture’.   But, unlike Nairn, I have never seen the view from the roof:-

I attended the opening of the new China Exchange in the old telephone exchange building on Gerrard Street.   It’s an initiative of Sir David Tang and the Prince of Wales to foster Anglo-Chinese cultural relations, including art, calligraphy and Confucianism.   As it’s the Chinese New Year (is it the year of the sheep or the goat ?), the event began with Chinese dragons serenading
the Prince and Camilla en route to eating dumplings in Dumplings’ Legend:-

There was then a line-up, speeches and a short piano recital by a Chinese Harrovian:-

I don’t normally pay much attention to the architecture of the great portico leading into the Royal Academy courtyard, but – in the fierce winter sun – I realised how fine some of the decorative detailing is.   The façade was designed by Robert Richardson Banks and Charles Barry Jnr., in March 1867, but it’s not clear who was responsible for the sculpture.   Someone must know.

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I had a cup of tea today in the newly refurbished viewing room at Hazlitt’s, one of the most old-established (and reputable) of the London Old Master dealers.   Its viewing room used to be all old-fashioned plush, redolent of the conservatism of the market, but has now been modernised so that twentieth-century work, including a great Howard Hodgkin, can be hung alongside the Old Masters:-

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