I was walking along the back route to the canal and thought that I would have a look at the Novo Cemetery, one of the best and most dramatic of the East London Jewish cemeteries, when I remembered that there is a fourth which I have never seen and is only available by appointment.   I managed to penetrate Queen Mary (I don’t recommend it as I may well have been trespassing) and discovered behind some student accommodation what remains of the oldest Jewish cemetery in the country, opened in 1657, only a year following the establishment of a Spanish and Portuguese congregation under the name of Sha’ar Hashamayim, ‘the Gate of Heaven’.   It was on the site of the garden and orchard of a pub called The Soldiers Tenement.   Not much to see, but the atmosphere of Cromwellian liberalism:-

You might not guess it from this morning’s Financial Times, but Stepney Green is actually quite green.   So, on my Saturday morning walk to buy goose eggs from Marsh Produce who have a stall in Stepney City Farm, I took photographs of the walk down the side of the Green:-

The church:-

The Farm:-

And the chickens:-

I have been writing – or at least thinking about – a talk I am giving to the Art Fund in July and was remembering that East London is not quite my first book of photographs because in 1976 I did the photographs for a book about Tunbridge Wells by Terence Davis, a friend and author of books about John Nash.   He and his partner, Nicolas van den Branden, had a small cottage in fields near Wadhurst, to which Terence had added a grand gothick library, and he asked me whilst I was still an undergraduate if I would take photographs for the book he was writing.   I enjoyed it immensely, but can’t help noticing that the photographs are a bit blurry and that the lens of the enlarger was covered in hairs and grit:-

I went out first thing this morning to the new local branch of Sainsbury’s to buy a copy of the Weekend FT to check that the article I’ve written about Stepney Green has appeared in the colour magazine.   It has (p.27).   I found it harder than expected to write a longer piece (well, it’s not that long), having got used to the blissful superficiality of a blog entry.   And it’s odd to see it illustrated with someone else’s photographs, including a basketball game in Bethnal Green Library Park and a brown and white sheep in the local farm.   You can spare yourself £3.80 by reading it online (just google Saumarez Smith Stepney Green).

Edmund de Waal gave the biennual Leo Baeck Lecture this evening at Queen Mary on the subject of ‘On the Eve of Departure: Art and Exile’.  He must have talked about the background to the writing of The Hare with Amber Eyes a hundred times, if not a thousand (it was published in 2010), but he still managed to invest the circumstances of his family history with extraordinarily vivid immediacy, as if he was only just telling the story for the first time of Charles Ephrussi in 81, rue de Monceau, Viktor von Ephrussi, his scholarly great grandfather, his grandmother Elisabeth who only died in 1991, his great uncle Ignace, who left Vienna to become a fashion designer, and Victor de Waal, his wonderful father who was chaplain of King’s and Dean of Canterbury.   Maybe talking to a scholarly Jewish audience gave the narrative a different edge, because, although his father had apparently suppressed his Jewish upbringing, Edmund said that a visit to the Leo Baeck library reminded him of his upbringing.   It was a tour de force.

I don’t normally do restaurant recommendations on my blog (unless they’re in Anglesey), but last night we were booked in to the Waterloo Bar and Kitchen next door to the Old Vic, which turned out not to have disabled access.   So, after two beefy waiters failed to lift the wheelchair, we retreated to La Barca on the other side of the road.   We had the nicest and most delicious meal and the warmest possible welcome, so this is a way of conveying our gratitude.

It feels faintly sacriligious to write a blog this morning, or irrelevant, after the events of yesterday afternoon, but a meeting this morning took me through the graveyard of Old St. Pancras Church where I was able to pay my respects to Sir John Soane RA and the great mausoleum which he originally designed for his wife Elizabeth, following her death on 22nd. November 1815.   It was apparently nearly relocated to Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1869 and was twice restored by the Soane Monuments Trust in the 1990s.   This is the old church, as much restored by Alexander Gough in the late 1840s:-

And the tomb:-

And a nice piece of lettering on the way back to the station:-

Because of the bright sun this morning, I paid more attention than usual to the face masks on the façade of Burlington House which I pass underneath on a daily basis, but I suddenly couldn’t place them.   They didn’t look Victorian as I assumed they must be, but more Kent-ian which they aren’t.   I’ve discovered that they are copies of the face masks in Somerset House, done by Sydney Smirke when he added the Diploma Galleries to Burlington House:-

En route to the Olympic Park, I walked along the Hertford Union Canal, otherwise known as Duckett’s Cut after Sir George Duckett who introduced the Act of Parliament in 1823 which allowed him to borrow £50,000 to fund its construction.   Duckett was a banker and member of parliament who went bust in 1832 and the canal was never a commercial success.   It runs between Victoria Park and the Roman Road:-

I’m never completely convinced by the Olympic Park, although I want to be.   It always seems to be trying too hard, too many paths leading nowhere, too many notices encouraging one to admire it.   It probably needs another fifteen years to grow into maturity and for the elaborate planting to make sense:-

Meanwhile, I was able to admire the boat-like shape of Michael and Patty Hopkins’s Velodrome close-up instead of from a distance on the motorway alongside:-