I’ve noticed that they’ve let the shops in the Commercial Road run down. It used to be where the local gun shop was, and Callegari’s Restaurant, once a roadside café is now derelict. One could buy fish from a fishmongers which was open to all the exhaust fumes of the main road, and bread round the corner at Walls. But now the whole block is vacant, awaiting redevelopment. This was Callegari’s:
It’s a while since I’ve been on my Sunday morning run (well, it’s no longer really a run, but we like to call it that), which always begins in York Square, a neat East End Square, built by the Mercers Company in the mid-1820s and taken over by the GLC in 1973, all of a piece apart from a certain amount of rebuilding after the war. There’s a campaign to save the Queen’s Head as a community resource and not be sold off as so many of the other local pubs have been. And they’re doing up Flamborough Walk, one of those secret, gated snickets which are such a feature of the East End.
This is York Square:
We used to live near Bermondsey when it was still half Dickensian, a run-down area of trade warehouses. Romilly worked in Zaehnsdorf, the trade binder, in a back yard off Bermondsey Street, we tried to buy 92, Bermondsey Street, and I once played tennis in courts nearby, but the smell of the local vinegar factory was overpowering. Now it’s become a consumer paradise, full of chichi boutiques and posh Spanish restaurants (we ate in Pizarro) alongside White Cube, the greatest art warehouse of them all:
I’ve realised that going to markets must be a wintertime activity because it’s a long time since I’ve been south of the river to visit my favourite suppliers in Maltby Street. Today we met up with friends in Spa Terminus, through a gate under the railway bridge on Spa Road where one finds a food mecca, including Kernel Brewery for table beer, The Butchery next door, where they wrap everything in brown paper parcels and string, the Ham and Cheese Company for a whole jesus, coffee at the Coleman Coffee Roasters, Natoora for vegetables, and cheese at a branch of Neal’s Yard:
We had lunch yesterday halfway up the Shard, delicious dim sum and Peking duck. In the week when the Shard is a candidate for the Stirling prize, it was good to see what it is like from the inside. The jury will have difficulties ignoring it because whether one likes it or not (I do like it), it has so obviously changed the grammar of architecture in London. What I particularly like are the distant views from far away as one enters London on the M11 or the A2 beyond Blackheath. Inside, it has amazing views of central London along the railway tracks east and west and the massing of the City northwards round the Cheesegrater. Oddly, the buildings which catch one’s eye in aerial perspective are those of Renzo Piano’s other major project in central London at Central St. Giles, so brightly coloured in the dense massing of historic London.
This is the view west:
East towards Canary Wharf:
I have been asked what is the relationship between Edmund de Waal’s work and Romilly’s. The answer is in the way that the forms of the past influence and inform the material present, so that both have a preoccupation with the archaeology of forms. Romilly specifically requested that some of Edmund’s work should be displayed not behind glass, so should share in the aesthetic of the found object:
A weekend at Edmund de Waal’s studio has given me an opportunity to get to know West Norwood, an area of indeterminate south London south of the south circular and beyond the boundary of my previous London knowledge, once an area of open farmland where the mistress of Lord Bristol lived and Lord Chancellor Thurlow had a mansion built by Henry Holland. He refused to inhabit it because of its cost. The most prominent landmark is St. Lukes, West Norwood, designed by Francis Bedford and consecrated in 1825:
Having spent my youth exploring crematoria, it has been a pleasure to be able to see the West Norwood Crematorium, founded by Act of Parliament in 1836 and consecrated in December 1837:
My enterprising first cousin once removed, after training as an actress, opened Beamish and McGlue, with Casey McGlue, to sell only ethically sourced products to the citizens of Norwood. It’s at 461, Norwood Road:
I was faintly reprimanded for writing about Romilly’s exhibition before seeing it. But now I can write about it having experienced it so beautifully displayed in grand empty studio space designed by Deborah Saunt and David Hills. The work itself is on long shelves, the individual pieces held upright by lead fishing weights, or buried under the floor or in a chapel-like annexe, with minuscule inscriptions and dots like the legion d’honneur for work which had sold. What everyone said, and was obviously true, is that it’s extremely rare to see jewellery displayed as works of art, isolated in white space so that one is compelled to engage with the detailed character of each individual work, with magnifying glasses provided, its ornament and encrustation, a modernist version of a cabinet of curiosities, echoed by cases of Edmund’s pots.
The work is very hard to photograph, especially the quality of natural daylight, and I’m not sure I’ve succeeded:
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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