I found myself walking through Embankment Gardens this morning en route to Portcullis House in amongst statues to forgotten Generals and behind the back of the Ministry of Defence. The gardens themselves were retrieved from the river by Sir Joseph Bazalgette and have been used to park the victors of colonial wars.
This is the entrance to the garden which could be Nice:-
This is the statue to General Sir James Outram, the Bayard of India and responsible for the capture of Lucknow:-
We set off to darkest south London to go to a Christmas sale of ceramics at the Kiln Room down a dark alleyway off Peckham Rye. We discovered a wild and wonderful bar called The Nines just behind it where we were able to have a brunch of fried eggs and harissa, scrambled eggs and smoked salmon, pancakes and pale ale:-
Arriving in Paddington this afternoon, I took the opportunity of calling in at the new Kioskafé in Norfolk Place near Paddington as I thought it could be a possible precedent for what we might do in Burlington Gardens. It’s a version of the Monocle Café in Chiltern Street, a café-cum-newsstand selling a wide variety of international newspapers and magazines, which are perhaps just staffage for the sale of tea and coffee, but giving it a European atmosphere:-
I had lunch in Bleeding Heart Yard, a small courtyard just behind Hatton Garden and originally behind the stable block of Hatton House. It is famous – or infamous – as the site of the murder of Lady Elizabeth Hatton in 1626. She left a party with the Spanish ambassador and the following morning her body was discovered in Bleeding Heart Yard with her body torn apart, but her heart still pumping blood onto the cobbles:-
I walked along the Thames towpath from Blackfriars to the Design Museum. I was struck by the clarity of the night, the way every building is lit up except St. Paul’s, remembering the development of Butler’s Wharf and Shad Thames in the 1980s, when the Design Museum first opened in 1989 and Pont de la Tour was the height of fashionability. At some point, there are steps down to the river and one can contemplate Tower Bridge in the night sky:-
We went last night to a performance of L’Ospedale at Wilton’s Music Hall. It was the first time we had been back to it since its renovation by Tim Ronalds, funded by the HLF. We were worried, because nothing is harder to restore than crumbling magnificence (see what happened to Christ Church, Spitalfields). But, miracle of miracles, it is the same, only better, just as rundown and shabby, with a bar next door to the theatre and a mass of old wood and peeling paint, but now a lift (we were its first users). There was a performance of L’Ospedale, a hitherto unknown mid-seventeenth-century opera by an unknown composer on the problems of seventeenth-century medicine, performed as if it was the NHS: a brilliant production by a young and newly formed musical collective called Solomon’s Knot:-
I walked up Melbury Road this evening to the sound of fireworks exploding in Holland Park. Past the street which leads to Leighton House, past the Tower House, past where Michael Winner used to live, to No. 8 with its grand oriel windows, designed by Norman Shaw as an artist’s’ home for Marcus Stone, a rather obscure RA, but immensely wealthy because of his work as a book illustrator. G.F. Watts was at No. 6 next door. And No. 11 (now No. 31) was built for Luke Fildes, also by Shaw, not long afterwards:-
Having done a post on Francis Bird, I thought the least I could do would be to inspect his work in situ.
Queen Anne still presides in front of all the tourists taking photographs of the west front, but she’s a copy dating from the 1880s by which time the original had been much vandalised:-
Years ago, we lived in Southwark, in an attic flat in Trinity Church Square, painted bright blue, with paint from a shop just north of the Elephant and Castle. The surrounding area was deeply dingy, little known streets, cheap housing, sandwiched under the railway tracks between London Bridge and Waterloo. Today I crossed Blackfriars Bridge at lunchtime, visited Purdy Hicks in Hopton Street, saw the exhibition by Julian Stair at Contemporary Applied Arts (pots for £36,000) and had lunch at The Table in Southwark Street, designed, I presume, by Allies and Morrison.
I could scarcely bring myself to record the appearance of Victoria Park today because it was so ostentatiously, flamboyantly and nearly nauseatingly autumnal, like some scene of the Fall in western Massachusetts which I’ve always thought was to be avoided. But in the end, amateur photographer that I am, I succumbed to a couple of shots:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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