Every year I get invited to Anya Hindmarch’s runway show in London Fashion week. Every year I decline. But this year I thought I should at least experience the full glories of the London fashion industry, late starting, a lot of hanging about having cups of strong coffee, then lots of stick thin models marching up and down, holding handbags as traffic signs, ending up with full Wagnerian pomp as motorway workers joined them in full orange fluorescence. A form of performance art:-
I have just been to Sandy Nairne’s leaving party after twelve years at the helm of the NPG. It was a wonderful event, saluting his many achievements: the establishment of the Portrait Fund, the acquisition of the Van Dyck Self-Portrait, keeping the institution going in an era of cuts, extending the range of sitters, and doing some wonderful exhibitions, including, most recently, William Morris and Virginia Woolf. Engagement not inspiration was how he described it. It’s not bad to have a paean in free verse from the former poet laureate.
It’s years since I’ve been to the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, even though it’s so close. It was reasonably deserted on a Sunday morning with grand echoing cloisters no longer housing retired mariners, but with musicians practising in the Trinity Laban Conservatoire and a few Japanese tourists exploring:-
I was told that the Greenwich Foot Tunnel had closed. This was completely untrue. If anything, it’s been done up with a new automated lift. We used to regard it as the means of escape to middle class Greenwich where there were teashops and the Park. Construction began in 1899 and was completed in 1902. There’s a grand list of prohibitions, but no-one, particularly cyclists, takes much notice of them:-
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:-
I walk through the churchyard of St. Dunstan’s, Stepney most weekends, but seldom when it is so crisp in the early morning frost, long shadows lighting up the pathways and croci and remaining tombs:-
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:-
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:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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