We went back to the new Tate Modern to get a better sense of it without the opening crowds. It felt better being able to navigate it on one’s own. We liked the view from outside the new south entrance:-
Kader Attia’s table reconstructing the ancient city of Ghardaïa out of couscous:-
I have been sent a link by Tom Stuart-Smith to an article in Nature which suggests on the basis of a study in Toronto that proximity to trees is worth the equivalent of an extra $10,000 a year in terms of quality of life (what they call the cardio-metabolic condition). I thought of this research yesterday morning as I walked across Hyde Park to the dentist and felt my spirits lift in the Spring sun (11 trees per city block is worth $20,000):-
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:-
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:-
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:-
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.
We were asked to lunch on Greenwich Peninsula, not the most obvious place for lunch, but unexpectedly enjoyable, like visiting another country. We were originally going to have lunch in Craft, Tom Dixon’s new venture, where the food is said to be delicious, but it doesn’t open for lunch on Sunday, so we sat outside eating Lebanese food instead.
First, we enjoyed Farshid Moussavi’s Ravensbourne School of Art close up with its polyhedral tiling:-
I walked back over Albert Bridge, an amazing piece of Victorian engineering, connecting the residential parts of Battersea to Chelsea. It was originally designed by Rowland Mason Ordish in 1873 and was then reinforced a decade later by Joseph Bazalgette. Soldiers must break step as they cross it:-
I was asked to lunch in the DoodleBar in Battersea, a part of town I scarcely know: the old Ransome’s Dock with Norman Foster’s office on the river behind:-
This year’s Whitebait Dinner was held at Trinity Buoy Wharf, far downriver beyond the baroque magnificence of the Royal Naval College, past the Trafalgar Tavern where the Academy Club first held its whitebait dinners on the first Monday in May, past the curious mixture of new development and old style industrial dereliction on Greenwich Reach, past the Dome and Richard Wilson’s A Slice of Reality, underneath Wilkinson Eyre’s grand cable car, until we docked alongside the Trinity Buoy Wharf, with its lighthouse built in 1864 and its mixture of industrial architecture, shipping containers and art installations.
The Dome from the river:-
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