This is one of the great novelistic portraits of London: a London full of smoke and fog, seedy backstreet pubs, horse-drawn cabs, and gaslights. That’s what I like best about it, really, the London it creates and the grotesque characters that inhabit it: Verloc himself, the secret agent and seller of pornography, his coterie of seedy, ageing [...]
Posts tagged with ‘London’
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Peter Doig & the Camden Town Group at the Tate
21 April 2008 – 2:13 pm
I went to Tate Britain today, mainly to see the Peter Doig, but while I was there I also had a quick look round the Camden Town Group exhibition.
Doig is a contemporary painter, born in Edinburgh in 1959 but brought up in Trinidad and Canada, who went to art school in London and now lives [...]
China hoist by their own petard
6 April 2008 – 5:10 pm
BBC News:
“Thirty-five arrests have been made after clashes between pro-Tibet protesters and police as the Olympic torch made its way through London.
Of course, in the parallel world of the Chinese official news machine, the only thing interfering with the movement of the torch was a sprinkling of snow. Actually, to be fair, there is an [...]
Herba Parietis or the Wall Flower
24 March 2008 – 1:29 pm
The text reads:
Herba Parietis or the Wall Flower
As it Grew out of the Stone Chamber
Belonging to the
Metropolitan
Priſon of London Called
NEW GATE.
Being A History
Wch is Partly True
Partly Romantick
Morrally Devine
Wherby A Marriag
Betweene Reallity &
fancie is Solemnised
By Devinity
Written By: I: B: whilst he was A Prisoner therr.
Every time I start browsing the British Library collections online, I find [...]
A London particular
10 March 2008 – 1:30 pm
And a peculiarly London sun - against which nothing could be said except that it looked bloodshot - glorified all this by its stare. It hung at a moderate elevation above Hyde Park Corner with an air of punctual and benign vigilance. The very pavement under Mr Verloc’s feet had an old-gold tinge in that [...]
The Thames path, Westminster to Putney
9 March 2008 – 3:31 pm
I talked about the juxtaposition of the C19th Gothic of Tower Bridge and the genuine medievalness of the Tower of London: not, in my opinion, one of the great planning decisions in the history of London. Well, at Westminster, you meet with a similar case. The Palace of Westminster (i.e. the Houses of Parliament), started [...]
More medievalish London
2 March 2008 – 5:52 pm
In my last Thames Path post, I commented that London’s medieval history is rarely visible except in the shape of a few street names. Which reminded me of something. When the Queen Mother (gbh) died in 2002, her coffin was laid in state in Westminster Hall for people to go and pay their respects. I [...]
Boy jumping
27 February 2008 – 11:43 am
A crop out of the centre of a photo I shot on the South Bank the other day when I went to see the Rodchenko at the Hayward.
See also Phillippe Halsman and Jacques-Henri Lartigue. And of course Flickr.
The Thames path, London Bridge to Westminster
26 February 2008 – 4:25 pm
A fairly short chunk of the path; I was intending to go a bit further, but the sun went in and I wasn’t really enjoying it much so I hopped on the tube at Westminster. Still, if you use one of the traditional definitions of a city—a town with a cathedral—this section includes the three [...]
The Thames path, Isle of Dogs to London Bridge
12 February 2008 – 2:54 pm
I picked up the Thames path where I left off, in Greenwich, and crossed straight under the river to the Isle of Dogs. The Greenwich foot tunnel itself is kind of freaky; I’m not normally susceptible to claustrophobia, but I got a definite twinge here. I took the stairs down, which made me conscious of [...]
The Thames path, Charlton to Greenwich
5 February 2008 – 2:54 pm
The Thames Path is what it sounds like: a walking route that follows the Thames. It runs 184 miles from the source in the Cotswolds to the Thames flood barrier. I walked from the Thames barrier to Greenwich. My plan is to do the London part of the route in occasional sections; I’m not planning [...]
Ho Ho Ho!
12 December 2007 – 10:29 am
The robust London sense of humour was on display at Borough market last week, courtesy of the bloke selling Christmas trees.
Also of interest at the market, some fine-looking fungi for sale. I have no idea what puffballs are like to eat—mushroomy, probably—but they look impressive.
These pictures are hosted on my Flickr account. And it seems [...]
The Mammoth Brigade of Black Comedians
5 December 2007 – 10:25 am
More fascinating stuff from the British Library collection; this poster is from 1892.
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
28 November 2007 – 3:34 pm
Today is William Blake’s 250th birthday. Happy birthday, William.
The Chimney-Sweeper
A little black thing among the snow,
Crying ‘weep, weep’ in notes of woe!
‘Where are thy father and mother? Say!’
‘They are both gone up to the church to pray.
‘Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smiled among the winter’s snow,
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And [...]
The girthiest tree at Kew?
3 November 2007 – 11:04 am
I thought I’d post the picture I took of what is perhaps the fattest tree in Kew Gardens. Or perhaps just the fattest relative to its height. Its fatness is so impressive that I wonder if there’s some kind of odd mutation or something going on above and beyond the effects of age and pollarding.
I [...]
Big trees at Kew
31 October 2007 – 1:38 pm
I went to Kew Gardens to see the Henry Moore sculptures. Which were OK, I guess. It’s not easy to display such a lot of very large sculptures—28 in all—but Kew is big enough that there’s plenty of room for them, so it’s quite a good match. I wandered around desultorily looking at them but [...]
‘We The People’ at the Globe
7 September 2007 – 4:26 pm
I finally visited the Globe theatre for the first time this week. That’s not because I’ve been avoiding it—every time I walked past on the way to Tate Modern, I thought ‘I really must go to the Globe some time’— but I never got round to it.
Since the whole point is that it’s a reconstruction [...]
Sparrow!
6 August 2007 – 9:50 pm
I was reading in the garden today and heard a distinctive chirp: there was a female house sparrow on the bird feeder. Once, this would have been normal, but British house sparrow numbers have plummeted in the past few years; the sparrow population of London declined 75% between 1999 and 2004. It was the first [...]
Anthony Gormley at the Hayward
11 July 2007 – 2:48 pm
Last week I went to Blind Light, the Gormley show at the Hayward. Gormley must be the third most famous artist in Britain, I should think*, particularly on the back of two spectacular public works: Angel of the North and Another Place.
For those of you who don’t know his work—foreigners and the like—he has [...]