Photo © KRSince getting back we have also been playing hard, finding ways to make the most of summertime London. The May Day bank holiday weekend saw the grand opening of the restored Brixton Windmill - yes, there is a windmill in Brixton! Built in 1816, it was surrounded by open fields - the Friends of Windmill Gardens (the local community force that has been behind the restoration) were selling an amazing postcard, showing Brixton Hill in the 19th century, when it was a Constable-esque rural idyll! But as the city gradually extended further south and the area became more built up, there was less wind to feed the windmill, and it fell into disuse and then disrepair in the 20th century. It's taken this local group 15 years to get the money together to restore the windmill, but now it's going to be open at regular weekends and is even going to grind flour supplied by local people growing wheat on allotments and in gardens! Brilliant!
Photo © KRIt was a lovely sunny bank holiday as well and loads of families were out enjoying themselves and some of the entertainment that was laid on - our friend Lisa took some lovely colourful people-watching photos which you can see here.
That same week we also went to see Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe at Wilton's Music Hall, this wonderful gem of a Victorian Music Hall that survives in the middle of an urban wasteland in the City of London - not only was it a fantastic production (all male, and the campest thing I have ever seen!), but it made total sense of the space, the kind of performance you would originally have gone to Wilton's to see. Fantastic. Next day we had an OJADS visit to Kensal Green Cemetery - one of our colleagues, Glenn, is a Friend of Kensal Green and arranged for their chief guide and knowledgeable historian to take us on a guided tour, picking out particularly famous Victorians, but above all of course we were there to make a pilgrimage to the grave of Owen Jones.
Kensal Green is where anyone who was anyone wanted to be buried, and there are some very grand tomb monuments, but it is also just an amazingly atmospheric place. We started off in the Crypt, which you can only visit on the occasional guided tours, but which Victorian Londoners used to come and visit as one of the city's attractions. It is now rather macabre, with mouldering lead-lined coffins and ceramic flower displays, and incredibly cold. Chilling, in fact.
Henry, our guide around the historic tombs of Kensal Green, in front of the grave of the Brunel family of engineers Then yesterday we had a fantastic day exploring south London. We signed up for one of the architectural walking tours that Open City - as the Open House team are now calling themselves - have started running. This one was focused on 'South London Regeneration', all about the huge building projects that have been going up around Southwark in recent years, making it one of the most exciting areas in London in terms of contemporary architecture as well as bringing new life and vibrancy into a formerly industrial area that had been largely neglected as London developed in all other directions. This also means that a lot of industrial buildings and 18th-century residential areas survive more here than in other parts of London, which were aggrandised into the Squares which characterise parts of the north.
Photo © KRThe most controversial/well-known of the new projects is The Shard at London Bridge, which will be the tallest skyscraper in western Europe when it is finished! It completely dominates the London skyline these days - for a long time it was just a gigantic concrete column, but as soon as they started cladding it with the glass structure that makes it look like an angled, broken shard of glass, you can see and recognise it from everywhere. It is even starting to hide the Gherkin which for the last 8 years has been an iconic profile on the London skyline. I don't think I had been so close to the Shard before - it really is too big to believe.
Our guide was a great character, a rather eccentric Irishman (?), he was an architect himself and had worked for many of the companies that had created these great building projects. He also had a fantastic habit of getting down on the ground and drawing architectural plans or diagrams in chalk on the pavement - loved that idea!
Photo © KRWe went with our wonderful Sicilian friend Rosa, who lives in Bermondsey, so after the official walking tour had ended - at the soon-to-be-destroyed monumental, brutalist Heygate in Elephant & Castle (there's a really interesting article on this failed social housing experiment here) - she took us on a walking tour of her own, starting with a fabulous late lunch at The Garrison on Bermondsey Street, then around the riverside and the wonderful old wharf buildings, which are now gorgeous apartment blocks. The bridges between buildings along Butler's Wharf are now people's gardens, but once were there for barrows carrying tea, spices and other goods which had just been off-loaded at the docks.
Photo © KRBermondsey is also known for its antiques trade and we ended up at the massive antiques warehouse under the railway arches near Tower Bridge. This was partly an exploratory mission, as we're still figuring out what we're doing in the new flat (see below), but we also knew we wanted some new kitchen chairs - and hurrah! we found some! Four very nice antique (1930s?) dark, hard wood chairs with very nice detailing (a sort of medieval pan-Mediterranean design on the backrest) for a not outrageous sum. A chair-laden taxi ride back to Brixton to get them home. They fit our dining room table excellently well and we're very chuffed with them.
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Since getting back we have also been trying to dedicate ourselves to settling in and sorting out the flat - as K so rightly put it, we need to be as organised and efficient about this as we were about moving out of the old flat. Trouble is, we're realising we haven't really left ourselves time for this! But gradually over the last weeks we have been meeting the immediate neighbours - upstairs, next door, and most importantly downstairs, since these guys were playing their music rather too loudly late at night and we needed to have a sit down with them to work it out. Fortunately it was all very reasonable - we had been afraid it might turn into a massive issue, and it was the only thing that was making us feel less than comfortable and at home in our new place - and since then we haven't heard a peep out of them after hours.
K has put up some shelves in the study (let us not dwell on the fact that he ended up cutting them each 10 cm too short, so we are not quite maximising the space in the way we had intended!), and I have planted a window box and some herb seeds - very excitingly the rocket seeds are already sprouting crazily, and there is also some activity from the thyme, though the others are all still keeping themselves to themselves in their little soil beds. We have even conquered our bourgeois guilt - as Juliette once so appositely put it - and hired a cleaner, Ingrid. Actually I was the one who had the problem with it, but I have finally come to the realisation that I just do not have time in my life for housework, and someone else could use the money. It doesn't seem like a lot, though I wonder if we get make £10 an hour ourselves...
Suzie came over to see the flat on Friday night, but rather unfortunately managed to fall down our stairs on her way out and broke her little finger. K spent the early hours of Saturday morning with her in A&E. Hopefully nothing else like that happens to our visitors for a very long time.
And just to round off the wonderful London time we've been having recently, we're just in from seeing 'Attack the Block', a brilliant film about youths on a council estate in Brixton becoming heroes as they fight off an alien invasion. Very funny and well acted and totally unpatronising, with lots of little social commentary digs - about stop and search policies, gang violence, etc - without laying it on too thick. I have to see it again. Slightly unsettling, perhaps, to step out of the Ritzy and find yourself in the midst of the area you just saw being invaded by terrifying aliens on-screen.
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And so back to Spain. It's K's birthday next weekend so we're taking advantage of this talk I'm giving at the Seville Book Fair - and the fact that the funders of my book are paying for my flight and hotel - to go to Spain for the Bank Holiday weekend together. He hasn't been to Spain for about 3 years, and hasn't been to Seville since we went there together about 13 years ago, when I first visited Spain with a view to spending a research year there. He comes back on Bank Holiday Monday, and I go to Granada for meetings of our Alhambra project and other such things. It was chaos last time so I'm a little nervous about it, but looking forward to just chilling this weekend in a beautiful city. So, expect updates on Central Asia some time in June. Until then...
