Open City

This has been a good week for making the most of living in London.

It started with going to see/hear Raja Shehadeh at the Royal Festival Hall. K had managed to double-book himself, so I went along with Alison, and we had a great evening. He read from his new book, A Rift in Time, which grew out of family research he did into the life of his great-uncle, a political exile from the Ottoman government of Palestine, which is interwoven with his own contemporary story of struggle against the Israeli occupation. Then there was a Q&A led by the director of Profile Books, his publisher, then opened to the floor.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the questions were less about his new book than about his views on the current peace talks (pessimistic) and about the potential for challenging human rights abuses through legal means - something he has spent his whole working life doing, which he seems to feel others are now doing just as successfully, if that's really the word. His recent writings - especially Palestinian Walks - have been about trying to reclaim the land, and his approach to the crisis in Israel/Palestine is long-term and root-and-branch: that basically the settlements not only need to stop being built, but need to be torn up, borders got rid of, and the whole region turned back into something approaching the broader territory encompassed by the Ottoman occupation, shared and lived in equally by all races and religions. He doesn't seem to think that is far-fetched, but I can't see it happening for a very long time.

As Alison said, it was just so refreshing to hear someone so articulate talk in an impassioned but entirely fair and reasonable way about the situation in the Middle East, without giving in to emotion or point-scoring. He signed copies of his book - I got one for Paz and asked him to sign it for her in Arabic. That will be a nice Christmas present, and also a nice exchange for the book she just gave me, the fifth and last in Tariq Ali's Islam Quintet, personally signed by him when she went to hear him talk at the Edinburgh Festival last month.

Then there was a screening of a short film that a father-and-son team have made inspired by Shehadeh's Palestinian Walks - part interview with him, part 'dramatisation' of one of the most memorable scenes of that book, the encounter with a settler during a walk along a stream through the hills around Ramallah where he lives, and their discussion of whose land it is and which of them has the right to walk there. Very poignant.

But what made it so 'London' - if it isn't already great enough that we have access to this kind of event - was the fact that Michael Palin was in the audience, and Stephen Fry was 'performing' in the main hall just underneath us, and when we went down in the musical lift (the RFH choir sings scales at you, upwards or downwards depending on which way the lift is going! A sound installation by artist Martin Creed) there he was signing copies of his new autobiography, with a huge queue snaking round the main foyer of the Festival Hall. Alison and I casually walked past and stared at him for a bit, before heading our separate ways!

----------------------------------------------------------

Then this weekend it is Open House - when hundreds of the city's amazing buildings throw open their doors and let you poke around inside. We were a little more organised than usual this year - at least we managed to book ourselves onto a tour of the London Library, which is somewhere we've always been curious about (not being able to afford the £400-odd fee to become members and find out from the inside!).

They have just finished a renovation and expansion project, and members of the architects firm were there to talk to us about that, which was interesting, but actually I wanted to know more about the Library! Basically it was founded as a gentlemen's club for the intellectually lofty, from what I could make out. We couldn't go into the reading rooms which was a shame, though we peered voyeuristically into them from the corridor. There were hardly any "members" around - the librarian who was taking us round thought perhaps they were all out enjoying Open House. More likely they stayed away from all of us! The stacks were fantastic though - with cast iron grilles allowing you to look all the way up or all the way down through the floors (not good if you have vertigo!) and with book-shelf height carefully worked out to avoid the need for ladders. They have a very individual cataloguing system which is entirely alphabetical within its thematic sections - in the "Science & Misc." part of the stacks (excellent!) 'Fishing' was followed by 'Flagellation' which was followed by 'Flags'!

After a restorative coffee, we walked from St James's along to our next port of call, the 'Roman baths' underneath King's College on the Strand. No-one seems to know when these were built, though possibly they're Tudor. From the horrible busy-ness of the Strand, we passed into the deserted square mile of the City of London - it is always so strangely empty at the weekends, when the business people that populate it during the week seem to stay away. We wondered as well if everyone was off looking at the Pope, as London did seem strangely empty yesterday. We were heading for the Guildhall where we spent a few hours - K got excited by the 15th-century Great Hall and crypts, I got excited by the fact there is a Roman amphitheatre underneath it!! Which was only discovered in 1988!!


We also visited the 1:500 scale model of the City of London on display in the 'City Marketing Suite' behind the Guildhall, which shows you what the skyline of central London is going to look like once all the current and projected skyscraper projects are completed - intended-to-be-iconic buildings which already have names ('The Shard', 'The Pinnacle') which are going to completely dominate The Gherkin and ruin the view. But quite fascinating to see it visualised in this way. There was a good interactive and a rather charismatic architect there answering people's questions.

We dipped in and out of quite a lot of Wren churches, which you seem to fall over on every corner in that part of the city, K making use of his recent purchase, the Pevsner for London's City churches. It was revealing of quite how much rebuilding was done immediately after the Second World War, since this part of the city was pretty much destroyed by bombing in the Blitz. We checked historic photos of where we were walking on the Museum of London's iPhone app, Street Museum. They don't have many photos on there yet, but it's a really interesting way of looking at and thinking about where you happen to be standing. We were going to go to the Bank of England, but this was the queue when we got there:


It reminded one of the queues you see on the news sometimes when there are reports in, say, Argentina of the country's economy being on the brink of collapse. K wondered whether they all thought they were going to be given money when they got inside. Perhaps they all knew something we didn't. Still, it's amazing that this many people turn out to look at buildings on Open House!

We got the bus home to Brixton, and because we weren't quite ready to go home, we went to visit Lambeth Town Hall, which was also Open, and got a personal tour by Lib Dem councillor and former mayor, Daphne Marchant, which was an idiosyncratic experience. Though we had come to that meeting of the Planning Committee last year - at which our Residents' Association successfully challenged the Lambeth College development next door - it was interesting to see the Council Chamber and hear a bit more about what goes on behind the scenes.

After that we went to experience the beer garden of our local pub.

Happy 200th Birthday Mr Jones!

Today we did something rather unusual. We went to church. While that in itself is pretty unusual (though the third time I have been to church in as many months!), that wasn't the half of it. Today was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Owen Jones (1809-1874), the Welsh architect and designer whose theories of design and polychromy were fundamentally inspired by his early experience of the Alhambra Palace in Granada, where he lived and studied for six months in 1834, and whose magnificent publications of its buildings during the 1840s were the first major work to employ the newly invented technology of chromolithography, in order to represent his theories of the use of primary colours in the original decorative scheme of the Islamic palaces. These books were also almost single-handedly responsible for the Victorian discovery of the Alhambra and of 'Moorish' design, and were perpetuated through all his later work, at the Crystal Palaces at Hyde Park (for the Great Exhibition of 1851) and at Sydenham, where he designed and erected an 'Alhambra Court' - a 3D version of the Alhambra palaces in microcosm, in the heart of south London, in the Grammar of Ornament, which became an immensely popular and widely-used design textbook, and in the foundation of what became the South Kensington Museum, now the Victoria and Albert Museum, where I have the great privilege to be a curator. Jones is very current in our thoughts these days, since the 19th-century revival of Islamic Spain and dissemination of its designs, primarily through his work, will form the fourth chapter of the book I will soon be writing, and my colleague Abraham Thomas has curated a display which will open at the V&A on 28th March (until late November), in time to celebrate his bicentenary. During the second half of this year, we will be working together on turning this display into a fully-fledged touring exhibition. More on that anon, no doubt.

So Abraham had the bright idea, because Owen Jones's birthday fell on a Sunday - today - to attend the service at Christ Church in Streatham, which was designed and built in the Byzantine style (though with Islamic inflections) by Jones's brother-in-law and protégé, James Wild, in 1841 - the V&A has several of Wild's original designs in the collection, for instance here. Jones conceived the interior design, of which all that survives is the painting in the apse ceiling, and the decoration of the capitals.


This church is basically at the end of our street - it's a 20-minute walk up Brixton Hill. I had tried to visit it before, during one of the two-week breaks I like to take from work in the summer, in order to explore London - but I had come at a time when the church was closed and there was no getting in. I had made a note of the vicar, Father Tricklebank's (what a fantastic name!), contact details, and Abraham got in touch and let him know that we were coming. There was quite a contingent of us: myself and K; Abraham and his girlfriend; Kathryn who did her PhD on Owen Jones and is our fount of all knowledge; Sonia who is working at the V&A on Indian textiles and has discovered interesting links to Owen Jones through the history of the Museum's collecting (which you can read more about in her recent article, here); and Charles, who was one of our curators of prints and drawings until his retirement a few years ago, and another expert in the 19th century.

Father Tricklebank put us on the order of service, and even mentioned us in his address - he had been doing a spot of reading, in preparation for our visit, and brought attention to the fact that Byzantine and Islamic styles had been employed in the design and decoration of the church, and that this regard for other faiths and cultures was reflected in the congregation of the church today, which is largely African and Afro-Caribbean. It was gratifying to see so many people in the congregation - as Charles commented, about as many as you might expect on a slack Sunday in 1846... There was also a baptism on the order of service, of a very sweet Nigerian baby who was being christened with the fantastic name of Chisom Pureheart Obiesie. It made you think of Arthurian legends, and the setting was right for that! This was the first baptism I had ever been to. It was very high church - I think they are Anglo-Catholics, and I must say I found it difficult to distinguish between this and the memorial service we attended for Ralph Pinder-Wilson last month at the high Catholic church of Our Lady of Victories. K went up to take Communion - I am never sure if he does this out of genuine residual faith, or if it is because of his academic interest in the working of churches. Probably a bit of both.

After the service, they welcomed us to look around and take pictures, and go up to the gallery, to get a closer look at the capitals and organ (which had Egyptian-style papyrus designs on its pipes). Several members of the congregation came up to ask us more about Owen Jones and the history of the church. The layout of the church reminded me of the synagogue we had visited during Open House weekend last September, the New West End Synagogue in Bayswater, also High Victorian and decorated internally in a neo-Byzantine style, but from the 1870s - indicating how influential, but also avant-garde, Wild's church at Streatham had been.

After milling and looking for half an hour or so, we went off to lunch at Brazas on Tulse Hill, which was really an excuse for K and I to try a relatively recently-opened local restaurant which several of our neighbours have raved to us about. It was excellent - very much a place to be returned to many times. This even led to talk of celebrating Owen Jones's birthday every year, or founding a gastronomic society in his honour!

After a somewhat lazy lunch, the others, very commitedly, set off to travel to Kensal Green Cemetery, one of London's great Victorian cemeteries, where Owen Jones and other Victorian worthies of his generation are buried. We wandered gently home, having taken absolutely no form of transport other than our feet all day. How wonderful!

This week in 1809 was a vintage week for births - Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were both born on Wednesday! Some other names came up over lunch, but the only one I can remember now is Edgar Allen Poe. Sadly Owen Jones is not quite so renowned these days, and is not getting any of the press coverage that Darwin is getting (the BBC are doing a whole season on him!). We're doing our bit though, in our own little way. Happy Birthday Mr Jones!

We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Very Excellent New Year!!

Capilla de los Condestables, Burgos Cathedral © KR

On New Year’s Day 2008, we went for a walk in Crystal Palace, among the ruins of the venue of the Great Exhibition of 1851 – an easy bus ride from Brixton on the number 3 bus, which transports you to the rather ghostly traces of what must have been an amazing spectacle until it was destroyed by fire in 1936… K had to give a paper in Oxford on 4th January, and has resolved never to ruin the Christmas holidays like that again.

In February, we celebrated our twelfth anniversary, and K was viva’d in Oxford for his PhD, which he passed with minor corrections.

At Easter, we visited Waddesdon in the snow, and joined the National Trust, which inspired us to visit London properties, such as William Morris’s Arts and Crafts home in Bexleyheath, The Red House, which we did the next day. It was still snowing on Easter Monday when we walked up to Alexandra Palace for a drink with Helen G.

M gave a ridiculous number of lectures this year, including a series of three in April, on Córdoba, Granada and Seville, to members of The Art Fund. She is resolving to learn how to say ‘no’ but already the line-up for 2009 suggests she has a lot of practising to do.

In May, M led a group of V&A Patrons on a tailor-made guided tour of ‘Islamic Spain’, visiting Granada, Córdoba and Seville over the course of a week, and then staying on in Spain for the rest of the month, travelling from south to very north researching for the book she will be writing in Spring 2009. K joined her for the last two weeks, and we celebrated his 32nd birthday in a lovely local place at the end of an alley in Zaragoza, which was about the only restaurant we could find open. Almost everything in the city was closed, in the calm before the storm of the international expo! We had arranged to meet Glaire in Toledo, but also met Jeremy quite by chance, and spent an excellent few days in their company. In Barcelona, it was wonderful as always to see Sarah, Julius, Leila and Isaac, and spent what later turned out to be our last few days in their old home.

In June, K graduated for his PhD in Durham Cathedral, attended by his parents and his (then) 94-year-old grandfather. He wore a very exuberant red and purple gown, which he did not want to give back at the end of the day. (There are some photos here)

In July, we were visited by Bev and James, our long-lost friends returned from Australia for a round of visits. It was brilliant to see them and spend so much time with them! K gave another conference paper, at Leeds International Medieval Congress, and M had the honour to attend her mother’s graduation ceremony (photos here), in Guildford Cathedral, which she suspected and later confirmed was the church that scared Damien in The Omen. We spent a lovely evening with Alison, Steve and Ellie, a few months before the arrival of Nathan.

In August, M took her customary two weeks off work to make the most of living in London, but the weather was terrible, so it was largely spent indoors. Though we did go with Isla to the Canary Wharf Jazz Festival, and picnicked in the rain – something the English will have to get used to doing more and more, I suspect. Gareth celebrated her birthday with us, at Gastro in Clapham. At the end of the month we went to Hereford for a few days to celebrate K’s mother’s 60th birthday and retirement party.

In September, we spent a very pleasant day with Cornelius, visiting buildings all over London which threw open their doors for Open House Weekend – the highlight was definitely the former Granada Cinema in Tooting, now a bingo hall, built in the 1930s in high Victorian Gothic style (see http://cinematreasures.org/theater/9424). We joined K’s family again to celebrate his grandfather’s 95th birthday. K ran a 10k charity run at Hampton Court in aid of Cancer Research, which he made in 58 minutes, and he’s now addicted to running!

M left for New York at the end of the month, to participate in a curatorial exchange at the Metropolitan Museum for a month, but was away in the States for six weeks altogether, with a week in California at the beginning (book research again – honest!), and most of a week in Philadelphia attending the Historians of Islamic Art Association conference. Again K joined her for the last two weeks, having given a paper at the Sixteenth-Century Society conference in St Louis. We were in the States for the Presidential Election which was hugely exciting, especially because of the excellent result. Election night with Albert at Cleopatra’s Needle, watching the early results on a TV whose sound we could not hear and whose subtitling software was spitting out gobbledegook, followed by a late supper at Karen’s in Spanish Harlem where the result was declared and you could hear the whooping in the streets from all over Manhattan! Walking back through the Upper East Side at 1 in the morning with groups of happy people periodically shouting out, ‘Yes we can!’

We were visited in New York by another long-lost friend, Rebecca (though sadly Adam couldn’t make it), and we celebrated the release of her debut EP! (details here).

M was back in London for four days before flying to Damascus to install an exhibition of World Ceramics, the first time the V&A has ever loaned an exhibition to the Middle East, which was hailed in the British press as the right kind of diplomacy (see the excellent Guardian comment by Simon Jenkins here). She then stayed on to supervise it for the first half of its run, and was in Syria for five weeks altogether, trying to make the most of her one day off a week to visit some of the amazing classical, early Christian, and Crusader sites, not to mention Islamic, for which Syria is justly famous. A fantastic experience.

She is very happy, though, to be back home just in time for Christmas, and to be spending the festive season with loved ones. We’re confident that 2009 will be a good year, with Obama at the helm, and we look forward to all the happy hours we’ll spend with friends and family over the coming months. A very Happy New Year to one and all!