WHITE WALKING

I went to London to see my doctor who told me I was still alive, which seemed like good news.  So the next day I went for a walk in and around White City, with my boon companion Ashley, flaneur of that parish, more or less. The temperature and the humidity were punishing so we didn’t walk as far or with as much zest as we might have in other circumstances.

Reader, it felt, at first, like walking in the future.  There were shiny, fresh-out–of-the-box buildings with no indication of what went on inside them.  There was free wi-fi outdoors in public spaces that had lots of places to sit. There were chain restaurants I’d never heard of before - Potager and Dear Grace – and the latter had set up a giant screen outside for those who wanted to watch the cricket.  On a different day that would have been me.

 

In fact there were some buildings I could tell the purpose of; a mighty concentration of places where people lived, developments with names like White City Living, Cascade Apartments, Belvedere Row and the improbable Bowery Apartments.  These mostly looked pretty good architecturally, and completely unaffordable.

 

I’d been to White City once or twice in the past, when I’d had some business or other at the BBC TV Centre. The BBC building remains, but is also converted into swanky flats, though there’s still a naked golden statue of Helios at the centre of the garden.  If the sun god isn’t permanent, what is?

 

 

Although this White City walk was just a meander, there was a general plan to go and look at (and walk in) the Japanese Garden in Hammersmith Park – which dates from 1910, and was originally part of the Japan-British Exhibition held to strengthen the Anglo-Japanese Alliance.  It’s a long story which I won’t tell here, though it's worth noting that White City was then part of Shepherd's Bush, which in many ways it still is.

  

Photographs from the time show it to have been a wild and complex affair, and it must have required a huge amount of work for what was a very short-lived exhibition. 

 

There were two gardens at the exhibition, The Garden of Peace and the Garden of the Floating Isle. Now there’s only one: ‘The Garden of Peace was converted into a more traditional British public park named “Hammersmith Park”’ – I’m quoting here from the Japanese Garden Society. 

 

I’m surprised, and pleased, by how many Japanese gardens there are in Britain - at least thirty open to the public – from Lowther Castle to the St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art, from Dartington Hall to the National Botanic Garden of Wales, and so on. I confess I haven’t walked in all that many of these. 

 

I suppose this prevalence of Japanese gardens may possibly be because the features of a Japanese garden are easy to identify and easy to replicate:  like these lanterns in Hammersmith Park, sponsored by various Japanese corporate interests.

 

There is also a type of Japanese garden called (at least by English speakers) a ‘stroll garden.’ just right for walkers, or meanderers, like me.  This one’s in Kew.

 

In the Japanese Garden in Hammersmith Park on the day I was there, a few homeless people were setting up camp, and a few young women in bikinis were sunbathing but I thought it best not to photograph them.

 

Adjacent to, or possibly part of, the Hammersmith Park is something called the Wood Crescent Playground: you know, for the kids.

 

And as we walked around, a moment came when I looked at the mound in the playground (above) and it reminded me powerfully of this other mound in the Jencks Garden of Cosmic Speculation, near Dumfries, (below).

Possibly the heat was getting to me.

 

 

 

 

EDDIE AND ME

 More than half a lifetime ago, I was (for want of a better term) a security guard at the Hayward Gallery for their Thirties exhibition, and one of the items I had to guard was this head of Sir Edwin Lutyens. (Sometimes it’s referred to as a bust.)

 

I might just about have heard the name Lutyens before I worked at the Hayward, but only just.  Nevertheless I loved that head: how could you not?  And to be fair it didn’t need much guarding.  

 

My job was by no means a walking job but we weren’t allowed to sit down and so we paced up and down the galleries hour after hour, day after day, as a deterrent.

 

Walking in galleries can be hard work even when you’re keen to see the exhibition; walking back and forth when you’re just a deterrent is much harder.

 

I gather that the head belongs to the Victoria and Albert Museum and it incorporates Lutyens’ design for the Viceroy's House in New Delhi, now the Rashtrapati Bhavan.

 

And then last week I was walking round the Victoria and Albert as a punter not a security guard, there to see the Tropical Modernism exhibition, and there was old man Lutyens again.  It felt like meeting an old friend.

Judge for yourself whether it's a good likeness.

 

 

DRIFTING WITH WITH DEAKIN

 

I’ve been reading Iain Sinclair’s Pariah Genius, his ‘psychobiography’ – partly fictionalized - of John Deakin, in which he ‘follows in the footsteps of the famed Soho photographer. kept man, primitive painter and secret witness.’  I’m quoting from the blub there as you probably guessed.

 

The writing’s great of course – it’s by Iain Sinclair, but it’s not a pacey read.  The problem I personally may have with it, is that I’m not all that fascinated by the gilded seamy glamour of Soho, the much recorded nexus of Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Daniel Farson, Muriel Belcher, the Colony Club, the French House, all the booze and the gay sex with dodgy geezers, some of them in scarily sharp suits. And it seems to me that Sinclair isn’t entirely fascinated either, though I’m sure both he and I have done our miles pounding the streets of Soho.

 

The book picks up a lot of energy when Deakin, because of Bacon, becomes an habitué of Limehouse where he ‘walked.  Alone. Uncommissioned. His patrons, the indulgent editors, had no part in this.’ The section is titled ‘Deakin as Psychogeographer,’ and Limehouse is Sinclair territory too - see Ludheat - and so he can walk the same streets as Deacon, and many others.  Some of Deakin’s archive can be seen on Instagram. 

Sinclair mentions the photographer and ‘compulsive pedestrian’ Harry Diamond, who sometimes modeled for Lucian Freud. Sinclair writes, ‘The lengthy sessions Freud demanded interrupted his (Harry D’s) eternal stamping across London. … Harry had no use for taxis.  He knew that blisters were the surest route to Enlightenment.’   Somebody, not me, should have that tattooed across their instep. This is a self-portrait of Harry Diamond in Brick Lane in 1973.

 

There is no doubt a mighty book to be written about photographers who walk and walkers who take photographs, though how would the poor author ever be able to afford to pay for the use of the images?  We might quote Julio Cortazar, as Sinclair does, ‘But in all the ways when one is walking about with a camera, one has almost a duty to be attentive, to not that lose that abrupt and happy rebound of sun’s rays off an old stone.’  

         I don’t understand why it’s almost  a duty rather than entirely a duty, but maybe it loses something in the translation.

 

VOTING WITH MY FEET

 

I walked up the hill to the polling station yesterday to cast my vote and participate in the democratic process.

 

This wasn’t any kind of politically-motivated derive, but it was a nice day, I felt like a walk, and perhaps the greatest motivation of all, I thought it might be a bugger to park near the polling station.

 

The walk was fine, the polling station was fine, the polling clerks were very friendly and helpful and good humoured.  However, that was at 10 in the morning, and I imagine their humour might have faded somewhat by 10 at night.  And so I presented my photo ID, was given a ballot paper, put my cross in a box on the paper, and put the paper in a plastic box.  My civil duty was done.

 

And the parking?  

Well of course there was enough room to park a bus, several buses, several battle buses.

I walked down the hill again, to await the tsunami.

TRAILING IN HARLOW

One of the best reasons for spending a Saturday night in the Holiday Inn Express in Harlow is that come the next morning you can have a meander round the Market Square and the Broad Walk.

 

You could, and we sort of did, walk around it on Saturday night, but there was a certain amount of police activity which in an unknown town rather deters the casual boulevardier.  Come the morning at about 9 am the place was all but deserted, although by ten it was starting to get busy, though not in a ‘police activity’ kind of way, just people on their way to Gregg’s, Primark and to the many barbers, and on the way strolling past quite a few closed down establishments.

Such a walk, inescapably, covers part of the Harwich Sculpture Trail.  There are pieces of sculpture around the town, including a Henry Moore and a Rodin, though we by no means saw  them all.

 

The sculptures we saw were great; Meat Porters by Ralph Brown, 1959

 

Trigon, by Lynn Chadwick, 1961

 

Vertex, by Paul Mason 1979

 

But for a man with my specialist enthusiasms they all rather fell by the wayside compared with this fine obelisk, possibly a quasi or broken obelisk by Sir Frederick Gibberd, who was one of the chief begetters of Harlow New Town, as well as architect of the London Central Mosque and the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral.

 

We also got a look at the bus station, and at Terminus House, which I thought looked all right from the outside, though according to the BBC it’s a ‘Human Warehouse,’ formerly an office block, and now hot bed of drugs and sex crime: we had to take their word for it.

This is Sir Frederick Gibberd in life:

 

and in sculpture: