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:

THE MOORE THE MERRIER

Here’s a psychogeographic walking project for some bright, fit, young soul who’s got a private income and lots of time on their hands.  Why not walk to, between, and around, every Henry Moore sculpture in the world?  Here’s a map from the Henry Moore Foundation of ‘works in public’ that gives some sense of the task.

 If you wanted to restrict yourself to just the ones in Britain it would be reasonably doable, though not a walk in the park.  

Japan, with a short side excursion to South Korea, would make a fine project too. 

 

Africa needn’t trouble you much, and Russia not at all. 

 

These thoughts are inspired, if that’s the word, by a visit to the Henry Moore Studios and Gardens, (also his house Hoglands) at Perry Green in Hertfordshire. There are 70 are acres of land with 21 major works by Moore scattered across them.  The sculptures are different sizes of course, but none of them is small, and some of them are absolutely massive. 

 

70 acres provides scope for plenty of walking.  The main area that visitors go to is called the sculpture lawn, then there’s a meadow and a large area designated as ‘sheep field,’ complete with sheep.  In the outer reaches of the site, the sculpture thins out considerably, and that’s the evidently way Moore wanted it.

Perhaps the best thing about the gardens is how few paths there are.  There are one or two, but mostly you’re free to walk where you like, make your own way, plan your own route across grassy expanses, and see the sculptures in any order you like, from any angle, from as near or as far as you like. You can even touch them, so long as you’re gentle and you don’t climb on them or their plinths.

 

I was left wondering how much of a walker Henry Moore was?  He grew up in Castleford in Yorkshire, which is near some very good walking territory, and I take it that if you own 70 acres you’re going to do some walking one way or another. 

 

There are certainly pictures of him walking.  In later years he used a walking stick but many do. We know that he liked his sculptures to be placed and seen in the great outdoors, and there are plenty of pictures of him posing with them in wide open spaces, and presumably he walked to them.

 

And I find myself wondering if he ever said to his wife Irina, ‘All right love, I’m just going for a walk round the garden,’ and then she wouldn’t see him for a few hours.  More research required.  I’m working on it.