PROMENADING WITH PEPYS

Finding myself near the Tower of London, I decided to walk to (and in) Seething Lane Garden, a place I knew a little about but had never been to.  

Chiefly what I knew was that Samuel Pepys had once had a house there, in the Navy Office, his place of work.   Both house and office are long gone, and Seething Lane Garden, is a sliver of land tucked in beside the Four Seasons Hotel, what used to be the headquarters of Port of London of Authority.

The garden is far too small for a ‘serious’ walk: by some accounts it’s a ‘pocket park,’ which only adds to my confusion about the difference between parks and gardens, but a walk doesn’t always have to be serious.

On the day of my visit the garden was wintry and windswept, which was only to be expected in December.  Presiding over it is a very fine bust of Pepys, created by Karin Jonzen and put up by the Samuel Pepys Club in 1983.

   On the ground are some even finer paving slabs showing a map, 

 

a plague doctor, 

 

among others, but best of all is a parmesan cheese, like the one Pepys buried in his garden to save it from the Great Fire of London.

I suppose the pavers are there be walked on but I and the few other people I saw in the garden seemed to take pains to avoid them as though they were too precious for tramping feet.  The pavers were made by past and present students of City & Guilds London Art School under the direction of Alan Lamb of Swan Farm Studios Ltd. 

 

I was pleased to have walked in the Seething Lane Garden but it didn’t take long and isn’t one of the great London walks.  Rather more fun can be had in and around St Olave’s church just across the road, though the address is Hart Street rather than Seething Lane, and best known (to me, anyway), for its skull-festooned gateway.

 

Dickens liked it too apparently.  The churchyard and the garden were again wintry but there was a labyrinth – some walkers do enjoy a labyrinth: 

 

Inside the church there are memorial busts of both Sam Pepys and his wife Elizabeth; their bodies are buried in the vault, away from prying eyes.But you know, the thing that really delighted me, the small thing that made the day for me, was a piece of stained glass in the church – showing teasels.  Nature it gets everywhere

 

In fact, as I soon found out, the teasel is a symbol of the Worshipful Company of Clothworkers, of which Samuel Pepys was Master, but I’d have been perfectly happy for it to remain an enigma.

 

Pepys himself was, of course, a great walker.  The word walk and its derivatives appears 1068 times in the Diary.  There’s a really good book by Jacky Colliss Harvey titled Walking Pepys’s London.  I recommend it, though your feet will get tired.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DESIRE CAUGHT BY THE FOOT (PICASSO ALLUSION)

You remember me going on, some while back, about “desire lines” - also sometimes known as “bootleg trails” (a term which I like a lot) – informal paths created by walkers as an alternative and sometimes as a downright challenge to the formal paths by and planners and landscapers.  Well, once you start looking, these things are everywhere of course, and as I roam around I see them all the time.  This one here is in Salt Lake City (and actually leads to a labyrinth):

And I found this rather less developed one in Ely, Nevada (birthplace of Patricia Nixon) which runs around the side of the public library and didn’t seem actually to be very useful but somebody must think it is otherwise it wouldn’t be there (you can’t argue with desire):

 As a matter of fact Ely also has a labyrinth.  There may be something going on here, right?

Meanwhile at CalArts where I am a very occasional adjunct professor (yep, I have been known to get emails addressed to Professor Nicholson which really is unutterably cool), the landscapers (or maybe just gardeners) have been working to destroy, or at least erase, a desire line I wrote about in that previous blog post.

First there was, and is, a formal paved, in fact cobbled, path leading from the dorms and the lower parking lot up to the main buildings, and as can you see there was then a desire line somewhat further along the bank.

Well, the cobbled path is still there of course but the desire line has gone.  That area has been mulched.  I’m not sure why.  It was just a bit of grass that didn’t seem in need of mulching – but maybe it was too hard to cut the grass there. 

Anyway, it’s clearly quite hard to walk on mulch but I think the irresistible forces of desire are already at work and, to my eyes anyway, a new desire line appears to be forming.  We shall see.  And I’ll keep you informed.   
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That other post is here:
http://hollywoodwalker.blogspot.com/2015/03/walking-with-desire.html

WALKING IN TIME

        

 It’s a curious thing, isn’t it, when you’re when traveling in some strange or unknown place, and you look out of the window of your car or the bus or train, and you see some solitary walker, in some bleak environment, often in the middle of nowhere, even in the middle of the desert.  You know that if you were walking out there you’d be feeling lost or scared or threatened, or in any case completely out of your element, but you assume that the solitary walker you’re looking at doesn’t feel the same way.  He or she may not be actually at home in that desolate spot, but they’re at least in their own landscape.

Of course, when you look out through the window of a plane, unless you’re very close to the ground, at take off or landing, you don’t actually see people walking, but even so you look down from a great height and sometimes you see a city below, and you can be absolutely sure there are pedestrians moving around down there.

And if you’re coming into a city you know, and recently I’ve flown into London and New York, you see the city from on high, and you not only know that there are people walking down there, you know they’re walking where you’ve walked in the past, and where you’re going to be walking again, quite soon, just as soon as you land, get off the plane and get into the city.  Here’s a picture of man walking in London, on Fournier Street:

And here’s a picture of a man walking in New York, on West Houston Street, where the pedestrianized La Guardia Place begins, striding across the “Seed Labyrinth” which is a “public art project” by Sara Jones, sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

The Facebook page says, “Everyone is invited to walk the Labyrinth  …

A Labyrinth is an ancient symbol of wholeness. It combines the imagery of the circle and the spiral into a meandering but purposeful path. The Labyrinth represents a journey to our center and back again into the world. It has only one path, it is unicursal. The way in is the way out. It is a right brain task, the choice is to enter or not, the choice is whether or not to walk a spiritual path.”

That strikes me as going a bit far, and although I can’t pretend to know what’s going on in the mind of that New York walker, I’d guess he’s pretty much unaware that he’s cutting right across a unicursal path.

Immediately to the east of the labyrinth is another art project, the Time Landscape, by Alan Sonfist.  It’s a 25' x 40' rectangular of land, set up in 1978, made to resemble what Manhattan would have looked like before the Dutch settlers arrived in the 17^th century.  So it’s filled with native species, beech and birch trees, red cedar, black cherry, mugwort, Virginia creeper, aster, pokeweed, milkweed, catbrier vines, and violets.  I am quoting here, obviously.  I would recognize really very few of these flora, but I’ve nevertheless always thought Time Landscape was a “very good thing.”

I gather that it’s an uphill, not to say Sisyphean, task to keep the Time Landscape free of non-native species, and garden crews have to be in there constantly weeding.  When I was there earlier this month the place did look a bit careworn, and it does seem to have a curious status now as memorial, not so much to 17^th century Manhattan, as to 1960s and 70s land art, and there are those who complain that it’s been “museumified,” but although I see their point, I’m still very glad that it’s there.

A little to the north of Time Landscape there are three tall apartment blocks, two of them designated the Silver Towers, containing student housing, the third a co-op for “real people.” Inevitably most of the apartments don’t have any usable outdoor space, nevertheless around the base in certain areas, avid New York gardeners have been at work creating one version of what a 21^st century Manhattan time landscape might look like.