I'm back.
The past few months have been too fraught at times to want to record them. Bob said he would find a new job and perhaps he will soon be proven right, but until then we have a month to fill with a London Staycation. And I can't think of a better place to hustle up 31 days of activities than London, including a bit of exploration into the surrounding English countryside. Everything is set to go. The breakdown of our old computer — another forgettable episode of the past few months — has been solved with my cute new, still shiny white MacBook that doesn't need to be shared with anyone.
Planning elaborate trips is a favourite pastime for me. Once, when I was especially unhappy living in New Jersey, I spent months planning a road trip that was to be a US version of Heidi's Alp, a travel book by an English writer, Christina Hardyment, who loaded her children into a van and set off to find the locations of favourite children's classics in Europe. She began with Hans Christian Andersen, and ended up writing about the original Legoland. I so wanted to go to Legoland, but it was in Denmark, and I was in New Jersey. This was in the days before the internet of course, so I borrowed all the Mobil Travel Guides from the library and combed them for any references to authors or settings of my favourite books, with a heavy emphasis on Laura Ingalls Wilder, since those were among my daughters' favourites. I came up with amazing gems of discovery. I sent off postcards to dozens of small town Chambers of Commerce and Tourist Boards, and received reams of mail. The trip would have stretched into months, but instead we moved to Massachusetts. Years later, Megan's high school junior year summer visit to colleges of the Midwest was heavily influenced by that New Jersey research. While we did see Kenyon and Oberlin and Carleton and Macalester what we all really remember was The Little House in the Big Woods (reconstructed version), the real Caddie Woodlawn House, falling in love with artist Wanda Gag's hometown of New Ulm, Minnesota, and the high point for me — a lifetime high point I would say — was sitting on the Betsy-Tacy Bench in Maud Hart Lovelace's Deep Valley, (Mankato) Minnesota. Legoland has continued to elude me however. By the time I moved to London, my daughter's were too old to pass the child test for admittance, although 16 year old Susan offered to give it a go. Megan has said she is not bringing her children on a plane until they are teenagers, but she will have to cede at least one of them to me when they are of Legoland age and height.
The second question was answered by the announcement of remaining station stops on the train journey: Car-sh-ahh-lton.
Carshalton is in the Borough of Sutton. One of the things I have learned in the past year is that London has 32 Boroughs. Yes that is not a mistake, I really mean 32. And if you split up Hammersmith and Fulham, Kensington and Chelsea, Barking and Dagenham, you could have even more. Bob went to a block party this evening and said everyone — natives of this country and this city — said they had never heard of Sutton. All of us in the Inner Boroughs are only vaguely aware of the existence of the Outer Boroughs, but when Boris Johnson won the mayoral election last year, the word was that his support came from the Outer Boroughs, previously unacknowledged, but residents of London nonetheless, making themselves noticed.
My love of trip planning is matched by an accompanying love of guide books. I am very particular in my choice of guidebooks, but when I see the right sort of guidebook, I can rarely walk away without a purchase. When I do manage to contain myself, I dream about the book, and find myself, the next day or week, succumbing. A book I couldn't resist 12 years ago was Village London: A Guide to London's Neighborhoods (no "u" in Neighbourhood, so I must have bought it in the States). I haven't looked at this particular book in years, but sure enough Carshalton is one of the 25 villages I could have made acquaintance with more than a decade ago.
Our day in Carshalton was outstanding. The train from Victoria took about a half hour to reach our destination close to the bottom edge of the left hand page of the A-Z Map which is London to the inhabitants. My newly discovered old guidebook took us past lovely old wooden weatherboarded — clapboarded in the States — houses which are rare in England and very rare in London. We visited the Sutton Ecology Centre, a local nature reserve set up more than 20 years ago to educate children and adults on the environment. Like many voluntary projects, the Centre looks like it could use a new generation of volunteers to keep up the side. Of course nothing is helped this year by our drought conditions where every blade of grass in the country is dry and brown. The land was originally an orchard when first recorded in 1590. Then part of the formal gardens of one of the three great houses that dominated the village.
Next we stopped into the Honeywood Museum which began life as a 17th century residence and was eventually extended into a charming upper middle class house in the mid-19th century with an extant billiard room — the man cave of the period — and an elegant drawing room for the ladies overlooking the ponds that form the centre of the village. The exhibits were a fascinating hodge-podge of local history from the Romans through the Second World War. This is the end of Archaeology Month in Britain so the dig that is proceeding between the Honeywood and the ponds was being worked today, and we held some 16th c. (the archaeologist guessed) pottery sherds as they came out of the ground.
We also visited the Carshalton Water Tower built around 1725 to provide running water to Carshalton House with a recently restored water wheel that was used to pipe water from a rooftop reservoir of the tower to the house, way across the field. The tower also had a lovely Orangery and a remarkable Delft tiled bath or perhaps indoor pool because it looked to be at least 6 feet deep.
And none of these places even figured in our decision to begin this Staycation in Carshalton. We went to visit Little Holland House which Bob saw described on the list of London museums yesterday, as a house built by Frank Dickinson (an artist previously unknown to us) inspired by the ideals of John Ruskin and William Morris who are of course well known. The House is owned by the Borough of Sutton and open to the public on the first Sunday of the month for a few hours. Usually when these discoveries are made the random open day is just past and who ever remembers the next random open day. In this case we had the first Sunday of August staring at us waiting to be filled with something special. And we could not have found any place more special. Frank was a poor struggling artist who worked at the nearby Doulton Tile factory who dreamed of a perfect house to bring his fiancée Florence to live when they married. He began building his furniture, bought a tiny plot, borrowed what money he could, which was only half of what he needed for the house he designed. So he and his brothers dug the foundation, and got to work with building in 1902. In 1904, he and Florence spent their honeymoon sanding window frames.
Everything in this charming little house was made by Frank and Florence and assorted friends. There is a living room - dining room with carved beams, paneled walls with family portraits painted in the panels (and one of Ruskin). Beaten copper fire place facings as in the Mackintosh rooms in Glasgow, parchment lamp shades decorated with painted medieval illuminations. The master bedroom has a charming painted frieze of trees in a darkening blue sky with a quotation from Longfellow on sleep painted beneath. He really wasn't a very good painter — although I did like his wartime paintings of air raid shelters and Carshalton blitz damage in the Honeyman Museum — but the House is a spectacular piece of art. They raised two children and lived their entire lives in the House. Frank died in 1961, and Florence left it in 1972 when she moved to a care home. The Borough bought the House and has managed it as a museum since 1974. And I say Bravo to the obscure Borough of Sutton for saving such a treasure. Would they do it in this century? Probably not. And who else was visiting today: a large family of Italians, a Japanese family were arriving as we were leaving. So is this little house famous around the world, but unknown to us until yesterday?
A most interesting fun fact is that Bob's grandfather, a German immigrant in New York who did decorative painting for a living — spokesman of the Amalgamated Painters' Society who were united with the Brotherhood of Painters in a strike over the new wage scale in 1907 according to a New York Times archive article — was decorating his family home a block from the water in the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx at much the same time as Frank Dickinson in Carshalton. The house was still in the family into the 1980s when it was sold. I wonder if it still exists. I can't imaging the Borough of the Bronx matching Sutton for the preservation of a treasure.
All photos of the Little Holland House taken by Bob with his new Android phone.
My love of trip planning is matched by an accompanying love of guide books. I am very particular in my choice of guidebooks, but when I see the right sort of guidebook, I can rarely walk away without a purchase. When I do manage to contain myself, I dream about the book, and find myself, the next day or week, succumbing. A book I couldn't resist 12 years ago was Village London: A Guide to London's Neighborhoods (no "u" in Neighbourhood, so I must have bought it in the States). I haven't looked at this particular book in years, but sure enough Carshalton is one of the 25 villages I could have made acquaintance with more than a decade ago.
Our day in Carshalton was outstanding. The train from Victoria took about a half hour to reach our destination close to the bottom edge of the left hand page of the A-Z Map which is London to the inhabitants. My newly discovered old guidebook took us past lovely old wooden weatherboarded — clapboarded in the States — houses which are rare in England and very rare in London. We visited the Sutton Ecology Centre, a local nature reserve set up more than 20 years ago to educate children and adults on the environment. Like many voluntary projects, the Centre looks like it could use a new generation of volunteers to keep up the side. Of course nothing is helped this year by our drought conditions where every blade of grass in the country is dry and brown. The land was originally an orchard when first recorded in 1590. Then part of the formal gardens of one of the three great houses that dominated the village.
Next we stopped into the Honeywood Museum which began life as a 17th century residence and was eventually extended into a charming upper middle class house in the mid-19th century with an extant billiard room — the man cave of the period — and an elegant drawing room for the ladies overlooking the ponds that form the centre of the village. The exhibits were a fascinating hodge-podge of local history from the Romans through the Second World War. This is the end of Archaeology Month in Britain so the dig that is proceeding between the Honeywood and the ponds was being worked today, and we held some 16th c. (the archaeologist guessed) pottery sherds as they came out of the ground.
We also visited the Carshalton Water Tower built around 1725 to provide running water to Carshalton House with a recently restored water wheel that was used to pipe water from a rooftop reservoir of the tower to the house, way across the field. The tower also had a lovely Orangery and a remarkable Delft tiled bath or perhaps indoor pool because it looked to be at least 6 feet deep.
A most interesting fun fact is that Bob's grandfather, a German immigrant in New York who did decorative painting for a living — spokesman of the Amalgamated Painters' Society who were united with the Brotherhood of Painters in a strike over the new wage scale in 1907 according to a New York Times archive article — was decorating his family home a block from the water in the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx at much the same time as Frank Dickinson in Carshalton. The house was still in the family into the 1980s when it was sold. I wonder if it still exists. I can't imaging the Borough of the Bronx matching Sutton for the preservation of a treasure.
All photos of the Little Holland House taken by Bob with his new Android phone.
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