In Search of Whistler

Chelsea Embankment 

Today was our day to explore Chelsea to look for places where James McNeill Whistler lived in London. Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts — his birthplace is an interesting little museum — where his father was employed as an engineer. The family moved to Russia when he was a boy when his father was hired to build Russian railroads. He returned to the States to attend West Point and for his short military career, he drew maps. A typical Third Culture Kid — one raised in more than one country/culture, therefore never quite belonging to any one culture, but to a hybrid Third Culture (e.g. Barack Obama, my daughter Susan) — Whistler hotfooted it back to Europe when he was free of the army. First Paris, then settling in London for the rest of his life. Whistler's Mother was indeed painted in London.

Bob has always been a fan of Whistler's work, but a few special exhibitions in recent years kindled an interest in Whistler's complicated and interesting life. In the last half of the 19th century, Chelsea was the  hub of London's creative art community. Whistler lived in several houses over the years, most of them on Cheyne Walk, considered one of London's most prestigious addresses despite the noisy Thames Embankment road running in front of it.

One of Whistler's residences

Cheyne Walk has had many famous residents over the centuries. Henry VIII built a summer home here.

Thomas More was arrested and taken to the Tower from his Cheyne Walk  home

A memorial to Sir Hans Sloane founder of the British Museum

Another great English painter, Turner lived on Cheyne Walk

At the end western end of Cheyne Walk is Cremorne Gardens, a small park where a second installation of bird houses has been sited.

The park on the site of a 19th century pleasure garden has an old concrete pier where you can walk out into the river.

After an excellent lunch at the Chelsea Ram pub, found using Bob's new smartphone, we stopped off at the National Trust's Thomas Carlyle's House on Upper Cheyne Walk where he and his suffering wife Jane lived for many many years.

Jane's difficulties with servants and marriage to a celebrity spouse are detailed in The Carlyles at Home by Thea Holme, published by Persephone Press.

Jane and Thomas at home by Robert Tait. The rooms have been decorated to match

Thomas Carlyle was a hugely important, public intellectual and historian in Victorian England. The displays in the house include quotations from famous people on their opinions of Carlyle and his work. The British view was that he was a sage whose work would live forever. The Americans seem not as impressed. Margaret Fuller said, he was a blowhard who you couldn't shut up once he started talking. Walt Whitman said, he couldn't see for the life of him what Carlyle's reputation was based on. Edgar Allan Poe said, he will only be remembered as a butt for sarcasm. And you may well ask, who the heck is Thomas Carlyle?

Then home, and a nice surprise with Susan and Cato taking us out for dinner at a Tapas restaurant in Belsize Park. They are taking the car to the Reading Festival tomorrow.

We are intrepid and dedicated to our staycation task. Despite a BBC hourly weather forecast of light rain-heavy rain for every interval of the day, we headed out for some church tourism. Bob is determined we get up to the 300 church mark, so we are focusing on the London churches we haven't checked off yet. We had very good luck and managed to see four (#291-294). The first St Cyprian's was charming and lovely. The next three were 19th centuryCatholic, two neo-Gothic and one neo-Baroque, all way over the top for my taste.

The last we visited, Brompton Oratory, is next to the V&A, so we decided to pop in, and I'm so glad we did. Fitting right in with yesterday's, bird house city, we saw 1:1 Architects Build Small Spaces which is about to close this weekend. 19 architects were invited to submit plans for "structures that examine notions of refuge and retreat." Seven of the projects were chosen to be built full-scale in various V& A galleries around the museum. Five of the seven were wonderful. (The one from the US, a wooden plank shed, sort of a dog run, from Alabama doesn't even bear mentioning since it missed the point of the exercise entirely. Has the US lost the ability and talent to design anything of note these days?) We both seem to have forgotten to take any photos of the Brazilian spiral staircase with tiny alcoves hidden behind red curtains.

The cutest was the Beetle's House from Terunobu Fujimori, Tokyo set in the new medieval gallery.

The coolest one, the one I want for my refuge was the Indian In-Between Architecture from Studio Mumbai. A set of interconnecting spaces on several levels with narrow corridors connecting them and built around a tree.

Bob's favourite, the one he wants for his refuge, was the Norwegian Ark, by Rintala Eggertsson, Oslo. A stairway wound its way around the center of the book tower, with sheepskin covered benches on two of the levels.

Finally, the cleverest was also from Norway, Ratatosk by Helen & Hard, Stavanger. Ratatosk is an Old Norse name for a squirrel from Norse mythology. It was made by splittling ten ash trees and arranging them in a circle so you can stand inside. And it has all sorts of hand and foot holds in the tree trunks and branches to make it a climbing structure for children. And there were children enjoying it today.

When you go off exploring in London, you are never quite know what you will find!

Paradise in a Parking Lot

We do welcome suggestions for our staycation outings, and last week our friend Frank in New Jersey sent us a link that sounded intriguing. That link took us to the Secret Gardens webpage where we found the addresses for two public art installations in London green spaces. We knew today would be a short outing day because we ordered a big shipment of food from our favourite organic farm that would be delivered this morning. Hooray, we finally have real food in the house again. Plus, the hourly weather prediction on the BBC website said it would begin raining lightly at 1 pm and heavily at 4 pm. We needed something to squeeze in between delivery and rain.  Bob suggested we look for the installation that is nearby in Islington right around the corner from the Angel Tube station.

Duncan Terrace is a lovely quiet Georgian terrace hidden behind a very busy area . It may look like a parking lot, but that's just the necessary street parking in residential streets.

In fact Duncan Terrace has a lovely garden walkway running down its centre for two long blocks.

The Tree of Heaven comes into view

I can't say I saw much bird life flocking to prime urban real estate. Perhaps they prefer suburban detached homes. 

Since we were in Islington we had lunch at the Duke of Cambridge, one of the first organic food pubs in London. Sure enough it began raining lightly at 1 pm, as we wandered through the lovely shops in Camden Passage, where we bumped into Susan who is working in Islington this week. That prompted a stop at London's award winning chocolatier, Paul A Young, as a treat for all of us. 

We Take A Train

We haven't been very good about travelling by train in recent years. We have grown used to dual modes of transportation: in London, we always take public transport options, especially since turning 60 gives you free transport with the beloved Freedom Pass; leaving London we always drive so we can detour to any churches we want to see, but mostly to find a special pub for lunch. The cost of petrol is skyrocketing here, so Bob said, we really should take more trains. Yesterday we stopped off at Euston Station to buy ourselves some Senior Rail Passes. £26 for an annual pass, and we can lop one third off the cost of train tickets.  Train tickets are not cheap, but may balance out the cost of petrol, and of course we can claim ecological virtue.

We pulled out our passes today and travelled to Brighton in East Sussex. The hour train ride cost us £22.40, saving us £11 — only £41 until we break even on the passes. Nevertheless, Bob says it costs £70 to fill the car's tank, so I think I see the costs balancing here pretty quickly. We chose a day of perfectly beautiful weather with a bright blue sky lasting all day long.

Our first stop was St Bartholomew's Church (#290), another 19th century Anglo-Catholic congregation, that is the tallest parish church in the country. The interior is massive, taller than Westminster Abbey according to the verger. All brick with lots of shiny metals, gold mosaics and a silver altar in the Lady Chapel.

Then on to a delicious traditional fish and chips and mushy-peas lunch at a pub recommended in the CAMRA restaurant guide. The Basketmakers Arms only serves meat raised locally and fish caught locally.

Then we were off to the real destination, the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery which is set in the Royal Pavilion Park. The Royal Pavilion is the Prince Regent?George IV's seaside folly, built when the healthful benefits of seaside saltwater bathing became the vogue in the early 19th century. We have been to visit the Royal Pavilion years ago, but today we just made do with its fantastic exterior.

The Museum is hosting an exhibition entitled From Sickert to Gertler: Modern British Art from Boxted House. From the 1950s through the 1970s, Boxted House was the home of a gifted and glamorous couple, Natalie and Bobby Bevan.  Bobby was the son of the Camden Town painters Robert Bevan and Stanislawa de Karlowska. Natalie was a beautiful young woman who was painted by artists including Mark Gertler, whose studio was on Rudall Crescent, a few blocks from our flat, (and I believe is now where David Hare writes his plays). She also was an artist in her own right as a painter and a ceramicist.
Bobby, who likely grew up in penury, chose advertising as his gig and was highly successful at it. Boxted House was filled with art from Bobby's parents, from their Camden Town colleagues, from Natalie's artist friends, and from Bobby's brilliant purchases of works on paper by the likes of Toulouse-Lautrec and Gaudier-Brzeska. The exhibition included dozens of pieces that had hung in Boxted House, photographs of the Boxted rooms, and documents from the lives of Bobby and Natalie.

Natalie, age 18, painted by Mark Gertler in Hampstead

Robert Bevan's early Fauve style

 Bevan's Camden Town style. The house is part of a school in Belsize Park that I pass regularly 

Bought by the Brighton Museum when it was first exhibited in 1910. The only work by Bevan purchased by a public gallery during his lifetime. Bevan was born in Hove, the partner city of Brighton.

If that wasn't enough, the Brighton collection of art and artifacts from local history was both amazing and imaginatively displayed. There is a truly superb wall of paintings in one gallery that creates a synthesis of artistic creation which transcends the quality of each individual painting. From Ivon Hitchens' abstract Forest to Charles Ginner's Leicester Square, the eye is drawn from wild nature to domestic nature to house plants into domestic interiors and finally a quintessential urban exterior.

A quick walk back to the train station through some of Brighton's trendy shopping areas, and we were home in time for dinner.

Surrr-reality

Every once in a while the surreality of the world we are living in begins to intrude on the general complacency of ordinary day-to-day life.  Even an ordinary staycation can be rattled by the daily news reports emanating from the States. A country that seems to be collapsing physically, economically, and morally can't manage outrage over poverty, unemployment, deficient healthcare, sub-standard education or any number of moral issues, but can be sucked into a whirlwind of protest over the equivalent of a YMCA —or more relevant perhaps, a YMHA. Hmmm. I wonder why someone had to build a YMHA. Wasn't a YMCA good enough for them?

So it seemed appropriate to see the Surreal House exhibit at the Barbican Art Gallery. A really interesting thematic show that brings together a huge mass of material that has to do with houses and domestic possessions presented in some surreal manner. The work of early 20th century Surrealists was predominant, but there were also photographs and extensive clips from films. Buster Keaton was well represented with the tornado scene from Steamboat Willy and The Scarecrow, a film I had never seen where Buster and his brother have devised housekeeping techniques that can be called innovative or surreal.

Afterwards we went for a pint at The Jerusalem Tavern, a 1720 pub, with an interior that looks like Tom Paine might have conspired to fight the good fight for Common Sense or The Rights of Man at their tavern tables.

The End of the Line

Here is Bob standing in the Morden Tube Station, the southern terminus of the Northern Line. After 12 years plus some months of seeing and hearing, "This train terminates at Morden," we finally saw Morden.

Today's outing was to Morden Hall Park, a National Trust property, they call "an oasis in suburbia," in the Borough of Merton.

The manor house dates from 1750, but currently has no purpose after a tenant restaurant closed.

The River Wandle, once an important industrial corridor, runs through the estate, and the snuff mill that enriched the proprietors, still has a working water wheel, but houses an environmental center these days. Unfortunately, I got my third and fourth Sundays confused, so the mill was not open today.

The last owner turned the estate into a gentleman farm with landscaped gardens including a huge rose garden.

The River Wandle rises just south of here in the North Downs and flows northward into the Thames. 

A Wandle Trail I am keen to walk follows the river's channel until it is lost underground in Wandsworth.

Here in the park, it is a rural stream with a broad flood plain.

A new sort of emigrant wildlife unknown to past generations can be seen 

Parrots and parakeet flocks have become a problem in South London parks breeding from escaped pets!

The trip home was an easy ride on the Northern Line back to Hampstead, where we stopped off at The Flask where we enjoyed a pint of Wandle Ale from London's Sambrook Brewery.