A River of Music

Saturday and Sunday, 21-22 July

Royal Victoria Dock with Canary Wharf
and Millennium Dome in the distance

The universe has realigned. Perhaps the gods and goddesses of Olympus have not lost their powers after all. Yes the errant polar jet stream has at last moved back to more northerly latitudes, where it should circulate at this time of the year, and our winter-summer of rain and gloomy darkness is over. At least for this week, we have the best of summer in London: blue skies, warm breeze, and no rain in the forecast.

The Olympics begins with the opening ceremony on Friday. I had lunch with a friend today who may have a ticket to one of the dress rehearsals. Her daughter was a classmate of Danny Boyle's daughter, and they have saved a seat for her daughter. But the problem is her daughter is in the States, and all the flights to London are fully booked. So my friend will use the ticket herself. This is the third story I've heard of people trying to get to London this week, but there are no seats available. I guess it's true that the whole world will be in London by the end of the week.

This weekend a good part of world music was in London playing at the  River of Music Festival sponsored by BT — British Telecom — for the Cultural Olympiad. A particularly good idea to bridge the connection between culture and sport, the event was to have musicians from every country sending athletes to the Olympics playing for London. Even better, they were nearly free concerts, costing only the £3 Ticketmaster fee on each ticket. Five stages along the Thames featured music from Asia, Africa, America, Europe and Oceania. There was also an extra Europe stage in Trafalgar Square, a non-river site.

Early on Saturday we set off for East London, the former port, docks, and industrial sector of the city, that is slowly being rebuilt, rehabbed, revived or gentrified, depending on your point of view. The initial Docklands projects in the 1980s resulted in the Canary Wharf financial centre which is now a thriving node of London. The Olympic Park development is designed to create the same magic in the Stratford area of northeast London. Despite being one of the world's oldest cities, London covers such a large land area, it has been able to use a growth strategy associated with the new cities of the western and southern United States where available land encouraged sprawling development that increased the area and population of cities like San Diego, Houston, Phoenix and Atlanta. London is encouraging dense nodes of development on brown-field sites using transport systems. New light rail lines cut through derelict industrial sites and old rail lines are connected into an Overground system that links with the Underground.

The Africa Stage was located in one of these derelict sites that is now being turned into something called the London Pleasure Garden.  Pleasure Gardens were popular places of entertainment in the 18th century. They were the amusement parks of Georgian London with gardens to promenade through, music and theatre productions, and one of the only places where different classes might intermingle in a seriously class-bound culture. This Pleasure Garden is being put together with a street edge by community artists — with funds from otherwise evil financial institutions.

The Docklands Light Rail station Pontoon Dock is right across the road from the ornate pink entrance to the grounds. Right away you enter a fantastic plaza and promenade along the old dock.

Follies, popular in Georgian England, abound, here with an urban edge: emulating the pyramidal roof of Canary Wharf's first office tower and the space ship form of the Millennium Dome. Both buildings are visible from the Garden.

Surrounding derelict buildings add extra character to the site. The Millennium Mill is a famous landmark.
Silo D was new to us.

This area of the Royal Victoria Dock was the centre of flour milling for grain arriving from around the world. The grain was off-loaded from ships into Silos such as D, and then milled for markets around the country.

The African musicians we heard were fantastic.

Seckou Keita, from Senegal
and the Batamba Syndicate, from all over West Africa

Seckou Keita playing his amazing stringed kora

SAfricanto from South Africa . . .

. . . with Hugh Masekela

A beautiful day with sun and blue sky as the day went on. Sadly we had to leave mid-afternoon — although our old bones had enough of sitting on the pebbled ground — to go off to the Barbican to see the premier of Alfred Hitchcock's first film The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog from 1927 which has just been restored by the British Film Institute — celebrating Hitchcock for the Cultural Olympics — with a new score commissioned from Nitin Sawhney who was conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. Quite fantastic. Susan and I saw The Lodger ten or more years ago when it had been previously recently restored, but the head of the BFI explained before the screening that the technology to clean the film did not exist ten years ago, and I do remember it was very spotty and a lot more foggy too. An added surprise was to discover that our favourite graphic artist E. McKnight Kauffer did the titles for the film.


Sunday we headed to Greenwich on a gloriously sunny day. The Oceania Stage was set in the Grand Square of Christopher Wren's magisterial Royal Naval Hospital originally built for pensioners of the Royal Navy to match the digs Wren designed for old soldiers in Chelsea.

I wonder what Wren and Hawksmoor and Van Brugh
and all the other leading lights of Georgian design would think of this.

George II, the really obscure George among the four Georgian Georges,
seems ready to assist the cameraman.

We listened to the Australian Crooked Fiddle Band and The Black Arm Band Company, an aboriginal soul band who sang songs about their history.

The didgeridoo player and his music were especially wonderful.

Then we headed off to the Tower of London where the Americas Stage was set in the moat outside the Tower Walls. What a great venue for a concert.

The trebuchet adds an extra level of antique security.
Or perhaps it's defending the Tower from the advance of The Shard
London's newest "iconic" landmark.

Across the river, London's bulbous City Hall with a glass
Olympic Torch installation from EDF with animated figures and flames.

Saturday's line-up had been musicians from the States; Sunday was  devoted to the other Americas. We heard Ondatropica from Colombia, the Creole Choir of Cuba, and La Bottine Souriante from Quebec.

We were pretty exhausted by the time arrived back home Sunday evening, but for once it was still sunny and bright as London summer evenings should always be. And we definitely felt culturally enlightened with music from four continents — two Americas, Africa, and Australia — in our heads. Two thumbs up for the Cultural Olympiad.