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August 29, 2005
Barbican
midday to dusk
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August 28, 2005
Florians
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Waterstones, Piccadilly
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August 27, 2005
more piccadilly
"Is it really him?" Lorenzo modestly tries to avoid being mobbed by his nipponese fan club. They are excitedly perusing a copy of the popular fanzine "Lets Enjoy Princely Tea at Lollys".
One senses he's heard this anecdote about the cheesecake before.
This is my gaff
"...and don't come back"
attempt at a caffocentric recreation of the cover of Soft Cell's Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret founders when Adrian realises he's forgotten his lederhosen.
Posted by robin at 08:39 PM | Comments (1)
Where it all happens
('all' in a relative sense, of course)
Posted by robin at 08:37 PM | Comments (0)
Shiraz: Dar’o Salam Old Graveyard
Posted by Azer at 10:33 AM | Comments (0)
August 25, 2005
Secrets of Bloomsbury
r/n 2276
Euston Road
Mabledon Place
Cartwright Gardens
Burton Place
Burton Street Is this the most gorgeous bookshop in London? Marchmont Books is a survivor dating back at least to the 70s; what was once a thriving area of independent booksellers is now dwindling, but we can only hope that this hidden beauty, signless, overhung by wisteria, musty, slightly disarrayed, with a highly varied stock capable of surprising, and an extensive poetry section (a rare thing indeed: there is more poetry in here than you'd find in the hugest branch of Borders) will endure unchanged.
Dukes Road
Woburn Walk Sorrento Snack Bar, with its tiling and wooden benches
Upper Woburn Place
Tavistock Square
Endsleigh Place
Gordon Square
Institute of Education
Russell Square The Knowledge: These Cabbies Cafes are one of the great mysteries of London: one can't help seeing them as the intriguing, secret temples of the Cafe world - culturally lagooned but kept alive by the loyalty of the trade, one suspects them of preserving within their wooden walls unchanged ancient esoteric secrets of teamaking long lost to the rest of the city. Who owns them? Are non-cabbies allowed in?
Montague Street
Great Russell Street
Museum Street
Drury Lane
Great Queen Street Freemasons' Hall
Wild Street
Wild Court
Kingsway
Aldwych
Strand A wry piece of installation art by a corner-shop fruiterer driven mad by European-Union fruit legislation?
Lancaster Place
Waterloo Bridge
NFT
Charlie Chaplin Walk
Stamford Street
Coin Street
Aquinas Street
Duchy Street
Great Stamford Street
Hatfields
The Cut
Announcement
From the end of September, in addition to the superb thursday night readings, the Calder Bookshop together with the Godot Company will be presenting short works of Beckett on stage in the intimate setting of the backroom of the bookshop, friday and saturday nights at 7pm. Highly Recommended - more details to come.
Posted by robin at 05:20 AM | Comments (0)
August 24, 2005
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August 23, 2005
In the rain, Shepherd's Market
Door, Mayfair
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August 22, 2005
The Gutter Life Ungilded : Studies for a Portrait of Adrian Maddox
It is he who prescribes the location; the rendezvous is presented as something of an esoteric initiation rite. For the New Piccadilly is one of those select few establishments that exert a powerful emotional hold on the Maddox psyche. Resonating centres of a mysterious force that the corporate world seems determined to pulverize into inexistence. Adrian Maddox dedicates an increasingly large proportion of his time to preaching their salvation, and doggedly cataloguing their decline.
Fings ain't what they used to be
He has been called 'the Pevsner of mid-century cafe architecture' and 'a Daniel Farson for the post-Nathan Barley generation' - Pevsner being the tireless notary of English architecture, and Farson being, of course, the writer whose dogged adhesion to the periphery of 50s bohemia made him the foremost cultural chronicler of Francis Bacon's Soho. Maddox leaves alone the churches and monasteries - his monomaniac speciality is the classic English (but invariably immigrant-run) working mens cafe, the singlehanded excavation of whose history the now vast and labyrinthine Classic Cafes website celebrates. And with his messianic fervour for the world of sugarpourers and tea urns he also has the edge over Pevsner, the aridity of whose prose alone renders it distinguishable from ditchwater. Meanwhile, although he has perfected the dishevelled enthusiasm and shows promising signs of a genuinely Farsonian binge-bloated waxy pallor, half a century after the heyday of bohemian Soho few artists of note make themselves (and their money) available for all-night champagne and oyster bunfights. This constitutes no inhibition to the Maddox narrative, however: for he is a periphery unto himself, whirled in an eccentric orbit about his own ego, the gravitational force of which is so pronounced that on occasion (and doubtless intentionally) the man will seem to have actually produced by sheer force of will the people and places that inspire his fervid delirium. To say of his presence in the Piccadilly, the rightly celebrated Denman Street establishment that serves as cathedral to his seedy caff-worshipping cult, that he 'acts like he owns the place', would be severely to understate the case. It doesn't take long, after he has welcomed us to his fabled 'office' - a cramped corner booth flanked by two worn wooden benches, around a slab of vintage yellow formica - before his dervish ranting in support of the proper iconic status both of himself and of his caffological charges begins to make it seem that this imperfectly-preserved formica palace might actually be a figment of Maddox's own tea-drenched cranium, dandy proprietor Lorenzo a pure product of his HTML-addled post-literary imagination. Among the welter of weighty questions thrown up by this feat of trompe l'oeil psychotopography: which came first, classic cafes or Classic Cafes? How has Maddox singlehandedly managed to drag the shiny happy network technology of the dotcom revolution into a lowlife slough of wilful despond at the same time as raising modest establishments such as the Piccadilly to the status of cherished masterpieces? Is it all an exercise in postmodern fetishism, retro chic; is it just one lonely man's obsession; has he genuinely managed to eke out the dying breath of british bohemia for another generation, or is he a deluded hyperreal puppeteer trying to make the corpse of cafe society dance? And why does this tea taste vaguely fishy? (Some light – albeit of an apocryphal nature – is shed on this last by the legend that the Piccadilly boasts its own exclusive water supply, drawn from one of the ancient subterranean sources of the Thames.)
Non domandare all'oste se ha buon vino
Retiring further west to chew over these conundra for a while, sheltering from the rain in Shepherd's cafe in Mayfair (yet to be awarded with the Maddox imprimateur), we return to the Piccadilly to find a celebration underway, albeit one whose occasional pretext is unconvincing (an unspecified, but presumably successful, Harley Street medical procedure for the grand homme of the establishment). Nevertheless, any doubts soon take their leave as the effects of Lorenzo's proprietary (chemically formulated?) Italian cava begin to tell on our party.
Shadowy acquaintances make fleeting appearances on the benches, some testifying to the media currency of Maddox's current incarnation (a journo working up a piece on the caffista for the Grauniad), some recalling past adventures in the 'creative industries' (an adman with a fetish for military uniform taking a risotto break from editing M&S commercials).
Maddox and Englishmen
Diners (tired businessmen, japanese tourists, unemployed actors) look up testily from their ham egg and chips as the champion of cafe culture launches into another stream of spluttering, undirected profanity, whilst Lorenzo, cravat unruffled, looks on with the resigned gaze of a indulgent dog owner watching an scrofulous cur scrape its arse along the ground in mixed company. Occasionally, between completing the crossword, maintaining the ambience (Classic FM with a switch to Radio 4 for The Archers) and teatowelling the china, he will drop in a well-timed bit of banter. There is undoubted mutual profit here - the two constitute a mutual theatre of parasitism, Maddox lolling in the glory of the inflated legendary status he has created for the establishment and its proprietor, Lorenzo pulling in the punters off the back of the Classic Cafes mediaplex franchise.
However loathe one might be to add to the unhealthy skein of myth, self-aggrandisement and misinformation that Maddox has woven around himself, it must be admitted that there is something about the man. As the evening wears on, we finally realise just what it is: a swarm of Lorenzo's treasured drosophila piccadiliensis (a variant breed cultivated in isolation at the cafe over decades and now in great demand in laboratories worldwide), attracted by the tepid organic fug of overbrewed tea that surrounds the still-unflagging author: they are feeding on his words.
The waiters in their outsize busboy uniforms skate elegantly around the aisles bearing canneloni and risotto (although Classic Cafes dogma has it that ambiance far outweighs food in importance, both are highly recommended). They grin warily at the unshaven maestro's anecdote recitations. Behind the counter where the imposing electric-pink espresso machine fumes silently, a copy of The Book itself is displayed under the solid wall of postcards whose faded technicolor array makes for something like a cheery holiday version of Bacon's ideogram-littered studio floor.
Equally Baconian is the visual rhythm of the evening, heightened by the freely-flowing cava: the subsonic rumble of central London, forgotten like a bad dream but still grinding on beyond the chairs that block the doorway; the backwards-read neon sign grunting its monosyllabic EATS into the unconscious, bleeding into peripheral vision insistently like a premonition of a thumping headache; the hand-drafted bezier-curves of the formica twitching like a hair in the gate on a bad porno movie, or the broken capillaries of a bloodshot eyeball; and above it all (in volume if nothing else) the sheer, waxing torrents of Maddox verbiage (thus Lorenzo: "he's so domineering after a bit of pomagne"). Randomly-batted disconnected phraselets chase each other raggedly across the sticky formica ("It's a sort of erotic dunking...they're expecting a horde of locust bug-beasts...I've got a deerpark right outside my door...")
Piccadilly Palare
Egged on, the potato-peeler from Pisa regales us with soho mythemes: Lollobrigida, Burroughs and the cheesecake, etc. And reveals the origin of the 'no drinks without food' notice still displayed amongst the theatrical posters: to keep out riffraff with rough trade in tow: only gentlemen who could afford to sit down and eat were allowed to play pocket billiards under the tables of the New Piccadilly. However, Denman Street's most-photographed man assures us of his discretion: not even muckraker Maddox has managed to get names out of Lorenzo Marioni.
Welcome relief comes as, stepping through a threadbare plastic ribbon curtain into the spartan facilities at the rear of the premises, the whole cacophony is heard anew, smeared and muted as if monitored through a long subterranean rock tunnel, or bounced off the bare walls of a prison corridor, as in the opening sequence of Porridge. I almost want to lock myself in, but I know however long I wait, he'll still be out there, calling for more cava.
Caffsploitation
Indeed, on returning, the pressure of the Maddox "wall of bull" hasn't let up: Now a bellowingly-inebriated Willam Hague soundalike who avowedly "gets all his clothes from Peacock's", now a righteous saviour of our heritage and rogue semiotician who 'used to have vicious arguments about logocentrism' with his flatmate. We hear of the furious media and letter-writing campaign to pressure English Heritage into listing this fine establishment.
But there's the rub: Is Maddox about to be recuperated, a part of the heritage industry? Will caff-culture eat itself? Will he be asked back after his first appearance on the Late Show? Shake hands with the heritage minister?
A mythmaker on a cottage-industrial scale, Maddox has no compunction about getting high on his own supply of full-english and formica. He's a conservationist who fetishises decay, and so neccesarily on a trajectory of cultural autoasphyxia. He fakes up rollieflex portraits with a FinePix and photoshop, and he calls it Art. He has fraternised with the enemy, hooked new media up to old bohemia to synthesize authenticity in HTML, all the while affirming a cast-iron categorical distinction between his own lonely battle and the ongoing march of theme-park cultural reclamation. Unconvinced, Iain Sinclair has him down on his hitlist, right below Peter Ackroyd.
Right now, freeze-framed between the bowing ceiling panels and the buttercup formica, he is living in a strange place somewhere between wholesale adoption by the style troops and chronic outsider intransigence. It's an uneasy place, it's a queasy place: it's exactly where the little shit belongs.
Posted by robin at 10:00 PM | Comments (0)
Special Feature: Shiraz Belongs to Me
From mystery guest blogger Azer come these rare and beautiful street photos from Iran
Posted by Azer at 08:24 PM | Comments (2)
Demons and Repellents
Guest Blogger Azer on the Earls Barton Monstrosities (below):
Although the architectural disciplines of all churches are based on demonographic cartographies just like mosques which swarm with heretical / blasphemous geometric gradients (since they evade presenting humanoid figures in their interior / exterior decorations and are mainly concentrated on complex geometric patterns and arrangements) but I must advise you that these are not demons so much as xeno-agents.
Archeologically / technically these figures cannot be considered as demons; in rigorous archeological investigations faces have minimal demonic capacities; even the most distorted, disfigured, amputated faces cannot be identified as evidence of a demon (xeno-agent) i.e. (de)faciality cannot be an constitutive element in diagramming a demon (esp. in a period from the rise of Mesopotamian civilizations to the end of antiquity and early medievalism). Demons are always delineated by anomalous cartographies / diagrams based on which their bodies, positions, and arrangement of their appendages (organs?) are presented, built and (re)composed; or else they are identified by coming in pairs (one a recognizable entity and the other an obscure twin of the familiar entity: examples are the Phoenician and Etruscanian demons). For example:
1. The right hand upward, and the left hand downward (demons of pestilence)
2. With stretched hands one pointing to east and one pointing to west -" solar demons -" (the Romans ironically borrowed the same diagrammatic position from Babylonians in their crucifixions: most prominent of which are the iconographic portraits of the crucified Jesus)
3. Body organs (appendages) are connected to each other by curved lines and circles which together construct a 'closed' labyrinthine convolution
4. Smaller wings attached to the main wings (or having more wings than what is necessary to fly)
5. Horns forming spirals (in contrast to general belief horns are not satanic members) or horns pointing to each other (arch-demons)
6. Legs are open, far from each other to draw a triangle (three-dotted profanity which is among the most significant diagrams of unlocalizable demons), etc
But this is still a simplistic investigation of demonography as applied in the architecture of churches, holy shrines and mosques, solely occupied by figurative projections and organ-ic hegemony. More immoderate demons are never figurative: the most striking example I recently encountered was located in the interior of Ayasofya (Hagia Sophia), originally constructed in antiquity but rebuilt many times. In the first glance, it is a symmetrical pattern, two lines symmetrically intertwining and reaching each other at the center of the pattern occupied by a dot (not a hollowed circle), more looking like a heavenly plant or a roman pattern than a sinister diagram. It is repeated at the top of each column. Well, it is exactly the neo-Sumerian seal of Tiamat discovered in Halaf complex and Ninevah, a closed draco-spiral / double-helix (parthenogenesis) leading to an unhallowed zero, a bindu (womb? Acephalous mouth? A faceless head? Or a hole to the Outside?).
The faces in these shots could be 'Repellents' (since they are symbolically positioned on archways, at the top of doors, gates or entrances to different sections) guarding the place from demons, and in addition, their emphasis is on faciality traits; this is because after antiquity and following the complete establishment of Christianity, it was believed (based on primitive / tribal exorcism which was imported to Christian doctrines by Christian schools in Jerusalem and by people such as Cyril of Jerusalem) that demons had inner, masked, concealed faces behind their polymorphic compositions and that exposing monstrous (grotesquely reassembled) faces to demons would unleash a symbolic impulse against the demon, resulting in self-empathy (similar to symbolic pomo-militarism, Baudrillard's favorite theme) and taking (or revealing), a unique identity which consequently destroys or repels the demon (a demon with identity is a 'creature' either on the side of the divine and his pro-creationist project or the State's affordance-based society) - the Power of the Gaze.
While these faces (Repellents) are bound to monotheistic authority, they have internal occultural functions (occult entities utilized by religion) so they still possess composite occultural or polytheistic edges threatening the order of the Tetragrammaton from within; by entirely overexposing themselves to occultural horizons, they gradually construct bridges and unlock gates between monotheistic borders and occult entities of the Outside (pulp-horror's obsession with spontaneous disorders caused by such occultural guardians, haunting gargoyles, rebel Lamassus and independent scarecrows).
Posted by Azer at 11:59 AM | Comments (0)
August 18, 2005
The Old Curiosity Shop and the LSE
...
Southampton Row
Kingsway
Gate Street
New Turnstile One of the tiniest city passageways
Lincoln's Inn Fields
Portsmouth Street The shop that inspired Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop is still standing here
Portugal Street
Clare Courts(?)
The LSE leaves you in no doubt, architecturally, that it means business. Wander through here and spot tomorrow's monopolists and Newsnight pundits...
Houghton Street
Aldwych
Lancaster Place
Waterloo Bridge
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August 14, 2005
English counties gazetteer : Northamptonshire (cont.)
""It was here when the Conqueror gave these lands to his niece the Countess Judith, and except for the clock and the battelements it looks today as it looked then."
All Saints Church, Earls Barton: Remembering Freud's analogy between the unconscious and the multi-layered city of Rome, we might be tempted to describe this building as a well-directed slice through the English architectural unconscious. Almost every century of English history donates some feature or artefact to this astonishing edifice, from the pristine 970AD Saxon tower (as described above), to the charming 1930s overpainting of the medaieval rood screen, from the entranceway with its arch of fantastical creatures of the Norman imagination, through to the 19th Century stained glass. When you look closely, the place buzzes with little wood and stone demons of every variety and provenance. Polytheism lives on regardless...
Inside a crop circle
(Tribute to Bernd & Hilda Becher) Gravel-farming by the River Nene
Posted by robin at 05:00 PM | Comments (1)
August 11, 2005
British Library to Calder Bookshop
Euston Road
Mabledon Place
Cartwright Gardens
Marchmont Street
The Brunswick Centre Alas. Disaster. The Brunswick Centre, hitherto one of the great landmarks of seedy modernism (or modernist seediness) in London, is to be 'renovated', 'updated' etc. The cheap and welcoming Little Venice restaurant is gutted; The cavernous Skoob secondhand bookshop has disappeared; all is scaffolding; but high upon the scaffold hangs the managerial classes' vinyl-coated flag of triumph, a litany of mediocre misery foretelling what is to become of this once-precious place. It's almost funny, the way they display these names as if they're something to be proud of. I suppose it had to happen sooner or later -" at least they can't destroy the super space-invader structure itself, but it will be a jarring and unpleasant thing to see encased within it the shiny exteriors of St*rbucks and B*netton :(
Bernard Street
Russell Square
Montague Street
Great Russell Street
Coptic Street
New Oxford Street
Shaftesbury Avenue
Monmouth Street
Mercer Street
Long Acre
James Street
Floral Street
Garrick Street
St. Martin's Lane
Trafalgar Square
Duncannon Street
Strand
Lancaster Place
Waterloo Bridge
Waterloo Road
Alaska Street
Cornwall Road Waterloo geodelirium: why does Cornwall abut onto Alaska? In any case, if you like cakes, visit Konditor and Cook
Cornwall Road
The Cut Peter Marinker of the Godot Company, reading Beckett, "in character" with tatty bowler. Not only does this man do a wonderful Molloy, but in his time he's also voiced the bad guys in Monkey!
Posted by robin at 04:00 PM | Comments (0)
A1 hairdressing, B- for politics
R/N 2298
Kings Cross Bridge
Posted by robin at 02:42 PM | Comments (0)
August 10, 2005
R/N 2294
Posted by robin at 02:41 PM
August 09, 2005
R/N 2088
Posted by robin at 02:40 PM
August 06, 2005
English counties gazetteer : Northamptonshire
Whilst the viability of noble families' tenure of their country piles is not a matter productive of great anxiety for us, Pevsner's surmise that "the county is far enough from London to avoid developments which would make it less attractive to continue residence, and near enough to London to make continued residence possible even in the twentieth century" is transferable tout court to the principal source of rural ruination in contemporary times: tourism and its attendant gewgaw developments.
Some of the ingredients for a conversion to tourism are in place: Notably, the towns of Northamptonshire, which once shod the nation, have for the most part lost this speciality, and Northampton museum proudly displays the impressive achievements of the county's shoemaking industry, from artisan to industrial processes, as a heritage interest. But despite the inevitable decline of industrial might, geographical centrality allows the midlands a basis for commercial survival as the distribution hub of mainland Britain: Whilst the rest of us, as consumers, are afflicted with its eyesore developments and dubious ersatz produce, it is Northamptonshire that is home to the gigantic corrugated-steel megalith that is Tesco's distribution centre. If the first principle factor of industrial capitalism, mass-production, has been entirely outsourced in literally outlandish fashion, to the immediate detriment of that segment of England north of the M25, the secondary factors of logistics and distribution remain by nature stubbornly rooted in the dynamics of material geography.
Beyond the thundering of juggernauts on arterial roads, the county boasts hidden treasures in the form of its many villages. Locals will continue to be quietly proud of them for as long as the area is unjustly but happily neglected in tourist guidebooks and itineraries, for they are a paragon of the modest beauty of England. Although Pevsner's verdict on the Northamptonshire countryside is unduly harsh (there certainly are beautiful open spaces - although not 'wild', since this is predominantly agricultural land - where anyone taken with the stark flatness of the east anglian fens will feel at home; there is lush greenery and thick forest, there are ancient gnarled oaks, there are sleepy rivers with occasional meandering barges), it is true that the wealth of Northamptonshire's peculiar aesthetic and historical interest is concentrated more in its buildings: particularly its churches (at least a thousand years worth, in a surprising variety of forms), but also a rich vein of industrial redbrick, and modest houses in both the local orange stone and brick, largely unspoilt by the conspicuous breezeblock extensions of the nouveaux-riche.
The inhabitants somehow manage to preserve these villages without smothering them in twee hyperreal simulation; there is a relaxed assurance to the thatched indian takeaways on village greens, the consultancies housed in old shoe factories, the shops dating from the dawn of the century now stocking printer cartridges along with aniseed balls and knick-knacks of pre-war provenance. Why? Because the area has not suffered an influx of aesthetic speculators who begin with good if misguided intentions, but having ultimately bound themselves to wringing a profit from aesthetic charms, end by a desperate and clumsy application of all manner of marketing technologies (often in league with local authorities) which gradually hollows out the real source of that charm. The parasites leave behind empty shells no less dead for their shiny exteriors, bereft of the indwelling life the process of whose calcification, it is discovered too late, can be neither retarded nor accelerated without consequence.
Of course, the organism is already ailing: These unhappy creatures arrive only when economic depression has set in (true capitalists, they spot an exploitation gap; disingenuous as capitalists, they are gladly courted with grants from misguided interventionist government 'regeneration' initiatives). They are not the solution, of course, but merely a quick fix: the grants will run dry, their little art galleries will soon founder, their organic crops will rot, their guesthouses will fail or become affordable only to their old friends from the capital, and a more profound, chronic malaise will overcome the place. Only the ritualistic bleating of marketing slogans and forced fawning over the 'loveliness' of their surroundings will keep out the hard truth that 'lovely' is not enough. In such ways do ill-considered dreams thwart themselves.
In Northamptonshire, the villages may have become predominantly a home to commuters and executives both home-grown and incoming, but in all truth one must be glad that at least in becoming a home to working people the places have not reached that level of queasy reflexivity that threatens the counties closer to London (and far enough away to qualify as 'escapes' e.g. the south-west: hence we discover the transformed version of Pevsner's dynamic). Consequently you can enjoy the countryside without being constantly told via a variety of display media what you are enjoying, why you are enjoying it, and why you should be grateful for having been allowed to overpay for it.
In this positive depiction we have to except some of the towns which share equally in the lamentable general decline of all UK small towns. Northampton itself is another matter: although somewhat divided in itself between shabby and upmarket areas, the centre has a palpable vitality (perhaps because it still has a thriving market). On the outskirts, the huge park at Abington, where we watch the local cricket team practice, is a testament to the generosity of one of those noble families of this county of "spires and squires". It's an outstanding model of the victorian municipal gardens, complete with aviary, tearooms, bowling greens and tennis courts, and a superb museum (an idiosyncratic family collection of exotica housed in old mahogany cases, supplemented with local history exhibits, with no strident curatorial intervention and a pleasing dearth of 'multimedia displays'.)
Also notable is the wonderful St. Andrew's hospital, an exemplary 19th-century 'asylum for pauper and criminal lunatics' set in a sprawling hundred acre site. (Amusingly, in view of its changing clientele it was later renamed as the 'General Lunatic Asylum for the Middle and Upper classes'!)
By chance we discover that it is the setting for an alfresco performance of Two Gentlemen of Verona: which happily turns out to be a faithful and witty performance by local company Masque Theatre in a unique setting: more than equal to many professional london performances.
portraits in haybale
In the soon-to-be-kaput indoor market, Northampton
As the day ends and we walk down a disused railway overhung with foliage, light is filtered by the dust thrown up in great clouds by the combine harvesters.
Posted by robin at 07:00 PM | Comments (12)
August 04, 2005
Deep South-East : Lewisham and Blackheath
"With the plain in my head, I went to the Heath" - Samuel Beckett, The Expelled
Loampit Vale
Loampit Hill
Lewisham Way
College Cafe - top marks for deadly fried slice
Lewisham Way
Loampit Hill
Loampit Way
Lewisham High Street
Courthill Road
Morley Road
Dermody Road
Eastdown Park
Lee High Road
The marvellous Aloddi Accordions take in my instrument for vital repairs, and meanwhile I have two hours to roam...
Brendram Road
Church Terrace
Heath Lane
Eliot Vale
The Orchard
Mounts Pond Road
Eliot Hill
Lewisham Hill Er, this is the wrong way
Eliot Hill
The Heath - more of a parched desert today, with the sun beating down on the massive, sleek rooks who take it upon themselves to spread out in order to surveil the whole plane
Hare and Billet Road
A whole road named after the pub on it! Into which I was forced to go for a life-saving pint
Grotes Place
Lloyds Place
Camden Road
Tranquil Vale
Now people often give you this line about London being a 'collection of villages'; but there aren't many of these that genuinely feel so. Blackheath's Tranquil Vale has a certain magic. Indeed the whole area around the Heath, with its bracing air and its staunchly middle-class C19 residential architecture, is, considering similarly-placed suburbs, uniquely un-city-like. Imagine Hampstead without the infuriating crowds of toffee-nosed shop assistants with rich parents who populate it.
Collins Street
The whole of the main thoroughfare being taped off by the now-ubiquitous armed police, and with no sign of being liberated soon, I take a random side street
Baizdon Road
Eliot Vale
Heath Lane
Church Terrace
St. Margaret's Passage
The hill between Lee High Road and Blackheath seems to have many of these intriguing passages, one of my favourite suburban features. These ones are uniformly overgrown and mysterious, and bordered by des reses in states of genteel disintegration.
Lee Church Street
Lee High Road
On the DLR returning, each carriage has at least two police; their radios squawking mutedly: ..."Suspicious male with a rucksack..."
Posted by robin at 07:30 AM | Comments (0)
August 03, 2005
Mid Air
Hornsey Town Hall
Posted by robin at 05:30 PM | Comments (0)
White Van Man Cinema : Reprise
Posted by robin at 02:56 PM | Comments (0)
It's Argos for scholars
Reader No. 2274
The British Library works on the same abstract machine as Argos. Like Argos, you can even order on the internet for pick-up later. Extraordinary. Somewhere, a software engineer is crying 'synergy'. The difference, of course, is that at the BL you have to return everything before you leave. (Considering the quality of their goods, this policy might spare customers a great deal of distress and regret if implemented in its sister establishment too.)
Another strange thing about this great public institution is the privatisation of knowledge that its patrons spontaneously operate. Threads of research are solitary, separate, and spun in silence. There is no forum for communication, no bulletin board; you would think there would be people for whom it would be useful to make requests such as: "Working on contemporary accounts in verse of cutlery manufacture in late-17th century Denmark. WLTM someone working on the fork form in finnish folk-art". But perhaps an explicit display of the massive multiplicity of academic research agenda would drive us all to insanity. And, of course, it's one of the few places you can come to escape the great 21st century imperative: communicate!. If only people remembered to turn off their phones...
All that is lacking, I think to myself, is a properly seedy cafe within walking distance, as an alternative to the WIFI-saturated air-con ambience of the high-priced (and, especially in the case of the upper floor, decidedly shoddy) in-house facilities. It's simple to see that, given the sheer amount of construction work going on in the area, one need only follow the earguards, plaster-caked boots and bright orange waistcoats in order to find the unholy grail. So I proceed down the intriguingly-sussurating...
Ossulston Street with its nice chalked calculus-graffiti (pehaps something to do with the fact that it leads to the even more delightfully-named Polygon Road)
...and lo! there on Phoenix Road are the flourescent-jacketed masses, huddled over mugs of tea in the superb Golden Tulip Cafe. If rather than the inhouse StarBooks place, you'd rather get four times the volume of food for a quarter of the price, with 100% better presentation, service and ambiance, this is the place to go.
"Spaghetti on toast today"
"Spaghetti hoops is OK, yeah?"
"Just one piece though"
"Listen, I'll tell you secret, brother, but don't tell anyone else. One slice or two slice it's the same price"
"Yeah but I only want one - it's a waste, innit, you keep the second slice and you'll make a better profit"
"OK but I keep the extra hoops for you tomorrow."
The Cafes on Chalton Street play out an obscure geopolitical game: "Little Lebanon" nestles next to "EMPIRE". This whole area between St Pancras and Euston ('Somerstown') is worthy of investigation; one of those little pockets of normal life in the midst of buildings which one usually only passes through on the way to somewhere else. In its surprisingly peaceful ambience it equals the area around Coram Fields to the south of Euston Road, in fact it benefits, in contrast, from not really being the way to anywhere else.
Posted by robin at 02:00 PM | Comments (0)
August 02, 2005
R/N 2255
Posted by robin at 10:00 AM