Author Archives: yamey

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About yamey

Active author and retired dentist. You can discover my books by visiting my website www.adamyamey.co.uk .

A village in Hampshire that lives up to its name

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THERE IS NOT much to see at Little London, a village in Hampshire, located between Basingstoke and Reading. It is a part of the civil parish of nearby Pamber. The place is spread out along its single main road. There are several attractive houses, and new ones are being constructed in the neighbourhood. This upsets the long-established locals who point out that apart from a single pub, there are no other amenities, not even a village shop.  The one pub, The Plough Inn, an old-fashioned looking building, was closed when we passed, but it is highly recommended judging by the reviews it receives.

Although Little London has an appropriately small village hall, I could not find any church in the place. On an old map surveyed in 1894, there is a Methodist chapel shown in the village. Today, the building, constructed in 1867, has been repurposed, and now provides bed and breakfast accommodation. 

If you are a church enthusiast, it is worth driving 1.8 miles northwest of Little London to the much larger village of Tadley. Using your navigating equipment, find Malthouse Lane, and drive carefully along this narrow road. Soon you will arrive at a building that could easily be mistaken for country cottage except that it is set amid a small cemetery. It is Tadley United Reform Church (‘URC’). A notice board near its entrance reads: “‘Old Meeting’ United Reform Church (1662)”. According to the establishment’s website, the reason that this church was designed to look like a house from the outside was it was built during the period when non-conformist worship was a punishable offence. It was best to disguise the purpose of the building. The website related:

“The original worship area consisted of an open space with a gallery on three sides which was accessed by an external staircase. It is recorded as being able to seat 450 people, although this must have been very cosy! It is understood that during the times of persecution there was a hidden door below the pulpit to allow the presiding minister to escape if there was a raid. The worship area was extended in … 1828 to accommodate an additional 100 worshipers and the ‘School Room’ added to the side maybe around 1848.”

It appears that although it is not a ‘mainstream’ church, it is one of the closest to Little London.  

By now, you might be wondering about Little London’s name. Apart from the village described above, there are 17 more Little Londons in England and Wales. Several of these, including that near Tadley, are within about 50 miles of London. One explanation of the name is that it was a place to which Londoners came when fleeing the Great Plague of 1665. Another possibility is that it was a place where people from London came to assist with the harvest. Another suggestion is that Little London is a corruption of Little Loddon, the Loddon being a stream that runs close to the village.

Hampshire’s own Little London is near to the site of the Roman town of Calleva Atrebatum, which is close to the town of Silchester. Until the mid-nineteenth century, Little London was a centre for brickmaking, and it was from places such as this that the Romans built their nearby town. The brickfields at Little London were close to The Plough Inn.

Pleasant as it is, Little London lives up to the first part of its name. It is truly little.

Works of art flating on a canal near London’s Paddington

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EVERY FEW WEEKS, we walk along the towpath of the Grand Union Canal (Paddington Arm) between the Meanwhile Garden in North Kensington and Little Venice near Paddington station. About 1/3 of the way along this route, we stop at the pleasant Grand Junction Café. Many canal narrow boats are moored alongside the towpath. Most of them are floating residences. Today, 31 August 2025, we spotted a narrow boat that we had not seen before. Moored between the Meanwhile Garden and the café, it is a floating, mobile art gallery.

Below the words “Canal Boat Contemporary” attached to the starboard side of the boat, there was a large glass-covered frame facing the towpath. This contained about 15 paintings. Next to the frame, there were notices giving information about the gallery’s concept and the works of the artist being displayed. There was also a whiteboard on which viewers could add their reactions to the art, using the marker pen attached to it. Between 27 August and 2 September, works by the artist Henrietta Roeder are on display.

Also attached to the boat and visible to passersby was the ‘manifesto’ of Canal Boat Contemporary, which can be read on a website (www.canalboatcontemporary.com). It refers to the ‘box’, by which they mean the display containing the art. Here are some excerpts from the manifesto to illustrate what the organisation is trying to achieve:

“Opera sings to chandeliers. If art wants to matter, it has to leave the palace … We moor up. We don’t ask for permission.We resist fixed power structures and take art to different places and contexts … We’re all speaking, nodding, showing – but always to each other. The Box is a window turned outward – away from the art world – for new eyes. It’s for someone walking their dog … The Box is modest, but powerful. A single painting on the towpath can shake you to the core … We don’t want your submissions. We want doppelgängers. Copy us. This idea wants to spread like moss. All you need is a frame no one’s using. A window everyone passes.”

Seeing the boat with its artworks, appearing as if from ‘out of the blue’ was a lovely experience. I think it is a wonderful idea to bring contemporary art outside of great institutions and commercial art galleries to make it available for anyone to stumble across unexpectedly.

At rest for ever in a gallery of art

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ALTHOUGH THE MAIN attraction of Dulwich Picture Gallery is the collection of works of art by famous painters, there is a small but fascinating feature that should not be missed. And that is the mausoleum. This small chamber houses the sarcophagi containing the remains of the gallery’s founders, Sir Peter Francis Bourgeois, Noel Desenfans, and his wife Margaret.

Like the rest of the gallery, the mausoleum was designed by Sir John Soane (1753-1837). Working in an age before electric lighting was available, he was a master of maximising the use of natural illumination to get light into his buildings. The galleries at Dulwich are provided with clear glass ceilings that are sufficient to provide adequate lighting of the artworks. However, this is now supplemented with electric lighting. Light enters the mausoleum through glass windows at the top of it. Instead of plain glass, he used amber coloured glass. The light passing through this gives the mausoleum a warm glow, making it feel a spiritual place.

The mausoleum was badly damaged during an air raid in WW2. However, it was restored and is said to look exactly as it did before the war. Although it was designed as a final resting place, it is occasionally used to house art installations and films about temporary exhibitions being held in the galleries.  

Never come to Holland again with this passport

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DURING THE 1980s, I used to drive from my home in Kent through Europe to Hungary and Yugoslavia. I used to take the car across the sea on the Olau Line that ran between Sheerness in Kent and Vlissingen in Holland. In those days, I held an old-style UK passport. With hard covers, it was dark blueish black. On the front cover, there was a coat of arms embossed in gold and words in gold lettering mentioning it was a British passport. There were two horizontal slots in the front cover. These were lined with white paper. On one of them, the passport holder’s name was written by hand, and on the other, the passport number.

I used to carry my passport in my trouser pocket. So with time, it gradually got a bit bent as it pressed against my leg. Another thing that happened was that the gold coat of arms and the gold lettering wore so thin that they were barely visible. Likewise, my name on the cover also began to become less distinct.

At various demanding frontiers, such as the borders to Communist countries such as Albania, Bulgaria, and Hungary, the tatty appearance of my passport was of no concern to the often-over-zealous border officials. However, it did cause trouble in a place where I least expected it.

On one occasion, after disembarking at Vlissingen, I handed my passport to the Dutch immigration official. He looked at it, and then wandered away with it. About 10 minutes later, he returned with it, holding it gingerly by one of its corners. As he handed it to me, he said:

“Next time you are coming in Holland, you must have a new passport.”

Clearly my passport’s appearance was not in harmony with the Dutch sense of tidiness and orderliness.

The mouth as landscape in Dulwich, south London

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RACHEL JONES IS an artist who was born in London in 1991. She trained at Glasgow School of Art, then at the Royal Academy Schools. There is an exhibition of her paintings, “Gated Canyons”, at Dulwich Picture Gallery until 19 October 2025. I must admit I had never heard of her before visiting the show in August 2025. So, I went to see it without knowing what to expect.

Rachel’s colourful paintings on display vary in size and shape. All of them are more abstract than figurative, but not completely abstract. The artist uses colours well, producing appealing images. Many of them interested me as a retired dentist because most of what was on display included somewhat abstract depictions of jawbones, teeth, lips, and tongues. The artist regards the mouth as being important as it is a portal through which we interact with the outside world, express our feelings, and explore psychological landscapes. If I understand it correctly, Rachel regards the mouth as a gateway to both our inner selves and the outside world. Having read the informative labels that tell viewers about her work, I began seeing, or even imagining, elements of her paintings that might be interpreted as features of oral anatomy.

The exhibition occupies three rooms, one of which I felt was too small to properly view the three large pictures within it. Otherwise, the paintings were nicely displayed and well-lit. I am glad I saw the show, but I would be reluctant to recommend it to most people I know.

Two barristers from South Africa stand together in central London

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A FEW MONTHS AFTER Mahatma Gandhi was born in India in October 1869, Jan Smuts was born in South Africa’s Transvaal Republic (in May 1870).

In 1893, the young barrister Mohandas K Gandhi, the future ‘Mahatma’, arrived in Durban, South Africa, from Bombay. This was the year before Smuts graduated in law at Christ’s College in Cambridge, England. After passing the Bar examinations in late 1894, he returned to South Africa, where he became involved in politics.

Gandhi remained in South Africa from 1893 until 1915. During his time there, he practised law as a qualified barrister, fought for the rights of Indians in the country, and gradually developed his non-violent approach to protest, which he later practised during the struggle to free India from British domination. During the Second Anglo-Boer war (1899-1902), Gandhi assisted the British with caring for casualties. Meanwhile, Smuts fought with his fellow Boers.

After that war, Smuts was involved with negotiations that led eventually to the union of the four territories, which then became unified as the South Africa we know today. In 1914, the First world War broke out. Smuts fought for the British, most notably in what was then German Southwest Africa, now Namibia. Meanwhile, in 1915 Gandhi returned to India, and the rest is history.

Both Gandhi and Smuts are commemorated by statues in London’s Parliament Square. They stand near each other, but not next to each other. Jan Smuts stands on the north side of the square, and is depicted as striding towards Westminster Abbey. Mahatma Gandhi stands on the east side of the square quite close to the statue of another South African, Nelson Mandela. Gandhi appears to be gazing at the Houses of Parliament.

Seeing those statues standing in the same square today made me wonder how, if at all, Gandhi and Smuts felt about each other. I found an article in a website called “The Observation Post”, which helps understand their relationship. Here are some quotes from it:

“It’s a common misconception that Jan Smuts and Mahatma Gandhi’s relationship was one of animosity. It is a little known fact that both men actually respected each other, remaining life long admirers of one another … Gandhi tried, at all times, to look for the positive in Smuts and said of him that he had a ‘high place among the politicians of the British Empire and even of the world’.”

When Gandhi was about to leave South Africa in 1915, he sent Smuts a pair of sandals that he had made at Tolstoy Farm, a cooperative colony he set up near Johannesburg, from which he ran his campaign of satyagraha (non-violence). Smuts wore these every day when at his farm, and is recorded as having said on Gandhi’s seventieth birthday:

“I have worn these sandals for many a summer, even though I may feel that I am not worthy to stand in the shoes of so great a man.”

Some tiny doors at the Windsor Castle in London’s Kensington

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THREE YEARS AGO, I published a book about west London past and present. In it, I made a brief mention of a pub, the Windsor Castle, which is near to Notting Hill Gate. This is what I wrote in the book:

“At the western end of Peel Street, there is another pub, The Windsor Castle. Unlike the Peel Arms, this is a working establishment, now popular with the locals, most of whom are definitely not poorly paid labourers. The hostelry was originally built in about 1826, and then remodelled in 1933. The pub contains much of its original late Georgian building fabric and is a Grade II listed place.”

A tiny door

Although the pub is a mere 5 minutes’ walk away from our home, where I have been living for more than three decades, I only entered it for the first time today, the 24th of August 2025. On entering, we were given a warm welcome by the pub’s manager before we sat at a table in the shade of a tall tree that overlooks the hostelry’s enclosed garden.

Within the pub, the furnishings look quite old. A notice on the wall draws the attention of visitors to some very low doorways in the wooden screens that divide the interior into separate rooms. The notice relates that in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, families ran pubs. The children of the landlord and landlady used to work in the pubs, delivering food and drinks. They would enter and exit the areas where the customers were enjoying food and drinks through the tiny doors such as still can be seen at the Windsor Castle, closing the doors behind them. The pub’s patrons were not allowed to use these little doors. They had to stay in the sections of the pub that were reserved for their social status: the public bar, the private bar, the sherry bar, and so on.

Just as I had never entered the Windsor Castle before, I had never seen these tiny doorways in any of many pubs I have visited.

My book “BEYOND MARYLEBONE AND MAYFAIR: EXPLORING WEST LONDON” is available from Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/BEYOND-MARYLEBONE-MAYFAIR-EXPLORING-LONDON/dp/B0B7CR679W/

Fascinating artworks at a gallery in Cambridge

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ARTSPACE 5-7 IS A small gallery housed in a pre-WW2 Modernist building in Portugal Place, a side street that leads away from Bridge Street in the university town of Cambridge. We visited the gallery in August 2025, and viewed a collection of sculptures and drawings by the London born artist Richard Bray (born 1955). A few years after being awarded a degree in Photographic Arts at the Central London Polytechnic, he was awarded a degree in Fine Art at Norwich School of Art and Design. His exhibition at Cambridge is called “Visible Invisible”.

Whereas kinetic art depends on its movement for effect, Bray’s finely crafted sculptures and prints are static. However, as the viewer moves around his artworks, viewing them from different perspectives, what can be seen changes. Bray’s works seem to acquire internal movement that can only be perceived when the viewer moves past or around them. These effects, which add great beauty to his works, cannot be captured using still photography. Three of the sculptures were on display in the churchyard of St Clements opposite the gallery

Bray spent time in Tanzania during the 1980s. What he must have seen in the way of local design and crafts has clearly influenced the appearance of the works we saw in Cambridge. In fact, when I first entered the exhibition, I saw what I mistakenly thought was a collection of sculptures from Africa.

The gallery because of its Modernist design is worth seeking out when you visit Cambridge. The exhibition of Bray’s works, about which we knew nothing in advance, were refreshingly exciting to see.

Defending shop windows from unruly revellers at the Carnival

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IT IS THAT time of year again. In two days’time, the Notting Hill Carnival will commence. Swarms of revellers will converge at Notting Hill Gate to watch or participate in London’s famous late August carnival. Most of them will be good-natured and well-behaved, but inevitably there will be those who will try to create mayhem and chaos.

To defend against damage, intrusion, and vandalism, many householders and shop keepers barricade themselves to prevent expected problems, everything from broken windows to being adopted as casual toilet spaces. The main form of protection is the erection of wooden boards and the employment of security personnel.

One of the first businesses to put up boarding this year was our local Tesco supermarket. This made me think. And what I thought was that one of the important causes of unruliness is excessive consumption of alcohol. And where will there be a ready supply of this intoxicant? It will be at Tesco’s supermarket, which is now hidden behind ugly timber boards. The sales of alcohol will raise great profits, but what effects will it have on the properties of those who are unable to afford paying for boards and barricades?