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A cultural centre beneath a Victorian clocktower in Croydon

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THE DAVID LEAN cinema, where we watched a superb film called “Coming to America” (made in 1988), is within a complex known as the Croydon Clocktower. In the heart of Croydon, this cultural centre is housed in what was originally constructed as the district’s Town Hall.

The Town Hall is a magnificent – exuberant – example of Victorian brickwork. It was constructed to the designs of a local architect, Charles Henman, and inaugurated by the Prince of Wales in 1896. There is a large statue of his mother, Queen Victoria, outside the façade on Katherine Street.

Until the 1980s, the enormous edifice was used for local government purposes. In the late 1980s, and early 1990s, the interior was renovated. Areas that were no longer needed for council business were repurposed as a public library, a café, a museum, and the David Lean cinema. A large room, which retains its original interior décor, the Braithwaite Hall, continues to be used for concerts, theatrical shows, and other public functions. It looked to me that the inside of the building had been hollowed out to create a spacious central atrium with a glass roof, which can be overlooked from galleries surrounding it on each floor. The result is pleasing to the eye. From the outside of the building, you would not expect to see this kind of atrium. The Town Hall complex is now known as the Croydon Clocktower, the name referring to the building’s high brick clock tower.

The film we watched in the small David Lean cinema was wacky but wonderful – a complete contrast to an incredibly slow-moving Taiwanese film, “Days”, which we watched a few days later.

A very slowly moving film from Taiwan

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MOST FILMS WE have watched at the Garden Cinema near London’s Holborn have been excellent or extremely excellent. Today, we watched a Taiwanese film called “Days”, directed in 2020 by Tsai Ming-liang. It is one of the slowest moving films I have ever seen. It was not devoid of interest, but it was almost sleep inducing. Lasting about 2 hours, it felt like months, not days.

A nude in London’s Hyde Park cast from cannons

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A HUGE STATUE OF a naked man holding up a shield in his left hand stands opposite the London Hilton Hotel, across Park Lane. It looks as if he is defending himself from missiles being hurled from the upper floors of the hotel.  Depicting the ancient hero Achilles, it is the Wellington Monument, commemorating the victories of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, and his men who helped achieve them.

The statue was designed by the sculptor Richard Westmacott (1775-1856), it was inaugurated in 1822 by King George IV.  On its granite base, there are the names of four of Wellington’s military victories: Salamanca, Vittoria, Toulouse, and Waterloo. The statue was financed by donations given by British women.

Although I think that the statue is unattractive, there are two things about it that I find interesting. It was the first public nude sculpture in London since ancient times. Despite the presence of a fig-leaf, this caused quite a bit of controversy when it was unveiled. The other thing that attracted my attention is that the sculpture was cast from the enemy’s cannons captured at the four places mentioned above, and then melted down.

There is a phrase ‘from swords to ploughshares’. The Wellington Monument must be one of the few examples of ‘from cannons to nudes’.

Narrative art in the round at London’s Barbican Centre

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THE CURVE AT London’s Barbican Centre is as its name suggests, a curved space. When the Centre was built, the Curve was designed as a space to act as a sound barrier or buffer to contain the sounds emanating from the concert hall that it surrounds. Nowadays, it is used as a space for temporary exhibitions. Until the 5th of January 2025, the Curve will contain an exhibition, “It will end in tears”, of paintings Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, who was born in Botswana in 1980.

Ms Sunstrum’s paintings are on grainy wooden panels, and are truly wonderfully executed. The series of paintings are all linked by a narrative – an imagined story of a woman who lands in a colonial country in Africa in the early to mid-20th century, and has an adventure that ends up with a court case. For this exhibition, the Curve has been divided by wooden partitions into a series of rooms, connected to each other by an elevated walkway. Each room is designed to resemble a different stage set. For example. one is a kitchen. and another is a courtroom. The viewer walks along the walkway from room to room, seeing the series of paintings arranged in the order that the story unfolds. The heroine of the story is an imagined woman named Bettina. The artist created Bettina in her own image – each depiction of Bettina is the artist’s self-portrait. The resulting set of pictures along with the wooden partitions makes for an enjoyable and intriguing experience.

The paintings are like ‘stills’ from a movie. Although their style and subject matter is completely different, I was reminded of series of paintings such as those by Vittore Carpaccio (c1460-c1525) in Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni (in Venice), which show scenes from a legend with a Christian religious theme.

Ms Sunstrum’s site-specific exhibition at the Curve is what the series of guidebooks issued by the Michelin tyre company would describe as “vaut la détour” (‘worth the detour’).

A baptismal font in with stone carvings a church in Hertfordshire

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WARE IS AN ATTRACTIVE small town on the River Lea in Hertfordshire. Coaches travelling between London and Kings Lynn passed through Ware because it was on the route of the Old North Road (now followed approximately by the modern A10). The parish church of Ware, St Mary the Virgin, is large and spacious as befits the size of the town. Much of what we can see today was built over several centuries, from the 12th to the 15th. It was the church’s stone font that attracted my attention.

The octagonal font is believed to have been donated to the church in 1408 by the then Lord of the Manor, Thomas Montagu (1388-1428), Earl of Salisbury. Each of its eight sides contains fine bas-relief carvings. Many of them depict saints connected with birth, baptism, and childhood. For example, ther is a carving of St Christopher carrying the young Jesus across a river. Most of the faces on the carvings are in remarkably good condition considering their age and that they were in place long before the iconoclastic activities of Protestants took place. The church’s guidebook mentioned that in the 1540s, the faces of the statues were attacked, but fortunately the workmen, who might well have been men of Ware, responsible for defacing did a “token job”, only defacing the faces of the Virgin and St Margaret because they could be seen by people entering the church. Luckily for us living in the 21st century, these workmen managed to protect what is an attractive piece of church art.

The cathedral of the Ukrainians near to London’s Selfridges

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THE NATURAL HISTORY Museum in South Kensington, a well-known landmark, was designed by the architect Alfred Waterhouse (1830-1905). Not too distant from this edifice, there is a church he designed in 1891. It is an unusual building with an oval nave, and it stands on the corner of Duke Street and Weighhouse Street. It was built originally as a place of worship for the Congregational King’s Weigh House congregation. During WW2, the church was badly damaged, and in the 1950s, after the church had been repaired, the congregation had declined significantly.

In 1968, the church was acquired by the Ukrainian Catholics in the UK, and it became known as the ‘Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family in Exile’. Now, it is called the ‘The Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family’. Fitted with a colourful iconostasis that hides the high altar, its congregation practise the Orthodox rites but look to the Pope in Rome as their religious leader. The oval shape of the nave, with an oval gallery running around it on the first floor makes for an interesting and unusual feeling of space within the church. The building contains much decorative tiling, which was put there when it was built. In 2022, when the Russians attacked Ukraine, the cathedral became a rallying point for Ukrainians residing in Britain.

With its adaptation to the needs of its Ukrainian congregation and its unconventional design, this church near Selfridges is well worth a visit.

Dragons in Mayfair and an artist from Pakistan

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ONE GREY SEPTEMBER afternoon, we stepped into the Almine Rech gallery in London’s Mayfair a few days before its wonderful exhibition of paintings, “Summer of Dragons”, by Hiba Shahbaz was due to end (on the 28th of September 2024). Each of the works on display depict dragons, and some of them also include human figures, often scantily dressed.

Hiba was born in Karachi, Pakistan. She studied Indo-Persian miniature painting in Lahore’s National College of Art. Then, she studied in the USA at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn (New York City), where she was awarded her Master of Fine Arts degree. She now lives and works in the USA.

The skills she gained while training to paint Indo-Persian miniatures can be seen in the much larger paintings, which are on display at Almine Rech. Some of the paintings evoked memories of Chinese or Japanese art. Others depict dragons in the company of naked women. All the paintings, including some wooden boxes decorated with paintings, were completed in 2024. I suspect that had she remained in Pakistan and produced the same images, those containing the nudes might have been severely frowned upon.

We left the gallery, feeling very satisfied with what we had seen. Although the clouds above us had become more threatening, the visual experience of the exhibition brightened our moods.

Once watercress grew in the flowing waters of a stream in Oxfordshire

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BITTER TASTING, WATERCRESS is a member of the cabbage family (Brassicaceae). It is rich in health-giving nutrients. In Britain, it is grown in fast flowing chalk streams. It used to be grown in streams on Hampstead Heath, and there is a row of cottages that formerly housed watercress workers on Hampstead’s Willow Road. Another place where it was once grown is the Oxfordshire village of Ewelme.

A trout stream runs past Ewelme. It was here in the late 19th century that the Smith family from the village of South Weston, not far from Ewelme and the larger town of Watlington, began cultivating watercress in the stream. The watercress beds stretch for about ¾ mile along the stream, and have now been preserved as a nature reserve. By the beginning of the 20th century, the watercress beds at Ewelme were flourishing, producing large crops. Hampers containing 56 lb of watercress were carried by wagon to Watlington railway station, and from there they were transported by train to the Midlands and Manchester. The cress from Ewelme was highly regarded all over the country.

The Smith family kept the watercress beds going until the mid-1960s, when they were sold to new owners. The beds were kept going but became increasingly less viable economically. They were closed in 1988. However, visitors to Ewelme can see the two rows of rectangular beds, each enclosed by low  partitions. A boardwalk runs along the length of the beds, separating the two rows. The stream flows through the beds. What can be seen now was the result of much restoration work carried out by local volunteers. A small visitors’ centre stands next to the beds. Near the beds, there is a house called Watercress Cottages, where a member of the Smith family used to live.

Ewelme is an attractive village with many historic buildings. A visit to the watercress beds, now the home of waterfowl, is an unusual experience and well worth making.